Most border agency criminal investigators lack basic training, audit says
The report lands just as stakeholders gather in Ottawa to discuss tactics to fight auto theft
Most criminal investigators tasked with hunting down crimes at Canada's ports and borders in recent years have lacked basic training, says a newly released audit report from the Canada Border Services Agency.
The report, posted on the CBSA website late last week, lands just as border officials, politicians, police and industry representatives meet today in Ottawa to discuss plans to tackle the rising number of car thefts over the past two years. The border agency's ability to catch stolen cars before they're shipped overseas is expected to be one of the main topics of discussion.
According to the Feb. 2 audit report, CBSA reviewed the effectiveness of its criminal investigations program between the fiscal years of 2016-2017 and 2020-2021.
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The program is responsible for investigating violations of Canada's border laws by travellers, importers, exporters and others, and for recommending cases to the Public Prosecution Service of Canada (PPSC).
The audit concludes that most investigators had not completed core training, which "could be negatively impacting the quality of investigations."
The audit says no investigator working under the $35 million criminal investigations program had completed the full set of required courses — and less than half of them had completed the CBSA's introductory course, called "Foundations of Criminal Investigations."
One CBSA employee interviewed as part of the audit said they'd been an investigator for three years and only recently had started receiving basic training.
"It impacts our job," the employee said, according to the audit report.
"The impact of no training is significant," said another CBSA employee quoted in the audit report, "because you're not supposed to enforce legislation without training."
The report says the lack of sufficient training may be undermining planning for complex cases, the preparation of evidence for disclosure, the drafting of Information to Obtain (ITOs) documents and the quality of suspect interviews.
"Stakeholders indicated that on some occasions, complex cases were closed without being referred to PPSC for prosecution due to inadequate case planning by criminal investigators," it says.
"In other instances, PPSC observed evidence gaps in disclosure due to the inadmissibility of statements collected, which could also be due to lack of training in this area."
No explanation for the lack of training: report
The report says no one can agree on why the problem exists in the first place.
Auditors report the CBSA Human Resources Branch suggested managers were reluctant to release investigators from their duties in order to complete training, leaving courses with too few participants to go forward. Regional managers, meanwhile, said that training sessions had not been made available to them, says the report.
While the low completion rate for training could be explained in part by the pandemic's effects on in-class courses, the completion rate was also low for investigators who had held investigative positions for over five years, says the report.
The report says that after the audit was completed, CBSA said the directors of its intelligence and enforcement section and human resources section had agreed to work on a plan to address the training gap.
It's not clear what the current rates of completion are for CBSA investigators.
After publication, the CBSA responded that last year it scheduled training and reduced the backlog.
"Efforts will continue throughout 2024. We will ensure we understand why certain completion rates were low, and implement strategies to avoid the situation arising in the future," said spokesperson Guillaume Bérubé.
The reviewers also said the lack of case management software is undermining casework and has "led to cases taking longer to complete than they otherwise would."
One CBSA employee interviewed for the audit said the investigations team had been "screaming about" the lack of an adequate computer system for seven to eight years.
The review found that when cases are referred to the PPSC, there is a high rate of prosecution and conviction. But it's not clear why certain cases aren't sent along to Crown attorneys.
"The Criminal Investigations Program is achieving results, as demonstrated by the high acceptance rate by the Public Prosecution Service of Canada (PPSC) of referrals for prosecution and the high rate of conviction of cases prosecuted in court," said Bérubé.
Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc said he raised the report with the president of the CBSA.
"One of the challenges was, imagine the CBSA officers during the pandemic, during COVID, the work that we saw them doing at airports and other international arrival points meant that many of them weren't able to take time off from the particular function they were doing to take some of these training courses," he said.
"That situation obviously is different now, but we're going to double down on that to make sure that not only existing training programs ... are available, but other ones that the border service officers could take in partnership with local police, with the RCMP. So I think that it's a very worthy investment."
Ahead of Thursday's summit in Ottawa, the federal government announced it would spend $28 million to help curb exports of stolen vehicles.
"The issue is, how can additional funding that we're able to provide to the CBSA result in immediate improvements in, I think, the extraordinary work that they're already doing? So we're very much focused on that," said LeBlanc.
The Liberal government said Wednesday the money will give CBSA more capacity to detect and search shipping containers carrying stolen cars.
The summit, and the influx of cash, comes after a week when the Conservatives hammered the Liberals over the surge in auto thefts and floated policy ideas of their own.
Earlier this week, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said it was Trudeau's "mismanagement [that] has allowed organized crime to take over the operations and the running of our federal ports and use them to transport cars stolen in places like Brampton to the Middle East, to Africa and to parts of Europe.
"Canadians are living in fear."
He said a future Conservative government would increase the mandatory prison sentence to three years for anyone convicted of auto theft for the third time. His plan would also deny house arrest to those convicted of auto theft by way of indictment.
The federal government says roughly 90,000 cars are stolen annually in Canada, resulting in about $1 billion in costs to Canadian insurance policy holders and taxpayers.
The CBSA said it has intercepted 266 stolen vehicles so far this year.
"Police across Canada lead investigations into vehicle theft, and the agency acts on 100 per cent of referrals from them to stop stolen vehicles from leaving the country," said CBSA spokesperson Maria Ladouceur.
"The CBSA counts on police to provide timely referrals and intelligence, to take swift possession of stolen vehicles and to successfully prosecute cases to stem vehicle theft at the source."
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With files from the Canadian Press