Royal Canadian Mounted Police

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) is Canada's national police force. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police Act provides: "There shall continue to be a police force for Canada, which shall consist of officers and other members and be known as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police."¹ It figures twice in the PROMIS Software Scandal, and since 2023 it has brought terrorism charges against members of the Terrorgram Collective and the 764 network.

The Commissioner

"The Governor in Council may appoint an officer, to be known as the Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, to hold office during pleasure, who, under the direction of the Minister, has the control and management of the Force and all matters connected with the Force." The Commissioner may delegate any power under the act to any member, "except the power to delegate under this subsection, the power to make rules under this Act" and certain powers over complaints. The Governor in Council may also, on the Minister's recommendation, designate an officer as Commanding Officer of each Division of the force "to hold office during pleasure."¹

The Security Service

Until 1984 the force's Security Service carried out Canada's security intelligence work. The McDonald Commission (1977 to 1981) documented a pattern of illegal operations by the service against Quebec separatists, including barn-burnings, break-ins, the unauthorized opening of mail, and the theft of Parti Quebecois membership lists, and recommended that intelligence be separated from policing. The service was disbanded and its functions passed to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, created on June 21, 1984, with a Security Intelligence Review Committee to oversee it.² The preamble of the CSIS Act reads: "Whereas the protection of Canada's national security and of the security of Canadians is a fundamental responsibility of the Government of Canada; Whereas it is essential, to discharge that responsibility, for Canada to have a civilian intelligence service."³

The 1991 Inventory

In November 1990 and January 1991 officials of the Department of Communications and the Canadian Workplace Automation Research Centre told Patricia Hamilton of INSLAW that PROMIS was running at "more than 900 locations" in the federal government, and one said the RCMP was among the users; an RCMP officer in Ottawa told her on February 1, 1991, that he knew of no PROMIS in the force. The officials later said they had confused INSLAW's product with a project-management package of the same name sold by the Strategic Software Planning Corporation of Cambridge, Massachusetts. On December 4, 1991, the Canadian ambassador wrote to the House Committee on the Judiciary that "the RCMP and CSIS report they do not use any case management software," a letter the committee called "conclusory." The Justice Department's review of 1994 concluded that the Canadian "PROMIS" was "a totally different program developed by a different company."⁴

Project Abbreviation

In 1999 and 2000 the force ran its own national security inquiry, Project Abbreviation, under Sean McDade, an Ottawa-Carleton regional police officer on secondment, into whether software used by Canadian agencies was a version of PROMIS with a hidden access point for American and Israeli intelligence. When the Toronto Star disclosed it on August 25, 2000, Sergeant Marc Richer said, "I cannot either confirm or deny what you're looking into"; Staff Sergeant Mike Gaudet said the next day that it had been under way "for some time" and had found "absolutely nothing to indicate that national security has been compromised in any way." On September 16, 2000, Gaudet announced its end: "We're saying today that we do not have Promis software."⁵ The account of the inquiry from McDade's side, including a meeting of allied intelligence chiefs at Los Alamos in December 1999 and his belief that he had been targeted by ECHELON, comes from Cheri Seymour.⁶

Extremist Networks

In the spring of 2019 Canadian border agents stopped the vehicle of Patrik Jordan Mathews, a reservist from Manitoba, found racist material, and notified the RCMP. When he disappeared in mid-August 2019, after the journalist Ben Makuch had identified him as a member of The Base, the force opened a missing persons investigation and ran its own extremism investigation.⁷

On December 8, 2023, after an eighteen-month investigation covering alleged offences from April 2018, the force arrested Matthew Althorpe of Thorold and Kristopher Erik Nippak of East York, Ontario, and charged Nippak with participation in the activities of a terrorist group for propaganda videos for Atomwaffen Division and manifestos for the Terrorgram Collective.⁸ In May 2025 and again in October 2025 it arrested an Edmonton-area youth of 15 for terrorism offences linked to The Com and 764.⁹

On December 10, 2025, the Minister of Public Safety, Gary Anandasangaree, added 764, the Maniac Murder Cult, the Terrorgram Collective and the Mozambique branch of the Islamic State to the list of terrorist entities under the Criminal Code, bringing the list to 90. "Canada is the first country to list 764 as a terrorist entity." The minister said: "By listing these groups, we have more powerful and effective tools to take action and thwart their efforts to incite violence and promote hate." Under the listing, "all property owned by these groups in Canada must be frozen and reported to CSIS or the RCMP."¹⁰ The government's backgrounder described 764 as "a decentralized transnational network of online nihilistic violent extremists" whose members "use various social media and gaming platforms, particularly those with young and marginalized user bases, to lure, groom, and extort youth to commit violent and sexual acts, including self-harm." A review of 18 entities listed earlier kept 17, among them Atomwaffen Division, the Proud Boys, the Russian Imperial Movement and The Base, and removed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.¹¹

On April 22, 2026, the force's Integrated National Security Enforcement Team arrested Jeffrey Roussel of the Quebec City area on three terrorism charges for running a Telegram group that promoted 764. The RCMP's release cited the December 2025 listing as the basis for terrorism charges in place of the child exploitation and cybercrime provisions used in earlier 764 cases.¹²