Stolen Canadian cars are ending up all over the world—will we finally do something about it?

The recent INTERPOL General Assembly in Marrakech (Morocco)—which included the participation of RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme in discussions on transnational organized crime—highlighted an uncomfortable truth: The world’s most effective policing models now rely on interoperable databases, criminal-asset tracing, and operational coalitions. Canada cannot continue treating these tools as optional supplements. They are the backbone of modern policing. For Canadian policymakers, the message from Marrakech is not about photo opportunities but about how quickly we can align our institutions with that emerging global standard. One major gap is asset targeting. INTERPOL’s new Silver Notice shifts focus from pursuing individuals to tracking the proceeds of organized crime: bank accounts, real estate, vehicle fleets, shell companies. Canada already provides high-volume vehicle data through CPIC. The next step is ensuring that Canadian intelligence feeds directly into Silver Notices that identify and disrupt the international entities laundering Canadian criminal proceeds. Without an asset-centric strategy plugged into global channels, Canada will keep incapacitating low-level offenders while the money—and the real organizers—remain untouched abroad. Fraud and cybercrime follow the same pattern. INTERPOL’s findings on global scam-centre operations show how trafficked workers are coerced into running large-scale online fraud factories that target victims worldwide, including Canadians. Its Operation First Light 2024 resulted in nearly 4,000 arrests and $257 million USD seized—numbers that dwarf anything Canadian domestic agencies can achieve alone. Our Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre documents losses but cannot dismantle overseas compounds or repatriate assets without coordinated international tasking. Here, brief operational examples abroad can inform Canada’s path. Morocco—the host of this year’s INTERPOL session—offers one such case study. Its INTERPOL National Central Bureau processed more than 7,000 international requests, recovered 380 stolen vehicles, and contributed to 135 arrests linked to cross-border investigations last year. Recently, Morocco’s police signed an agreement with France’s Argos insurers to access manufacturer-grade datasets and improve vehicle identification and tracking, a partnership blending public policing with private digital resources to disrupt international supply chains. Canada does not need to import foreign models, but it should pay attention to how technical data-sharing and public-private collaboration are now central to effective transnational policing. The deeper point is that Canada must stop treating auto theft, cyber fraud, trafficking, and money laundering as separate files. They are one crime system—integrated abroad, fragmented here. The federal government has already endorsed international cooperation through the UN’s new cybercrime framework. The domestic test is whether Ottawa can fuse cybercrime, organized crime, and financial crime strategies into a single operational posture that treats foreign nodes as extensions of Canadian risk, not externalities. That requires three changes. First, Canada needs true integration between the RCMP, CSIC, CBSA, and provincial police, not ad-hoc cooperation. Transnational crime should be treated as a national security issue with unified intelligence access and shared priorities. Second, Canada must operationalize INTERPOL, not just participate in it. Notices, diffusions, and database checks should be routine across Canadian police services, as they are in the most effective member states. Third, Canada must invest in digital forensics and asset-tracking infrastructure. Organized crime thrives in blind spots. It shrinks when states can follow the money, map the logistics, and act quickly with trusted partners abroad. Canada has the expertise, alliances, and institutional foundations to build a modern, internationally connected policing architecture. What it lacks is not capacity, but coordination. If Ottawa chooses to recalibrate, Canadians will feel the difference not in rhetoric but in results: fewer stolen and exported cars, fewer wiped-out savings, fewer criminal proceeds disappearing into foreign networks. The country’s organized crime problem may appear on our streets, but it is solved, or allowed to grow, in the international spaces where Canada is still playing catch-up.