Groups trying to police the Internet accuse Canada of lagging behind other countries in defending citizens and businesses against malicious hackers and cyber-criminals.
Since 2010, Public Safety Canada has spent $245 million on defending government computer networks, safeguarding critical infrastructure and educating the public.
It has also earmarked $142 million over the next five years to tackle cyber-threats — particularly against critical infrastructure. But leaders in Canada's policing, IT and cyber-security sectors say the federal strategy is focused primarily on national security threats and does little to combat the dramatic growth in email scams, online extortion and breaches at corporate computer networks.
Canadians are also largely in the dark about the scope of cybercrimes given the country has no central agency to track online scams and malicious electronic attacks.
What's more, there are no federal laws to force companies to disclose hacks, security breaches, thefts of data or money so the general public has incomplete knowledge of which companies have been compromised.
Canada does have a Spam Reporting Centre and a government run Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, but experts say neither is equipped to handle the exploding array of cyber-scams and malware that are targeting home and business computers.
This past spring, police forces sent 17 of their executives on an international study mission to learn how governments in the U.S., Europe, India, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand are grappling with cybercrime.
The group identified "the urgent need to increase reporting of cybercrimes to police," and pointed to Australia's ACORN program (Australian Cybercrime Online Reporting Network) as a model for collecting citizen complaints so that police and industry can monitor trends, thwart organized criminal groups and arrange incidents for further investigation.
The FBI in the U.S. runs a similar program called "IC3", referring to its Internet Crime Complaint Centre, which last year alone received 269,000 complaints about frauds, email scams and online extortion. That included some 4,000 complaints from Canada.
But in Canada, "most of the reporting, and almost all of the resolution is happening behind the closed doors of the private sector," says one expert.
Canadian police chiefs involved in the 2015 global cyber-study made six recommendations are calling for a "paradigm shift" in how police and the public treat cybercrime, involving more coordination and information sharing between police and industry.
Right now, Public Safety Canada advises the public to contact local police if they are a victim of cybercrime. But "Canadian policing in its current format is ill-suited to address crime on a global basis," one police chief concedes, acknowledging that Canada's police system is fragmented between between federal, provincial and local authorities.
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