More details emerge on Ottawa’s auto theft action plan

The federal government released its National Action Plan on Combatting Auto Theft this week, providing a list of details into what it will be tackling. The report shows three specific sections it plans to focus on: intelligence or information sharing; intervention; and legislation, regulations and governance.

Intelligence or information sharing includes the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), where among other things the federal government aims to focus on boosting customs information and intelligence sharing to help municipal and provincial police forces — and also reduce barriers to information sharing.

For the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the focus will be on providing Canadian Police College courses on auto theft investigative techniques to municipal, provincial, and federal law enforcement. More information about the intelligence and information sharing section is available here

For intervention, part of the focus on CBSA will be to increase collaboration with port authorities, as well as rail and shipping partners, to broaden its ability to examine export cargo containers — including the deployment of scanning and detection technology in new locations, such as rail yards. The idea is to use advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the targeting of containers that are suspected to contain stolen vehicles.

An investment of $28 million will be used to increase efforts in combating auto theft by hiring new frontline Border Service Officers; deploying them to ports, rail yards and intermodal hubs; dedicating new resources to intelligence and targeting capabilities around stolen vehicles; identifying and testing new detection technology tools; and to use data from interdictions of stolen vehicles and AI to predict the location of suspected stolen vehicles, among other things.

Other investments include $9.1 million over three years in municipal and provincial police services. This will help boost their ability to provide timely referrals, information, and actionable intelligence to the CBSA. It will also help speed up their ability to take custody of stolen vehicles intercepted by CBSA.

And $3.5 million will be provided over three years to support INTERPOL in combating transnational organized vehicle crime. More information on intervention, along with details about section three (legislation, regulations and governance) is available here.

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