With 85 per cent of critical infrastructure in Canada either publicly or provincially owned, the challenge to make sure everyone involved shares information about incidents they deem suspicious has been a challenge, until now.

In April 2008, the RCMP launched the Suspicious Incident Reporting system for critical infrastructure targets such as transit systems and oil pipelines. The system, which is still in beta for some sectors, such as energy, allows pre-authorized infrastructure stakeholders across Canada to file incident reports in a secure central database. RCMP intelligence analysts regularly review the reports for linkages and escalate items accordingly. A test pilot for the program was run with transit organizations and in July began rolling out to other sectors, such as the electrical industry.

"There's never been a good framework for information sharing across any platform - this is a little bit ground-breaking," says Doug Powell, manager of corporate security at BC Hydro.
Powell and his team have been working with the RCMP, providing information from their own incident reporting system to the national database. Over the course of a year BC Hydro has about 1,000 incidents reported a year and of those about 400 are considered serious crimes.

"In the past, if we were suspicious about something we would let them know what it was, but in terms of formalized reporting, no, there wasn't really anything in place," says Powell. "Now, everybody is pushing information to the RCMP on a regular basis so they can assess it and qualify it as intelligence and put it into one database."