Adedokun Waliyu 
A former RCMP intelligence official has been sentenced to 14 years in prison for breaching Canada’s secrets law.
Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert Maranger handed the sentence Wednesday to Cameron Jay Ortis, who was found guilty in November of violating the Security of Information Act.
Maranger said Ortis will be credited with time spent in custody, and he must now serve another seven years and 155 days.
Ortis, 51, led the RCMP’s Operations Research group, which assembled classified information on cybercriminals, terror cells and transnational criminal networks.
He pleaded not guilty in court to all charges, including breaking the secrets law by revealing classified information to three individuals of interest to police in 2015 and trying to do so in a fourth instance.
At Ortis’s trial, a picture emerged of an intense, deftly intelligent man — an avid runner who kept his personal life to himself.
In November, jurors declared Ortis guilty of three counts of violating the Security of Information Act and one count of attempting to do so.
The jury also found Ortis guilty of breach of trust and fraudulent use of a computer system.
In delivering the sentence Wednesday, Maranger said Ortis was “somewhat of an enigma.”
While there were suggestions that a possible financial incentive was the reason for the crimes, “in truth, there was no tangible evidence of a motive for what Cameron Ortis did,” Maranger told the court.
“He was never paid anything by anyone. The ‘why’ here in my mind remains a mystery.”
At a January hearing, Crown prosecutor Judy Kliewer said a sentence for Ortis in the range of 22 to 25 years would be appropriate.
Defence lawyer Jon Doody said his client should be sentenced to a little over seven years.
Following the sentencing Wednesday, Doody confirmed plans to appeal Ortis’s conviction.
At trial, Ortis testified he did not betray the RCMP. Rather, he said he offered secret material to targets in a bid to get them to use an online encryption service set up by an allied intelligence agency to spy on adversaries.
The Crown could not pinpoint a motive, but argued Ortis had no authority to disclose classified material and that he was not doing so as part of a legitimate undercover operation.
Kliewer told the January hearing that Ortis deserved a sentence that would show the public and Canada’s international partners that the system intended to protect sensitive information “has teeth.”
Ortis was released briefly on bail following his arrest in late 2019, only to be returned to an Ottawa jail for more than three years. He was again granted bail under strict conditions in December 2022 as he awaited a trial that took place last fall.
At the January hearing, Doody recounted the unusual hardships Ortis endured in custody, and came up with a rather different number.
He said Ortis spent years alone in protective custody, contracted COVID-19 and was repeatedly strip-searched and X-rayed in the course of viewing documentation related to his case at a secure, off-site facility.
