RCMP Quietly Checked Whether FBI Cut Ties Over CBC Wording

The RCMP made internal inquiries to determine whether the FBI had halted intelligence sharing with the Mounties after FBI Director Kash Patel posted a public warning on 27 August criticising a CBC internal memo on how to describe the 11 September 2001 attacks, according to National Post, citing reporting from The New York Times. Patel wrote on X that “any agency in Canada that doesn’t publicly reject this bastardization of history” would “no longer have a friend in this FBI,” a post that came a week after Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government walked away from trade talks with Washington.

The controversy began when a leaked internal memo, first surfaced by columnist Warren Kinsella, showed CBC’s senior director of journalistic standards, Basem Boshra, reminding staff of a long-standing practice of attributing the word “terrorism” to officials or experts rather than using it as a flat description, according to Toronto Star. The memo instructed staff not to refer to the September 11 hijackings and crashes as “terrorist attacks” without that attribution. CBC reversed the policy the same day Patel’s post appeared, saying attribution would no longer be required specifically for descriptions of 9/11, according to The Bureau.

What the RCMP actually found

According to National Post’s account of New York Times reporting, the FBI’s disruption “appears to have been short-lived” and was specific to the bureau rather than to other U.S. intelligence-sharing bodies, with some meetings between FBI and RCMP officials cancelled during the period in question. A separate report from The Bureau states that a U.S. law-enforcement source described FBI personnel at posts in Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver being told to leave their workplaces and go home amid the dispute, though that account has not been independently corroborated elsewhere. The RCMP’s own statement, quoted by National Post, declined to say whether there was any measurable impact on its work with the FBI, instead noting only that the two forces have a “long-standing history of working together” on cross-border threats.

The episode unfolded against a backdrop of already strained Canada-U.S. relations, with the trade dispute under President Donald Trump’s administration providing the political context in which a single editorial memo escalated into a question about the durability of a law-enforcement partnership that includes joint investigations into drug trafficking and violent crime, such as the arrest of alleged trafficker Ryan Wedding earlier this year, an operation RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme announced alongside Patel.

Editorial judgment or national security matter

The deeper question raised by the episode is why an internal style guideline about attribution, the kind of decision newsrooms make routinely, became the trigger for a foreign law-enforcement official to threaten the withdrawal of intelligence cooperation from an entire country’s agencies. CBC’s Boshra maintained that the broadcaster “never said” 9/11 was not terrorism, only that it required attribution, a distinction that appears to have been lost once the memo circulated publicly. Whether that distinction should have carried any weight in a security relationship between two national police forces is a question none of the parties involved have directly answered.