Canada's 25 Most Wanted is not an RCMP list, and 10 of the 25 have already been arrested
The RCMP publishes no national wanted register. Canada's 25 Most Wanted is run by the Bolo Program, and 10 of the 25 are already under arrest.
"Do you screen the RCMP most wanted list?" is a question with an awkward answer, because there is no such list. The RCMP's own A-to-Z index of services, last modified on 25 June 2026, offers missing persons and a high-risk child sex offender database; a national register of wanted people is not among them. Individual divisions publish appeals as news releases instead: the Saskatchewan RCMP issues a monthly "Wanted Persons" bulletin, ranked by the Crime Severity Index and stating on its face that it is not a complete list. What people mean by Canada's most wanted is the Bolo Program's Top 25, launched in May 2018 by the Stephan Crétier Foundation and refreshed in campaigns run with police services. The most recent unveiling took place in Vancouver on 8 October 2025, with representatives of Bolo, the BC RCMP and fifteen other police agencies, and rewards of up to CAD 100,000 attached to the top five. The second thing worth knowing before you rely on it: arrests do not remove a name. On 4 September 2026 the Top 25 held 25 entries, and 10 of them were flagged as arrested, with dates running from 14 October 2025 to 30 July 2026. Three of the five reward-bearing entries at the top of the list were among them. So the page titled "Canada's 25 Most Wanted" describes 15 people actually at large, and any pipeline that reads names without reading the arrest overlay produces a 40 percent false-positive floor before it has compared a single date of birth. What a listing gives you either way is an allegation behind an unexecuted warrant: a reason to look harder at a counterparty, never a bar on dealing with one.
What this workflow covers
SCOPE- The list held 25 entries on 4 September 2026, each with a rank, a requesting police service, a crime tag, a region tag and, for the top five, a reward of up to CAD 100,000.
- 10 entries carried an ARRESTED flag and stayed on the page. The earliest arrest date shown was 14 October 2025 and the most recent was 30 July 2026.
- The requesting agencies are municipal and provincial: Toronto Police Service on six entries, Winnipeg on three, Ottawa, the OPP ROPE Squad and Montreal on two each, then ten other services with one apiece. No RCMP-requested case appeared on the list on the day we read it.
- There is no date of birth, no alias field, no nationality and no physical description in the listing data. A name, a charge and a police force is the whole of it.
- Murder accounts for 17 of the 25 crime tags; the rest are attempted murder, manslaughter, conspiracy, drug trafficking, sexual interference, assault and being unlawfully at large.
- A separate page at boloprogram.org/still-wanted carried 16 people featured in earlier campaigns, which is where a lapsed listing goes rather than into an archive with dates.
- The divisional bulletins are worse still for automated use. The Saskatchewan RCMP release of 27 August 2026 gives an age rather than a date of birth, lists aliases and tattoos in prose, and replaces one numbered entry with the single word "Arrested" — a format written for a reader, not a parser.
- The one national public person register the RCMP does run is the High Risk Child Sex Offender Database, which carries an explicit warning that misusing its contents to injure or harass anyone listed may itself be prosecuted. That warning is a good reason not to bolt it onto a commercial screening product.
- Treat a Canadian wanted hit as an allegation attached to a warrant issued by one police service, verify against that service rather than against the aggregator page, and record the arrest flag you saw on the day you checked.
Key statistics
DATA- Entries on Canada's 25 Most Wanted, 4 September 2026
- 25, of which 10 were flagged as arrested
- Counted from the Bolo Program most-wanted listing
- Reward attached to the top five entries
- Up to CAD 100,000
- BC RCMP news release, 8 October 2025
- Bolo Program launch
- May 2018, by the Stephan Crétier Foundation
- BC RCMP news release, 8 October 2025
Compliance glossary
TERMS- Bolo Program
- A Canadian non-profit initiative launched in May 2018 by the Stephan Crétier Foundation that amplifies priority wanted notices issued by Canadian police services, publishes the Top 25 list and funds rewards for information leading to arrests.
- BOLO
- Be On the Lookout: the police shorthand the programme is named after. It describes an alert asking people to watch for a person or vehicle, which is a weaker instrument than a warrant and confers no legal consequence of its own.
- ROPE Squad
- The Ontario Provincial Police Repeat Offender Parole Enforcement squad, which pursues offenders unlawfully at large. It appears as the requesting agency on entries in the Top 25.
- High Risk Child Sex Offender Database
- A publicly searchable RCMP database of people convicted of sexual offences against children who are assessed as posing a high risk of reoffending. It carries an express warning that misusing the information may be prosecuted.
Authoritative references
SOURCES- 01BC RCMP joins Bolo Program in unveiling Top 25 list of Canada's most wanted fugitives
Royal Canadian Mounted Police
- 02RCMP services and information (A-to-Z index)
Royal Canadian Mounted Police
- 03High risk child sex offender database
Royal Canadian Mounted Police
- 04Canada's 25 Most Wanted
Bolo Program
- 05Saskatchewan RCMP: Wanted Persons (27 August 2026)
Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Frequently asked questions
Q&A- Does the RCMP publish a most wanted list I can screen against?
- Not nationally. The RCMP's services index lists missing persons and the high-risk child sex offender database, and its divisions publish wanted appeals as news releases rather than as a maintained register. If a vendor tells you it screens "the RCMP wanted list", ask which URL it reads, because the answer is almost certainly the Bolo Program's Top 25.
- Who runs the Bolo Program, and can a non-police list be relied on?
- It is a non-profit initiative launched in May 2018 by the Stephan Crétier Foundation, and it amplifies priority wanted notices that Canadian police services ask it to publish. The warrants behind the entries are real and the requesting service is named on each one. What it is not is an authority record: verify with the police service named on the entry before you act on a match.
- If someone on the list has been arrested, why are they still on it?
- Because the page is a public-awareness campaign, and showing that a campaign worked is part of the point. Arrested entries keep their rank and gain a dated ARRESTED overlay. For screening this is the single most important behaviour of the source: on 4 September 2026 ten of the twenty-five people shown were no longer at large, so the arrest state has to be read, not inferred from presence.
- Do you screen Canada's most wanted?
- Yes — the Bolo Top 25 is the Canadian criminal-watchlist source behind the "Canada RCMP" entry on our coverage register, and it runs in every Quick Check. We describe it as RCMP-adjacent rather than RCMP-published because that is what it is, and /coverage is the authoritative statement of what a check actually reads.
- Is a Canadian wanted listing a sanction?
- No. It is a public appeal supporting an outstanding arrest warrant, and it carries no prohibition on dealing with the person. Canada's sanctions instruments are separate — the Consolidated Canadian Autonomous Sanctions List and the listed-entity regimes under the Criminal Code — and a screening report that merges the two misleads whoever has to make the decision.
- Where do I look for Canadian wanted people outside the Top 25?
- At the police service with jurisdiction, which in most of the country means a municipal or provincial force rather than the RCMP. Some RCMP divisions publish monthly bulletins — Saskatchewan ranks its selection by the Crime Severity Index and says outright that it is not a complete list — and others publish nothing at all. There is no consolidated national source to fall back on, so state that limitation in your coverage documentation instead of implying national coverage you do not have.