Firearms and illicit drugs seized last week are displayed as RCMP Chief Supt. Stephen Lee, back from left to right, Asst. Commissioner David Teboul, Insp. Jillian Wellard and Cpl. Arash Seyed leave after a news conference at RCMP headquarters, in Surrey, B.C., on Oct. 31.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
The language from the Drug Enforcement Administration was stark. Canada had become a haven for chemists making a drug gaining popularity in the Lower 48. Most of the product seized in the U.S. was “manufactured in clandestine laboratories in Canada and smuggled across the Northern Border,” the DEA warned. Asian transnational criminal organizations, it said, were producing tens of millions of tablets to be sold in the U.S. market.
That was 2015, and the drug was MDMA, better known as ecstasy.
Nine years later, Donald Trump cited an invasion of “drugs, in particular, fentanyl” from Canada and Mexico as one of the grounds for a 25-per-cent tariff he intends to impose on all goods from the two countries when he takes office.
But data collected by U.S. law enforcement and international agencies provides little direct evidence for Mr. Trump’s claim that Canada shares responsibility for the scourge of fentanyl that has killed an estimated 150,000 Americans in the past two years.
Even the DEA no longer warns about an influx of Canadian-made narcotics. The agency’s 2024 report does not make a single reference to Canada.
At a congressional hearing on the fentanyl crisis last year, experts warned about a “tsunami of deadly drugs coming into this country” – from Mexico. Canada was mentioned only for its harm-reduction policies. At a Senate hearing this year on “Stopping the Flow of Fentanyl,” Steve Daines, a Republican Senator from Montana, described rising fentanyl seizures in his state – whose border with Canada stretches across nearly 900 kilometres – as “a crisis that starts at the southern border. It starts in Mexico.”
In fact, data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows that the weight of narcotics seized each year is in dramatic decline on the northern border. In 2022, agents seized 27,260 kilograms of illicit drugs; last year, just 5,260.
Of that, only 19.5 kilograms was fentanyl.
On the southwest border, by comparison, U.S. border agents seized nearly 10 tonnes of fentanyl last year – a haul nearly 500 times greater.
(The Canada Border Services Agency seized just 946 grams of fentanyl entering this country in all of fiscal year 2023.)
In the global marketplace of illicit narcotics, “Canada is probably on balance a net exporter, but it’s not a big one compared to others,” said Jeremy Douglas, the head of strategy for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
Before legal marijuana became broadly available across the U.S., supplies of Canadian-grown product – including the famed “B.C. bud” – found lucrative markets south of the border.
But the extraordinary rise of synthetic drugs and the efficiency of the laboratories that produce them have remade the landscape. Cartels based in Mexico have become increasingly large manufacturers and transporters in a narcotics trade that generates billions in revenues each year, according to U.S. estimates.
The undefended Canada-U.S. border gets renewed scrutiny as Trump’s win revives historic anxieties
In Canada, meanwhile, makers of narcotics have shifted their gaze to even more lucrative markets. Take the superlab recently raided in Falkland, B.C., which the RCMP called the largest and most sophisticated operation of its kind. It employed a manufacturing process that “has been the primary method used by Mexican cartels to produce methamphetamine,” the RCMP said.
But it more closely resembled operations seen in Asia, said Mr. Douglas, who is Canadian. What made it distinct was its use of pre-precursor chemicals, allowing the lab to fashion drugs through a multistep process that begins with substances whose purchase is not controlled.
“As we understand it, the shipment – at least of the methamphetamines – was destined for Asia-Pacific,” Mr. Douglas said.
The RCMP declined to comment on specific export destinations of the Falkland lab.
“But historically, Canada’s export market has been to Southeast Asia and Australia, New Zealand,” said Corporal Arash Seyed, a spokesman with the RCMP’s Federal Serious and Organized Crime program. Drug users there pay considerably higher prices than in the U.S.
“Our criminal networks don’t seem to be really supplying the United States,” Cpl. Seyed said. Fentanyl, for example, is “really cheap down there.”
Still, those with experience at the highest ranks of U.S. drug and border enforcement say they remain concerned about Canada based on a broader view of a country seen as naive to threats.
“When you’re soft on crime, when you’re weak on border security, you’re creating golden opportunities for the criminal networks around the world,” said Derek Maltz, a director of special operations for the DEA. In that respect, “Canada is no different than what we’re dealing with right now with the Mexican government.”
For Rodney Scott, who was chief of the U.S. Border Patrol under Mr. Trump and President Joe Biden, a greater concern is the perception that lax Canadian immigration policy has allowed entry to people who might otherwise be barred from the U.S.
Only about 15 per cent of U.S. Border Patrol resources are stationed along the frontier with Canada, and Mr. Scott worries that a rise in illegal immigration – even if nowhere near the levels seen from Mexico – is providing a smokescreen that allows for the smuggling of narcotics and other illegal goods.
“Bad immigration policy wipes out law enforcement’s ability to do proactive work,” he said.
At the southwest border, cartels regularly dispatch groups of migrants “to overwhelm law enforcement, so they can get the narcotics in,” he said.
The difference with parts of the northern border is “you can do it with two illegal aliens because there’s only, like, one agent.”
It’s time for Canada to “re-evaluate some of their immigration and asylum laws that let what I would classify as known terrorists into Canada, and then that becomes a threat to the United States,” he said.
He dismissed concerns about Canadian sovereignty, saying it’s a matter of looking out for the interests of a close neighbour. “It’s better,” he said, “to keep the threats on the other side of the ocean.”