The Trump administration is using misleading fentanyl figures to justify tariffs against Canada, relying on a dataset that includes drugs traced to Mexico, a Globe and Mail investigation has found.
Citing U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, the White House has asserted that 43 pounds of fentanyl was intercepted at the border last fiscal year, marking a “massive 2,050 per cent increase” compared with the year prior, when two pounds of the deadly synthetic drug was seized.
U.S. President Donald Trump has invoked the 43-pound figure as grounds for threats of punishing trade measures, including 25-per-cent tariffs on almost all Canadian goods.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump reiterated in a social-media post that drugs “are still pouring into our Country from Mexico and Canada at very high and unacceptable levels.”
In an effort to placate the White House, Ottawa has committed $1.3-billion to a border plan aimed at preventing fentanyl trafficking. As part of this, the Trudeau government has put Black Hawk helicopters and drones in the sky, and deployed additional front-line personnel and canine teams on the ground.
At top, Denver the drug-sniffing dog shows his skills at a border crossing in Lansdowne, Ont., for a Feb. 12 visit by 'fetanyl czar' Kevin Brousseau, bottom middle, and Public Safety Minister David McGuinty, bottom left.Patrick Doyle/Reuters; Spencer Colby/CP
However, The Globe analyzed the U.S. border agency’s figures to verify that the 43-pound tally actually came from Canada, and found that the dataset does not reveal anything about the origin of the drugs.
U.S. border agents confirmed to The Globe that the agency’s methodology for attributing seizures to the northern border doesn’t hinge on whether the fentanyl was intercepted at the border or whether it came from Canada. It could have been seized hundreds of kilometres inland, and it may have no ties to Canada whatsoever.
Regardless, border agency spokesperson Jason Givens said seizures made by its agents in what it considers the north, including as part of joint law-enforcement operations, are recorded as northern-border seizures.
One of the northern-border regions, known as the Spokane sector, was responsible for nearly 24 pounds of the 2024 total cited by the White House, so The Globe travelled there. Law-enforcement officials across the sector, which covers eastern Washington, Idaho and western Montana, said they could not think of a single case of Canadian fentanyl flowing into their jurisdiction. All five of the current and former high-ranking officers said the problem – even where they are, in the northernmost parts of the western United States – is fentanyl from Mexican cartels.
“What I can tell you is that the majority of our sourcing of fentanyl comes from the southern border,” Commander Alan Brooks, of the Northwest Montana Drug Task Force, said in an interview.
The dataset released publicly by the border agency contains basic information, such as the date of the seizure, the region, the sector or field office tied to the interception, the drug type and the weight seized. There is no information about criminal charges or the suspected origin of the drugs. It also is not stated whether the fentanyl was seized from a vehicle, commercial vessel, airplane, in the mail or elsewhere.
Through interviews and by cross-referencing the seizure data against court records, The Globe determined that nearly 15 pounds of fentanyl attributed to the northern border had, in fact, originated in Mexico – but could only identify 5.5 pounds of the drug as having crossed the Canadian border. The investigation also confirmed that nearly five pounds attributed to the northern border in fiscal 2025 came from Mexico as well.
Applying the reporting exercise to the smaller seizures contained in the dataset proved a challenge. In most instances, the border agency did not provide The Globe with details about the specific cases associated with the seizures and couldn’t point to a Canadian connection.
Without confirmation that a particular interception is associated with a particular criminal case, it’s impossible to calculate how much of the fentanyl included in the northern-border dataset is actually from Canada.
One long-serving Canadian law-enforcement official said the statistics are being spun by the Trump administration, and he questions Ottawa’s appeasement of the White House.
“It’s become a political football,” said Pierre-Yves Bourduas, a retired former deputy commissioner of the RCMP. “When you start mixing policing with politics, it could be troubling.”
‘Northern border’ fentanyl from Mexico
Although the origin of fentanyl attributed to the northern border can’t be verified by data from the U.S. border agency, an examination of court records revealed some seizures in the Spokane sector came from Mexico.
In one major case, authorities seized 14.8 pounds of fentanyl in Spokane, Wash. – more than 150 kilometres from the border with Canada – as part of an investigation last summer that led to charges against three Mexican nationals. The Globe reported on the case earlier this month.
The months-long investigation, which was led by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, is outlined in documents filed in U.S. District Court in Spokane. This includes an affidavit sworn by a U.S. northern border patrol official who had been working with the DEA. The operation resulted in the seizure of approximately 68,000 pills presumed to be fentanyl, as well as firearms, large bundles of U.S. currency and several other drugs such as methamphetamine, cocaine and heroin.
Investigators amassed evidence that a car used by the alleged drug traffickers, which had California licence plates, travelled from Phoenix to Spokane in the weeks prior to the seizure, court records show. There is no mention of Canada in the criminal indictment against the three men, or the affidavit sworn by the border agent.
The Globe was able to determine that another case attributed to the northern border, from last fall and classified as fiscal year 2025, also had no known connection to Canada. In that instance, nearly five pounds of fentanyl was intercepted in inland Washington. According to court documents in the continuing criminal complaint against the co-accused – Jose Antonio Guzman-Garcia and Eduardo Gonzalez-Rodriguez – authorities said they believe the fentanyl came from Mexico. The allegations have not been tested in court.
Drugs and firearms were seized at Mr. Gonzalez-Rodriguez’s home in Benton City, roughly 400 kilometres from the U.S. border with Canada, court records show. “Investigators in this matter have a good faith basis to believe that the source of the fentanyl possessed by the defendant to distribute is in Mexico,” U.S. prosecutors said in a motion seeking detention. The role that border agents played is not made clear in the court filings. Canada is not mentioned in the materials reviewed by The Globe.
Canadian law-enforcement authorities, including the RCMP and the Canada Border Services Agency, dispute the notion that fentanyl produced in Canada is a significant and increasing threat to the United States.
In interviews, Canadian law-enforcement officials stressed they were not suggesting that fentanyl isn’t a problem for Canada – nearly 50,000 deaths since 2016 have been attributed to the toxic drug crisis in Canada – nor were they ignoring the reality that organized crime groups in the country have formed alliances with Mexican cartels and are mass-producing the opioid domestically. Some of the fentanyl has even been caught for export.
A 2023 Health Canada memo on the economics of the illicit North American drug market notes that domestic production in Canada has taken off since the flow of fentanyl from China was staunched under new Chinese regulations in 2019.
“Within the law enforcement community it is widely believed that the excess product is being exported to lucrative international markets, including, potentially, Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Europe,” says the memo, which was released to The Globe under access to information laws.
In 2022, Australian authorities intercepted a shipment from Canada at the Port of Melbourne containing more than 24 pounds of fentanyl. In reviewing some of the interceptions included in the 43-pound total cited by the White House, The Globe determined that 5.5 pounds of fentanyl seized in Detroit in June did, indeed, cross the Canadian border. And just a few weeks ago, Seattle border agents at a shipping facility opened a package that came from Canada and discovered more than one pound of fentanyl.
But the Trump administration’s specific claim that the flow of the opioid across the northern border has risen massively in recent years doesn’t reflect what authorities are seeing on the ground. (The White House did not respond to requests for comment as of deadline.)
‘Cartel connection’ in Spokane
The Pacific Northwest is a natural transit zone for fentanyl trafficking inside the United States. Cdr. Brooks and other law-enforcement sources described a route of fentanyl coming into the United States from Mexico at the southern border, and then flowing northbound through states such as California and Arizona. The fentanyl moving from Canada into the United States is a tiny fraction of the thousands of pounds of the illicit drug trafficked into American territory each year. Mr. Trump has said he intends to impose 25-per-cent tariffs on Mexican products as well.
Specifically, law-enforcement sources explained why the city of Spokane is a hub. Interstate 90 runs through it, connecting it to the port city of Seattle to the west, and to a lucrative drug market inland to the east. Rob Boothe, a lieutenant with the Spokane Police Department who oversees the special investigations unit, concurred that Canadian fentanyl is not the problem in the Pacific Northwest.
“The majority of our fentanyl,” he said, “has some type of cartel connection.”
Lieutenant Rob Boothe, explaining how drugs are transported from Mexico to Spokane, said he wasn't aware of cases in the area involving fentanyl coming from Canada.Margaret Albaugh/The Globe and Mail
Residents in Spokane have good reason to be frustrated with the toll fentanyl has taken on their community. At least 346 people are believed to have died from drug overdoses in Spokane County in 2024, according to preliminary data from the medical examiner’s office; another 30 to 40 deaths are still being investigated. Of the deaths confirmed to be drug overdoses, fentanyl was detected in slightly more than three-quarters.
Even a former drug dealer in Spokane said Mexican fentanyl is to blame. Now a supervisor at Compassionate Addiction Treatment Spokane’s sobering centre, Kurt Garber said he had firsthand experience with Mexican drug traffickers operating in the city. Just a few years ago, he worked as a mid-level drug dealer, selling fentanyl and other substances to support his family and his own addiction.
In an interview with The Globe at the Spokane centre, Mr. Garber said it was common knowledge in his circles that the fentanyl in the region originated in Mexico. He dismissed outright the suggestion that it might have crossed the border from Canada. “Every plug I knew had a cartel plug,” he said, using the street term for drug dealers.
Mr. Garber had sold drugs since his mid-teens, starting with medications that family members had been prescribed for chronic illnesses, and then graduating to methamphetamine and heroin.
But in 2020, as heroin became increasingly scarce in the Pacific Northwest, Mr. Garber heeded the advice of a friend and began buying pressed fentanyl tablets – referred to locally as “Mexi-blues” – from a Mexican supplier. Every week or two, one of several anonymous men whom Mr. Garber presumed to be Mexican would drive to Spokane, staying in a local hotel before meeting him for the exchange, either by his apartment complex or at a nearby trap house.
The men only spoke Spanish, and Mr. Garber’s limited communications with them were run through Google Translate on their phones. He initially paid US$3,500 in cash for 1,000 tablets, reselling them for $5 apiece. As the price of fentanyl fell with the influx of supply, he purchased 10,000 tablets for US$7,500, which he then flipped for $3 each. He carried with him a pistol, tucked into his basketball shorts under his pants.
Mr. Garber was ultimately arrested and charged with possession with intent to deliver, as well as unlawful possession of a firearm. He was sentenced in 2021 to one year in prison, and was released after eight months.
He calls his prison sentence a blessing in disguise, having cleared his head of an addiction that he says clouded his judgment and had him contributing to a drug crisis that has ravaged North America. “I do feel really bad about it,” he said. “It wasn’t something I thought of at the time.”
Mr. Garber works at Compassionate Addiction Treatment, founded by Hallie Burchinal. She says she first heard about illicit fentanyl in 2019; by the end of 2022, ‘I couldn’t believe I was thinking it, but I was like, I wish heroin would come back.’Margaret Albaugh/The Globe and Mail
Canada’s role unclear
In 2023, the United States saw an estimated 107,000 overdose deaths, of which nearly 75,000 involved fentanyl, according to data released last May by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Also in 2023, the DEA seized more than 77 million fentanyl pills and nearly 12,000 pounds of fentanyl powder. The DEA’s Rocky Mountain Field Division, which includes Montana, seized a record of more than 3.6 million fentanyl pills in 2023.
“The fentanyl trade is extremely profitable for the Mexican cartels who continue to flood the nation and the Rocky Mountain region with their poison,” the division’s special agent in charge, Jonathan Pullen, said in a statement last spring announcing an operation targeting the movement of the cartels’ proceeds. “Fentanyl pills are manufactured in Mexico for as little as two cents per pill, yet can sell for upwards of $60 per pill in our jurisdiction.”
In its 2020 national drug threat assessment, the DEA didn’t mince words about cartel activity in the Pacific Northwest. The region, the agency said at the time, was under siege by cartel forces pushing illicit fentanyl pills. Four years later, in its 2024 threat assessment, the DEA again highlighted the role of Mexican cartels and made no mention of Canada. (Police in Canada suggest that the relatively low cost of cartel production of fentanyl in Mexico could be effectively crowding out Canadian contraband from the U.S. market.)
A former DEA special agent in Washington said the cartels have a long history in the state, adding that Spokane has for decades been a hub for trafficking illicit drugs eastward to Montana, the Dakotas and up into Canada. The Globe is not naming the former DEA agent because the person was not authorized to speak about past or continuing investigations.
The source said that while the northern border poses a risk in terms of the flow of drugs in both directions, Mexico is the main concern. In the cases the former agent investigated, the fentanyl had been trafficked from Mexico, primarily by individuals working with the Sinaloa cartel.
The former agent said law-enforcement agencies are aware of the potential for Canadian fentanyl to become a larger problem if the flow from Mexico into the United States is choked. If pressure is exerted on the southern border, the source said, other routes will be attempted, whether by Chinese, Canadian, American or Mexican crime networks.
Even small amounts of fentanyl can be lucrative for traffickers if they can find a way to get it across borders undetected.Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press
Law enforcement’s efforts to slow the flow of illicit drugs are complicated by the fact that shipments can cross borders in small packages. The seizure in Detroit last June of 5.5 pounds of fentanyl crossing from Canada occurred at an international mail-sorting warehouse, sniffed out by a customs canine team.
But American and Canadian authorities – who would not say whether anyone was arrested in the case – disagree on Canada’s role in that trafficking. While U.S. border officials say the fentanyl came from Canada, the RCMP says Canada was merely a waystation. “Whether it was actually produced in Canada, I don’t believe it was,” Staff Sergeant James Cooke, a senior official in the RCMP’s Federal Policing organized crime unit, told The Globe in an interview in Ottawa.
Canada’s crime gangs are also accused of using the mail system to export other kinds of illicit drugs, including nitazenes, a next-generation synthetic opioid that’s even deadlier than fentanyl. The Australian Border Force said earlier this winter that it stopped 64 packages of nitazenes from entering the country. “The imports originated from Hong Kong, the United Kingdom and Canada, and primarily were imported via the international mail stream,” authorities said in a press release.
In its statement threatening tariffs and citing the 43-pound seizure figure, the White House referred to a “growing presence of Mexican cartels operating fentanyl and nitazene synthesis labs in Canada.” The administration cited “international mail” as a chink in its border armour. But again, Canadian authorities question whether the drugs originated from Canada. Staff Sgt. Cooke said the RCMP has no intelligence to indicate that crime gangs in Canada produce or synthesize nitazenes. “It’s a more complex synthesis process,” he said, adding that the primary producers of bulk nitazenes are in Asia.
Canada’s problems with the U.S. border metrics are not new. For years, congressional Republicans have been invoking the northern-border seizure data as proof of Canadian fentanyl flooding the country. In 2023, Vivek Ramaswamy, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, cited the same metrics to support the case for building a border wall with Canada.
Mr. Bourduas, the retired former deputy commissioner of the RCMP, said Canadians should have tough questions for Ottawa policy makers seeking to appease the White House. With Canada now making redeployments to the border, he is concerned about what the strategy – known in law enforcement as reprofiling – will mean for continuing organized-crime investigations within Canada.
“What do you lose? That’s a big question,” he said. “Reprofiling of resources within the RCMP is creating voids in other aspects of enforcement in our country.”
Carlos Osorio/Reuters
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