President Donald Trump states that he is pointing to Canada with punishing tariffs of all our assets because he is concerned about the country’s supposedly lax approach for fentanyl and migrants.
But the new data from the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) show that Canada has a reason to worry about what is arriving in the United States
There has been an influx of American drugs and weapons, that experts and the police say they are feeding crime, death and addiction on this side of the border.
CBSA is taking many more drugs, prohibited firearms and firearms than only two years ago, according to figures compiled by the border agency and shared with CBC News.
In fact, when they look at the weight alone, Canadian officials confiscated more illegal drugs from the United States last year than what the Americans captured on their side of the 49th parallel.
“We live next to the world’s largest weapons, the world’s largest drug market. There are inherent and significant effects on unlocking,” said Christian Leuprecht, a professor at the Royal Military Military in Canada and an expert in border security.
In almost all categories measured by CBSA, the number of illegal goods captured in this country is on the rise.
In particular, there has been a striking increase in drugs to Canada seized by border officials.
In 2022, for example, CBSA obtained 3.8 million grams of drugs from the United States, last year that figure rose to 8.3 million grams. That is a 118 percent increase in two years.
CBSA measures cannabis, hashish, cocaine and crack, heroin, some opioids (such as opium, metadona and morphine) and chemicals precursors related to drugs seized in grams.
A recent drug bust in Toronto shows exactly what Canada is dealing: the police captured 835 kilograms of cocaine in January, the product that, according to a Mexican poster, moved to Canada through the United States.
There is also an increase in the amount of “dose” of drugs captured by CBSA.
In 2022, there were 112,576 doses seized by border officials. That number tripled at 469,996 doses in 2024, according to CBSA figures.
CBSA measures some opioids and other medications and chemicals related to dose drugs.
LeuPret said that the increase in drugs seized in Canada is probably driven, at least in part, by changing production methods.
During the years of early pandemic and postpandemics, transnational crime unions behind drug production moved part of their work in Mexico to the United States to overcome the tight border measures related to COVID, Leuprecht said.
It was easier to move those drugs from the United States to Canada.
It is estimated that 400,000 people cross the border every day, some with little scrutiny, and there is a constant flow of vehicles that could guide drugs in Canada, he said.
“Like American integration has worked quite well for the automotive sector, agriculture and other industries, it has worked very well for transnational organized crime and pandemic was a kind of acceleration for that integration,” he said in an interview.
Leuptcht said that the new border security package of the Federal Government of $ 1.3 billion was presented as a way of calming Trump’s concerns about drugs and migrants and getting his tariff threat to retreat.
“But the real benefit is for the public safety of Canadians in terms of having the resources we need to play illicit firearms, in particular, and a large number of other drugs that come to the north,” he said.
Public security bureaucrats have pressed for a long time for more money for the border, but they were largely ignored, Leuprecht said. “It wasn’t a priority, until now,” he said.
There is an area in which there has been a decrease in seizures: the amount of fentanyl that comes from the US intercepted from non -American countries in the United States. On the Canadian border he jumped from 2,812 grams to 4,403 grams in that same period.
With US officials who reported 19,500 grams of fentanyl seized on the northern border last year, Canada is not yet a significant source of the drug that enters the United States less than one percent of all fentanyl seized in the United States comes from Canada, according to data from the Canadian government.
The former deputy commissioner of RCMP, Kevin Brosseau, was appointed Tuesday of the Canada Tsar Fentanyl. It has the task of stopping the production and distribution of fentanyl of that mortal drug as part of Canada’s efforts to convince Trump that he is taking measures.
“Obtaining the number at zero is our goal and it should be our goal. If it is a pound or 10 pounds, we all know the possibility of deaths they could represent. This is a public security crisis. We should focus on eliminating the scourge of the fentanyl in This country and the United States, “he said.
The United States is a more significant drug supplier that can be less mortal but still causes great social problems.
By simply observing the weight of the captured drugs, the comparison of the data of CBSA and Customs and Protection (CBP) reveals that there were actually a greater amount seized on the Canadian side of the 49th parallel last year that captured what the officials Americans along its northern border. .
The CBP seized 5,260 kilograms of drugs on the northern border in 2024, much of that was cannabis, compared to the 8,300 kilograms to the intercepted Canadian officials from the US CBC of the CBP and CBSA data.
Canada also takes a lot of cannabis, but it is what CBSA calls “other drugs”, including methamphetamine and precursor chemicals to make drugs such as MDMA (ecstasy), which represent the largest category of drugs removed, according to the border agency.
There has been a remarkable decrease in the weight of drugs to the south that Americans have caught in the last two years.
The 5,260 kilograms seized last year have dropped from 27,260 kilograms in 2022 and 25,000 kilograms in 2023.
Firearms
The illegal image of firearms is also worrying, according to the police.
In 2022, CBSA seized 581 firearms that arrived in Canada from the United States; That figure jumped to 839 last year, according to the agency’s data.
The data reveal that the US is the main concern when it comes to illegal firearms because, in comparison, only 93 were found by officials from other countries last year.
The Canadian police have long warned that the illegal firearms of the United States are promoting crime related to weapons in this country.
Only in 2024, in Toronto, the Toronto Police Service (TPS) confiscated 717 weapons of the crime and a surprising 88 percent of them were obtained to the United States, according to TPS data shared with CBC News.
Of those firearms, 515 were guns and 91 percent of them were tracked to the United States
Since 2018, between 70 and 88 percent of the weapons seized by TPS have been tracked to the United States, a police force spokesman said.
Pressing to respond for the role of Canada in the Fentanyl trade in an interview with an American podcast .
“There is no flow of migrants from Canada to the United States of a significant number,” said Harper.
“And I am going to tell you at this time, drugs, weapons, crime: most of those things flow to the north, not to the south.”
