The conversation we have about opioids in Canada is very different from a year ago.
Where Canadians were once fully focused on the health policy to reduce the large number of deaths by opioids – especially last spring, amid British Columbia Rollback of medicines – Our attention has shifted lately, from the people who use drugs to those who sell them.
That is largely because of President Trump.
Mr. Trump said that Canadian criminals send “massive” quantities of illegal fentanyl to the United States, one of the pretenses for his earlier punitive tariff measures.
[Read: Trump Calls Canada a Big Player in the Fentanyl Trade. Is It?]
Less than 1 percent of fentanyl intercepted by American customs and border protection last year was linked to Canada. Yet Canada made concessions, appointed a “fentanyl tsar” and invested in drones and helicopters on the border. Like me before reportedThe government agreed to cast millions of dollars into new projects for collecting intelligence and staff increases at the Canada Border Services Agency.
I worked in the regional offices of the agency as a university student about ten years ago and sometimes assisted with Tours for broadcasting media crews in a large posting facility where border officers would demonstrate how they screened packages on illegal fentanyl. At the time, the agency underwent one of its many border moderation efforts, in which the border was re -devised as something that starts with the geographical extremities of Canada, but as a bubble that continues. The concept to push the border out simply meant identifying and intercepting security threats long before they had the chance to land in front of our door.
Or, as was the case for Fentanyl, in Canadian letterboxes.
Small quantities of fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, can make an enormous profit for criminal organizations. For context, 500 grams of fentanyl, the weight of about four bananas, has a street value of at least 30,000 Canadian dollars, the police say.
Stay at home economy, instead of four bananas, imagine a medium -sized cuisine. That is about the footprint that some criminal organizations need to synthesize millions of doses of fentanyl chemically.
(My colleagues in Mexico, Natalie Kitroeff and Paulina Villegas, visited a kitchen laboratory in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, a hub for the production of Fentanyl. You can read their story here.)
Canadian officials have said that crime groups are shifting to producing Fentanyl in their own country with the help of chemical ingredients, called precursors, who are more difficult to intercept because many have legitimate industrial use.
Border officers saw a “dramatic increase” in the import of predecessorchemicals in 2021, according to one report by Canada’s public safety department. That year, officers intercept more than 5,000 kilograms of predecessorchemicals, 10 times that of the previous year.
These chemicals usually come from China and Hong Kong on cargo ships, the report notes.
Checking the ports, including the port of Vancouver, the largest in Canada, is a patchwork of law enforcement agencies. The dedicated port police was dissolved in 1997.
The port of Vancouver processes approximately three million containers every year and consists of facilities along the Metro Vancouver area, including the adjacent cities of Delta and Surrey.
During a recent reporting before the elections to British Columbia to Cover HousingI stopped at the office of the mayor of Delta, George Harvie.
Mr. Harvie has been sounding an alarm about port protection for years and has given an order report In the issue, published in 2023, by Peter German, a lawyer, retired federal police officer and well-known anti-money wax expert in the province.
Mr. German made the argument for every form of uniformed police -presence as a replacement, especially to help border officers. Although the Canada Border Services Agency has not released the part of the containers that are bred to view their content, Mr. German said that the number is less than 2 percent, with less than 1 percent physically sought.
Mr. Harvie, who became mayor in 2018, said that since the start of his term of office the government had promised to deliver rolling freight scanners to investigate more shipments, but still did not come. He hoped that the report of 2023 would attract Ottawa’s attention.
“But again, it fell on deaf ears,” Mr. Harvie told me.
“The biggest help I had was that President Trump said he was worried about the amount of fentanyl who returned from Canada to the United States,” he said. “I don’t know about those figures, but sure, there will be Fentanyl in Canada.”
When Mr. Harvie has traveled other ports, including those in Singapore and Australia, and so close to home as Seattle, he often makes himself frustrated, he said, by the more advanced systems that seem to have other countries in place.
“There is a huge gap,” said Mr. Harvie. “We do more work on our country borders than in that port.”
Trans Canada
Vjosa Isai is a reporter at the time that is located in Toronto.
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