Trump complains about Canada — but new data shows spike in U.S. drugs and guns coming north

CBC

13-02-2025

President Donald Trump claims he's targeting Canada with punishing tariffs on all our goods because he's concerned about the country's supposedly lax approach to fentanyl and migrants.
But new data from the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) shows Canada has a reason to worry about what's pouring in from the U.S.
There's been an influx of illegal American drugs and guns, which experts and law enforcement say are fuelling crime, death and addiction on this side of the border, too.
CBSA is seizing many more drugs, prohibited weapons and firearms than they were just two years ago, according to figures compiled by the border agency and shared with CBC News.
In fact, when looking at weight alone, Canadian officials seized more illegal drugs coming from the U.S. last year than what the Americans captured on their side of the 49th parallel.
"We live next door to the largest weapons market in the world, the largest drug market in the world. There are inherent — and significant — spillover effects," said Christian Leuprecht, a professor at the Royal Military College of Canada and an expert on border security.
In almost every category measured by CBSA, the number of illegal goods captured coming into this country is on the upswing.
Notably, there's been an eye-popping increase in Canada-bound drugs seized by border officials.
In 2022, for example, CBSA nabbed 3.8 million grams of drugs coming in from the U.S. — last year that figure climbed to 8.3 million grams. That's a 118 per cent increase in two years' time.
CBSA measures cannabis, hashish, cocaine and crack, heroin, some opioids (like opium, methadone and morphine) and drug-related precursor chemicals seized in grams.
A recent Toronto drug bust shows exactly what Canada is grappling with: police captured 835 kilograms of cocaine in January, product they say was likely manufactured by a Mexican cartel and then moved into Canada through the U.S.
There's also a spike in the number of drug "dosages" captured by CBSA.
In 2022, there were 112,576 dosages seized by border officials. That number more than tripled to 469,996 dosages in 2024, according to CBSA figures.
CBSA measures some opioids and other drugs and drug-related chemicals in dosages.
Leuprecht said the spike in drugs seized in Canada is likely driven, at least in part, by shifting production methods.
During the pandemic and early post-pandemic years, the transnational crime syndicates behind drug production moved some of their work from Mexico to the U.S. to get around tight COVID-related border measures, Leuprecht said.
It was then easier to move those drugs from the U.S. into Canada.
An estimated 400,000 people cross the border every day, some with little scrutiny, and there's a constant flow of vehicles that could shepherd the drugs into Canada, he said.
"Just like North American integration has worked quite well for the auto sector, agriculture and other industries, it's worked really well for transnational organized crime and the pandemic was sort of an accelerant to that integration," he said in an interview.
Leuprecht said the federal government's new $1.3-billion border security package was pitched as way to assuage Trump's concerns about drugs and migrants and get him to back off his tariff threat.
"But the real benefit is for the public safety of Canadians in terms of actually having the resources we need to interdict illicit firearms, in particular, and a host of other drugs coming north," he said.
Public safety bureaucrats have long lobbied for more money for the border but were largely ignored, Leuprecht said. "It wasn't a priority — until now," he said.
There's one area where there has been a decrease in seizures — the amount of fentanyl coming from the U.S. into Canada and intercepted by CBSA dropped from 1,070 grams two years ago to 532 grams in 2024. But the amount of fentanyl intercepted from non-U.S. countries at the Canadian border jumped from 2,812 grams to 4,403 grams in that same period.
With U.S. officials reporting 19,500 grams of fentanyl seized at the northern border last year, Canada is still not a significant source of the drug entering the U.S. Less than one per cent of all fentanyl seized in the U.S. comes from Canada, according to Canadian government data.
Former RCMP deputy commissioner Kevin Brosseau was appointed as Canada's fentanyl czar on Tuesday. He is tasked with curbing fentanyl production and distribution of that deadly drug as part of Canada's efforts to convince Trump it is taking action.
"Getting the number to zero is our goal and should be our goal. If it is one pound or 10 pounds, we all know the possibility of deaths that could represent. This is a public safety and security crisis. We should be focused on eliminating the scourge of fentanyl in this country and the United States," he said.
The U.S. is a more significant purveyor of drugs that can be less deadly but still cause huge societal problems.
When looking at simply the weight of drugs captured, comparing CBSA and U.S. Customs and Protection (CBP) data reveals there was actually a greater quantity seized on the Canadian side of the 49th parallel last year than what was captured by American officials along their northern border.
The CBP seized 5,260 kilograms of drugs at the northern border in 2024 — a lot of it was cannabis — compared to the 8,300 kilograms Canadian officials intercepted coming from the U.S. in the same year, according to a CBC News review of CBP and CBSA data.
Canada seizes a lot of cannabis too but it's what CBSA calls "other drugs," including methamphetamine and precursor chemicals to make drugs like MDMA (ecstasy), that represent the single biggest category of drugs taken away, according to the border agency.
There's been a notable decline in the weight of southbound drugs the Americans have nabbed over the last two years.
The 5,260 kilograms seized last year is down from 27,260 kilograms in 2022 and 25,000 kilograms in 2023.
Firearms seizures spike
The illegal firearms picture is also troubling, police say.
In 2022, CBSA seized 581 firearms coming into Canada from the U.S. — that figure jumped to 839 last year, according to the agency's data.
The data reveals the U.S. is the primary concern when it comes to illegal firearms because, by comparison, just 93 were found by officials coming from other countries last year.
Canadian police have long warned that illegal U.S. firearms are driving gun-related crime in this country.
In 2024 in Toronto alone, the Toronto Police Service (TPS) seized 717 crime guns and a stunning 88 per cent of those were sourced to the U.S., according to TPS data shared with CBC News.
Of those firearms, 515 were handguns and 91 per cent of those were traced to the U.S.
Since 2018, anywhere from 70 to 88 per cent of guns seized by TPS have been traced to the U.S., a spokesperson for the police force said.
Pressed to answer for Canada's role in the fentanyl trade in an interview with an American podcaster earlier this year, former prime minister Stephen Harper pushed back on the framing of Canada as a big cause of the U.S. drug crisis.
"There is no migrant flow happening from Canada to the United States of any significant numbers," Harper said.
"And I'm going to tell you right now, drugs, guns, crime — most of those things flow north, not south."