The conversation we have about opioids in Canada is very different from a year ago.
Where Canadians were our centers once directly on health policies to reduce the high number of opioid deaths, especially past spring, amid the reversal of the decriminalization of drugs of British Columbia, our attention has people’s press.
That is due in large part to President Trump.
Trump has said that Canadian criminals send “massive” illegal fentanyl amounts to the United States, one of the pretexts for their previous punitive tariffs.
[Read: Trump Calls Canada a Big Player in the Fentanyl Trade. Is It?]
Less than 1 percent of the fentanyl intercepted by the Customs of the United States and border protection last year left Canada. Even so, Canada made concessions, naming a “fentanyl tsar” and investing in drones and helicopters on the border. As previously reported, the Government agreed to pour millions of dollars into new intelligence collection projects and personnel increases in the Canada Border Services Agency.
I worked in the regional offices of Toronto of the agency as a university student approximately a decade ago, sometimes helping with tours for transmission media equipment in an important postal center where border officers extend how they project packages for illicit fentanyl. At that time, the agency was experiencing one of its many border modernization efforts, reinventing the border not as something that begins in the geographical extremities of Canada, but as a bubble that extends beyond. The concept of expelling the border simply meant identifying and intercepting security threats long before they had the opportunity to land in our doors.
Or, then, it was the case of Fentanilo, in the Canadian mailboxes.
Small amounts of fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, can generate great profits for criminal organizations. For the context, 500 grams of fentanyl, which is the weight of approximately four bananas, has a value of the street of 30,000 Canadian dollars, according to the police.
Sticking with the domestic economy, instead of four bananas, imagine a medium -sized kitchen. That is the footprint that some criminal organizations require to chemically synthesize millions of doses or fentanyl.
(My colleagues in Mexico, Natalie Kitroeff and Paulina Villegas, visited a kitchen laboratory in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, a center for the production of fentanyl. You can read its history here).
Canadian officials have said that crimes groups are changing to produce fentanyl nationwide using chemical ingredients, called precursors, which are more difficult to intercept because they have legitimate industrial uses.
Border officers saw a “dramatic increase” in the importation of precursor chemicals in 2021, according to a report from the Canada Public Security Department. That year, the officers intercepted more than 5,000 kilograms or precursor chemicals, 10 times the previous year.
These chemicals arrive mainly from China and Hong Kong in load ships, the report points out.
The surveillance of the ports, including the port of Vancouver, the largest in Canada, is at the height of a mosaic or law enforcement agencies. In 1997, the Dedicated Public Police Force was with a band of dishes.
The port of Vancouver processes about three million containers every year, and is composed of facilities along the Vancouver Metro area, including the neighboring cities of Delta and Surrey.
Duration A recent trip of pre -electoral reports to British Columbia to cover the house, I stopped at the office of the mayor of Delta, George Harvie.
Mr. Harvie has been playing the alarm on the security of the port for years and commissioned a report on the subject, published in 2023, by Peter German, a lawyer, a retired federal police officer and a well -known expert in money laundering in the province.
Mr. German presented the argument of any type of uniformed police presence as a replacement, especially to help border officers. Although the Canada Border Services Agency did not disclose the part of the containers that are radiographed to see their content, Mr. German said that the number is less than 2 percent, with less than 1 percent physical search.
Harvie, who became mayor in 2018, said that the Government had had since the beginning of his mandate promised to deliver rolling cargo scanners to help examine more shipments, but have not yet arrived. I expected the 2023 report to get Ottawa’s attention.
“But again, he fell on deaf ears,” Harvie told me.
“The greatest help I had President Trump by saying that a group was the amount of fentanil that returned from Canada to the United States,” he said. “I don’t know about those numbers, but certainly, there is fentanil that comes to Canada.”
When Mr. Harvie has traveled other ports, including those of Singapore and Australia, and as close to home as Seattle, he or the leaves feel frustrated, he said, for the most advanced systems that other countries seem to have in their place.
“There is a great gap,” said Harvie. “We do more work in our country, the borders than in that port.”
Trans Canada
Vjosa Isai is a reporter in the Toronto -based Times.
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