What to Know About Canada’s Role in the Fentanyl Crisis

Responding to threatened tariffs by President Trump, Canada has unveiled a security plan aimed at tackling the trafficking of fentanyl, which is also killing many Canadians.

Fentanyl has flooded North America’s drug supply over the last decade, killing tens of thousands in Canada and the United States, and generating enormous profits for criminal organizations using basic chemistry skills, improvised equipment and home laboratories to produce millions of doses.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly talked about fentanyl as a major public health threat to Americans and holds Mexico and Canada responsible for allowing the drug to enter the United States. But last year, less than 1 percent of the fentanyl arriving in the United States came from Canada.

In fact, fentanyl is just as big a public health threat in Canada, where on some days more Canadians than Americans die of opioid overdoses, officials say.

The number of organized crime groups making fentanyl in Canada keeps growing, and Canadian officials have uncovered links between Mexican drug cartels and some domestic crime groups involved in the drug’s production.

In the last six years, Canadian police have dismantled 47 fentanyl labs, including the largest ever last year in British Columbia, government officials said. That lab had enough material to produce 96 million opioid doses.

Last year, about 19 kilograms of fentanyl was intercepted at the Canada-U. S. border, compared with almost 9,600 kilograms at the border with Mexico, where cartels mass-produce the drug, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

...Opioids have killed about 49,000 Canadians since 2016, with most deaths occurring in British Columbia, where most areas of the province have a rate of more than 50 deaths per 100,000 people, comparable to the rates in some U.S. states.

Nobody knows what the real numbers are, for amounts of fentanyl that cross the two borders, and also arrive directly in A erica by ports, private aircraft and watercraft.

The NYT article cites only those amounts intercepted at borders, and not at ports in America.

And it stands to reason, if there are large fentanyl production facilities in Canada (serving drug dealers in various places) then there are probably similar ones not yet detected on American soil also.

As to terrorists being allowed to “walk in” — if Canada knows they are terrorists, then American border guards also know that and can easily prevent them from entering. This is the basis for recently agreed measures between the two countries. People entering Canada or America only go past the receiving nation’s border guards. If terrorists are crossing illegally away from sanctioned border crossing sites, I agree the responsibility lies mostly on Canada to prevent this. I don’t know how many instances of this have taken place, only that one or two have been apprehended near the border by either Canadian or American police forces (depending on where they were first detected to be trying to cross)

There is a difference between a known terrorist with a past history, and some random traveler who intends to become a terrorist but has no “form” in that regard. One would need to be a mind-reader to know, out of millions of international travelers, who intends to become a terrorist, and who intends to overstay a tourist declaration (I don’t say visa because in some cases no visa is required in either Canada or America).

The answer to the overstay problem is to require visas for all international travel except possibly citizens of the two countries who have traveled and returned several times previously, demonstrating a low risk of breaking the law. I believe border security will now get better, in part because there will soon be a change in government in Canada too.

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