Mexican cartels have operated in Canada for at least 15 years, working closely with homegrown criminal organizations such as the Hells Angels, the Wolfpack gang alliance, and the United Nations gang.
Canada’s proposed fentanyl czar and cross-border strike force, announced this week to fight drug trafficking, could go a long way to tackle transnational organized crime on this side of the border, experts say.
But they added that the additional proposal to declare Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations won’t do much unless there is an infrastructure to investigate and prosecute those involved.
On Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the new measures in response to concerns raised by U.S. President Donald Trump about fentanyl production in super labs, including a record-sized one uncovered by the RCMP in Falkland, B.C. last fall. And Trump has complained about Canadian fentanyl being smuggled into the U.S., despite statistics showing less than 20 kilograms was intercepted by American border agents in 2024.
Neither the federal public safety department nor RCMP headquarters responded to Postmedia’s requests for more information Tuesday, but Minister of Public Safety David McGuinty told CNN that the czar’s role would be to “pull together a full Canadian national response between our provinces, our police of local jurisdiction, and work with American authorities.”
Criminologist Yvon Dandurand, professor emeritus at the University of the Fraser Valley, said the new measures “are interesting and important.”
“The question is why didn’t they do it beforehand? Why did the U.S. have to resort to some kind of bullying or threats to accomplish that?”
And Dandurand said police should be more broadly focused than just the Canada-U.S. border.
“The real issue is not so much at the border. It is the organized crime groups without any real controls. It’s about the production of (drugs). It’s about the broader issue of organized crime,” he said.
Investigations that only target the border mean “all you catch are mules and rather meaningless actors, as opposed to the people who are behind it and profit from it,” Dandurand said.
One Trump official said Tuesday that Mexican cartels are expanding in Canada. In fact, they have operated in the country for at least 15 years, working closely with homegrown criminal organizations such as the Hells Angels, the affiliated Wolfpack gang alliance, and the United Nations gang, among others.
Retired Vancouver police superintendent Mike Porteous told Postmedia that prior to the Mexican crime groups setting up in B.C., they were “obviously involved in bringing drugs into this country.”
In about 2010, police here “started seeing those direct linkages, not just your local guys going down to Mexico and bringing stuff back,” Porteous said.
“Anything that we can do to formalize those kinds of relationships to be more effective is very welcome,” he said. “It only if stands to reason that those types will only be bolstered through levels of formalization.”
The number of cartel members here today is difficult to calculate as those involved are mobile. As well, local criminal organizations meet their transnational counterparts in various locations around the world. The RCMP recently executed search warrants on a Surrey house where alleged Sinaloa cartel members had been living.
Declaring cartels terrorist organizations “is definitely a step in the right direction, and hopefully it’s a stepping off point for a more robust response to transnational organized crime, starting from the cartels at the top to the local gangs … where there’s the appropriate legislation, funding for police, funding for prosecutions, and willingness of the courts to prosecute all involved in these kinds of activities.”
SFU Professor Martin Bouchard, an expert on organized crime, said if the focus of the new strike force is only intercepting fentanyl, it likely won’t change much given the small amounts smuggled from Canada to the U.S.
Drug interceptions are “the cost of doing business for criminal organizations, so it may not make a huge impact,” said Bouchard, the director of SFU’s school of criminology.
But if the new force focuses on more large-scale investigations, “that could have some impact on organized crime down the road.”