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

Canada’s last-minute reprieve from crushing U.S. tariffs came after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unveiled a series of measures aimed at controlling the trafficking of fentanyl, a key reason President Trump has cited for wanting to impose levies.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.How Canadian fentanyl enters the United StatesLast 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.“There is limited to no evidence or data from law enforcement agencies in the U.S. or Canada to support the claim that Canadian produced fentanyl is an increasing threat to the U.S.,” said Marie-Eve Breton, a spokeswoman for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.Mr. Trump has said fentanyl seized at the northern border could kill 9.5 million Americans, but health experts have stayed away from defining a lethal dose of any opioid because it can depend on many conditions, including a drug user’s tolerance level or the way fentanyl is administered.Canadian fentanyl that arrives in the United States tends to be sold on the dark web and shipped through the mail, Ms. Breton said.In one case last year, a 43-year-old man from Toronto was charged with about a dozen narcotics trafficking offenses, accused of sending packages of drugs containing small amounts of fentanyl to New Jersey, according to the U.S. attorney’s office there. Federal prosecutors called him a “prolific vendor of fentanyl on the Dark Net.”One gram of powder fentanyl can fetch up to 240 Canadian dollars on the street, or about $170, and pills can go for up to 40 Canadian dollars each, or $28, according to Canadian police.The issue of drug shipments in mailed packages focuses primarily on China. A trade rule known as de minimis allows companies to ship packages from China worth less than $800 without paying duties, taxes and fees. Their contents do not have to be listed and are subject to fewer inspections.Last April, a report by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party called for reforming the trade rule to address America’s vulnerability to drug trafficking through the mail.Mr. Trump signed an executive order on Saturday that removed the trade exemptions on those types of packages from China and Hong Kong.Canada’s main drug export into the United States is M.D.M.A., or ecstasy, according to a White House report in 2022 laying out the northern border counternarcotics strategy.A ‘fentanyl czar’ will shepherd Canada’s response.In response to Mr. Trump’s tariff threats, Canada said it would appoint a new “fentanyl czar” to oversee the country’s efforts at the border.The role will involve overseeing coordination between the border agency, law enforcement, prosecutors, the health agency that regulates drug imports and global affairs departments, said David McGuinty, the federal public safety minister, during a tour of a border crossing in Manitoba on Tuesday.“We’re going to be really wrestling this fentanyl scourge to the ground,” Mr. McGuinty said.The government has already deployed 60 additional U.S.-made drones to the border, two Black Hawk helicopters and extra canine teams, and plans to station 10,000 “frontline personnel” at the border. Efforts to expand staffing levels at the border will come under a 1.3 billion Canadian dollar, or $900 million, spending plan.The Canada Border Services Agency has a staff of 8,500 frontline officers across its 1,200 ports of entry, including airports and ports.Other efforts to curtail the fentanyl crisis include supporting new intelligence gathering, backed by a 200 million Canadian dollar investment, and listing drug cartels as terrorist organizations in Canada, giving the government more power to “track the money, follow the assets and disrupt the activities of cartels,” Mr. McGuinty said.Canadian crime groups are making more fentanyl.About 100 organized crime groups are involved in fentanyl production, more than four times as many as in 2022, according to reports by Canada’s financial intelligence agency.Most chemicals used to synthesize fentanyl, known as precursors, are legal to import because they have valid industrial uses but are subject to higher scrutiny by Canada’s health agency, which regulates controlled substances, and the police.Precursors are mostly shipped from China to Pacific Coast ports in British Columbia.While Mexico is not a major source of fentanyl or precursors in Canada, the police in British Columbia said the large-scale fentanyl lab that they took down showed connections to Mexican cartels. That lab used a drug production method favored by Mexican cartels to make a particularly potent synthetic drug.Fentanyl is killing Canadians at an alarming rate.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.“At some points of time in Canada, based on per capita population, there are more Canadians dying from fentanyl than there are Americans dying from fentanyl, a point that we made very clear to the White House,” said Mr. McGuinty, the public safety minister.The epidemic in both countries has been driven by the emergence of fentanyl, which is highly profitable, easy to produce and extremely potent.Vancouver, ground zero of Canada’s opioid crisis, has pioneered methods to address the public health harms caused by drug addiction, including decriminalization, but they have recently provoked political backlash as the crisis has deepened.