TORONTO: Canada’s last-minute reprieve from crushing US tariffs came after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unveiled a series of measures aimed at controlling the trafficking of fentanyl, a key reason President Donald 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 organisations using basic chemistry skills, improvised equipment and home laboratories to produce millions of doses.
(Fentanyl is synthetic, means it can be made easily and cheaply in a lab, and is about 50 to 100 times stronger than many prescription opioids.)
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 US. But last year, less than 1% of the fentanyl arriving in the US came from Canada.
The number of organised 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, govt officials said. That lab had enough material to produce 96 million opioid doses.
Last year, about 19kg of fentanyl was intercepted at the Canada-US border, compared with almost 9,600kg at the border with Mexico, where cartels mass-produce the drug, according to US Customs and Border Protection. One gram of powder fentanyl can fetch up to 240 Canadian dollars ($170) on the street, and pills can go for up to CA$40 ($28) each, according to Canadian police.
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.
Canadian fentanyl that arrives in the US tends to be sold on the dark web and shipped through the mail, Breton said. 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, and their contents are subject to fewer inspections. Trump signed an executive order 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 MDMA, or ecstasy, according to a White House report in 2022 laying out the northern border counternarcotics strategy. In response to Trump’s tariff threats, Canada said it would appoint a new “fentanyl czar” to oversee the country’s efforts at the border.
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