Across Canada, criminal networks from Latin America to Asia to the Middle East are seeing the country more and more as a hub for illicit trafficking and trade, according to a recent report by the International Coalition Against Illicit Economies (ICAIE), a national security NGO based in Washington DC.
The immense size of the country and number of law enforcement agencies, meanwhile, make implementing any coordinated response against transnational organized crime difficult.
Canada needs a better federal strategy that dictates how the country’s law enforcement and government agencies should unify together against the threat, claims a former senior operations officer for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).
Calvin Chrustie, now a senior partner with the security and intelligence advisory firm Critical Risk Team, said that this lack of a federal strategy prevents the country’s police forces and government agencies from properly working collaboratively together.
“It’s ad hoc, it’s random and it’s in a bit of a disarray in terms of some going north, some going south, some going east, some going west on these issues,” he told OCCRP.
The strategies in place are not aligned to the threat streams of transnational organized crime activities, specifically from the ports, he explained.
Take Vancouver Port, for instance. It’s Canada’s largest by container volume and moves over 3.6 million TEUs of cargo annually. A TEU, or twenty-foot equivalent unit, is a measure of volume in which one unit equates to a single 20-foot cargo shipping container.
The ports of Montreal, Toronto, and Halifax, meanwhile, handle more than 1.7 million, one million, and 600,000 TEUs of cargo per annum, respectively. And all serve as major gateways into the country from areas such as Europe, Latin America, and Asia, ICAIE said.
The Canada Border Services Agency seized a total of 2.7 metric tons of opioids in the first three months of 2022, compared to 1.1 metric tons in the first three months of 2021, according to a 2023 report by the U.S. Department of State.
These figures, however, raise concerns of the volumes transnational organized crime groups are capable of trafficking past Canada’s borders and onto its streets, even after accounting for the tonnages lost to authorities, the report said.
This is a trend authorities have noticed since the turn of the century, with transnational crime groups eyeing Canada as a major hub for their illicit enterprises, namely in narcotics, ICAIE said.
Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel and the Chinese triad syndicate Big Circle Boys, for instance, have expanded their respective drug trafficking footprint in Canada. They have flooded the country with vast quantities of cocaine, fentanyl, and opioids, amongst an overabundance of other synthetic and pharmaceutical drugs.
Distribution and sale in Canada is either managed by the criminal networks that smuggled the narcotics in, or handed off to local criminal groups, such as biker gangs, in exchange for a piece of the action.
In some cases, Canada isn’t even the final destination for the loads smuggled through its borders. Some of the cartels’ and triads’ product transits through Canada en route to other countries such as the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, the ICAIE said.
A feat that necessitates a great deal of planning and coordination.
But on the other side of the law, inadequate inter-agency cooperation across Canada’s municipal, provincial, and federal levels serves as a foil to the country’s counter-crime efforts, Chrustie told OCCRP.
“There’s cooperation,” he said, “but is it quality cooperation?”
This lack of a federal strategy, uniting how Canada's police forces combat organized crime as one body, ultimately results in local law enforcement going after the “low-hanging fruit,” he told OCCRP.
“They go for finding common targets, not the highest threat targets,” he said, highlighting that while there’s lots of police cooperation at the municipal and provincial levels, “what’s missing is the cooperation at the federal level, at the highest level, at the international level.”
Amongst the ICAIE’s recommendations in its report include Canadian policy makers recognizing the scale of today’s interconnected illicit threats, from organized crime activity to its enablers, corrupt protectors, and money launderers. Also stressed was the need to pinpoint and disrupt geographical points where transnational criminal networks intersect in their business dealings.
But Canada, Chrustie said, cannot do this alone.
“Transnational organized crime is a large football field. It’s not just about our end zone,” he told OCCRP. “You want to be more successful? You tackle the guy in the other end zone, closer to his end zone.”
Rather than make a high-level drug seizure at home, Chrustie noted the importance of working with international partners, sharing intelligence and resources, to prevent crime from penetrating Canada’s borders in the first place.
Even if it means not getting any credit or praise in the local press.
To go down the other road and work in isolation is a self-imposed handicap that transnational organized crime networks are extremely well-versed in exploiting.
“To me, take the battle on other battlegrounds,” Chrustie advised.
