From the Fraser Institute

By Scott Lincicome

The U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide the fate of the global tariffs President Donald J. Trump has imposed under the International Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA). A court decision invalidating the tariffs is widely expected—hovering around 75 per cent on various betting markets—and would be welcome news for American importers, the United States economy and the rule of law. Even without IEEPA, however, other U.S. laws all but ensure that much higher tariffs will remain the norm. Realizing that protection will just take a little longer and, perhaps, be a little more predictable.

As my Cato Institute colleague Clark Packard and I wrote last year, the Constitution grants Congress the power to impose tariffs, but the legislative branch during the 20th century delegated much of that authority to the president under the assumption that he would be the least likely to abuse it. Thus, U.S. trade law is today littered with provisions granting the president broad powers to impose tariffs for various reasons. No IEEPA needed.

This includes laws that Trump has already invoked. Today, for example, we have “Section 301” tariffs of up to 25 per cent on around half of all Chinese imports, due to alleged “unfair trade” practices by Beijing. We also have global “Section 232” tariffs of up to 50 per cent on imports of steel and aluminum, automotive goods, heavy-duty trucks, copper and wood products—each imposed on the grounds that these goods threaten U.S. national security. The Trump administration also has created a process whereby “derivative” products made from goods subject to Section 232 tariffs will be covered by those same tariffs. Several other Section 232 investigations—on semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, critical minerals, commercial aircraft, and more—were also initiated earlier this year, setting the stage for more U.S. tariffs in the weeks ahead.

Trump administration officials admit that they’ve been studying these and other laws as fallback options if the Supreme Court invalidates the IEEPA tariffs. Their toolkit reportedly includes completing the actions above, initiating new investigations under Section 301 (targeting specific countries) and Section 232 (targeting certain products), and imposing tariffs under other laws that have not yet been invoked. Most notably, there’s strong administration interest in Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which empowers the president to address “large and serious” balance-of-payments deficits via global tariffs of up to 15 per cent for no more than 150 days (after which Congress must act to continue the tariffs). The administration might also consider Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930—a short and ambiguous law that authorizes the president to impose tariffs of up to 50 per cent on imports from countries that have “discriminated” against U.S. commerce—but this is riskier because the law may have been superseded by Section 301.

We should expect the administration to move quickly to use these measures to reverse engineer Trump’s global tariff regime under IEEPA. The main difference would be in how he does so. IEEPA was essentially a tariff switch in the Oval Office that could be flipped on and off instantly, creating massive uncertainty for businesses, foreign governments and the U.S. economy. The alternative authorities, by contrast, all have substantive and procedural guardrails that limit their size and scope, or, at the very least, give American and foreign companies time to prepare for forthcoming tariffs (or lobby against them).

Section 301, for example, requires an investigation of a foreign country’s trade and economic policies—cases that typically take nine months and involve public hearings and formal findings. Section 232 requires an investigation into and a report on whether imports threaten national security—actions that also typically take months. Section 122 has fewer procedures, but its limited duration and 15 per cent cap make it far less dangerous than IEEPA, under which Trump has repeatedly threatened tariffs of 100 per cent or more.

Of course, “procedural guardrails” is a relative term for an administration that has already stretched Section 232’s “national security” rationale to cover bathroom vanities. The courts also have largely rubber-stamped the administration’s previous moves under Section 232 and Section 301—a big reason why we should expect the Trump administration’s tariff “Plan B” to feature them.

Thus, a court ruling against the IEEPA tariffs would be an important victory for constitutional governance and would eliminate the most destabilizing element of Trump’s tariff regime. But until the U.S. Congress reclaims some of its constitutional authority over U.S. trade policy, high and costly tariffs will remain.

From Caledon to Mecca and Medellín: U.S. Says Toronto ‘Cocaine Lawyer’ Used Encrypted Chats Inside Wedding’s Murder Conspiracies

U.S. indictment says Toronto defence lawyer obtained Ontario Provincial Police evidence from the Caledon family shooting investigation and relayed it via encrypted app to Wedding’s cartel command.

On the path to becoming the first Canadian of genuine Latin American cartel stature — a man the FBI has likened to a “modern-day iteration of Pablo Escobar” — Ryan Wedding did not simply exploit Canada’s borders, ports and highways to move cocaine, methamphetamine and fentanyl.

Prosecutors say he became the single largest cocaine importer into Canada, building a billion-dollar enterprise by mastering cryptocurrency money-laundering, legal strategy, paramilitary training and the kind of hardened operational security usually associated with state intelligence agencies.

It was an operation, U.S. authorities now allege, in which a brash Toronto criminal lawyer not only counselled murder and helped arrange bribes, but also tapped into Canadian police evidence to glean information about a contracted assassination that collapsed into tragedy — the killing of innocent people mistaken for the family of an Indo-Canadian narco-trucker.

A stunning 50-page indictment unsealed in California this week explains how Wedding allegedly discovered that a trusted associate in both cocaine trafficking and crypto-based money-laundering — identified only as “Victim A” in the document — had quietly become a federal informant. The murdered government witness is Jonathan Acebedo-Garcia, a Colombian-Canadian who appears in prosecutors’ Tether-crypto flow chart as a key node in Wedding’s KuCoin-centred laundering network.

According to the indictment, Wedding then turned to Toronto lawyer Deepak Balwant Paradkar — “a dual Indian-Canadian citizen” listed under aliases including “cocaine_lawyer” — and, together with his top lieutenant Andrew Clark, used encrypted Threema chats to plan Acebedo-Garcia’s murder in Medellín. For Paradkar, now under arrest in Canada and facing extradition, the brutality alleged in the filing is not confined to a distant Colombian restaurant. The indictment also places him at the centre of two other crises in Wedding’s empire: a 521-kilogram cocaine seizure in Arkansas, and a botched assassination in Caledon, Ontario, that left an innocent Indo-Canadian family dead.

The Arkansas strand starts on October 1, 2024, when Canadian truckers Maninderjit Singh Dhillon and Ranjodh Singh were stopped in Hazen, Arkansas, with “approximately 521 kilograms” of cocaine. That same day, Wedding told Clark on Threema that their load had been seized and sent Dhillon’s name. Clark then asked — in coded language — if Wedding wanted Paradkar “to monitor Dhillon and Singh’s arrests,” and Wedding agreed, suggesting that an American lawyer be used to obfuscate the Toronto lawyer’s role.

In a Threema group chat with Clark and a transport co-conspirator, Paradkar allegedly asked for the drivers’ names and licences, said he would “look into it,” and asked if there were “any relatives” he could contact. The key line in the indictment states:

“On October 1, 2024, in the Threema group chat and using coded language, defendant PARADKAR advised that he was calling law enforcement to obtain information about Dhillon and Singh’s arrests.”

Prosecutors say Paradkar later reported that he had located Singh in prison but not Dhillon, directed that Singh’s brother be told he was Singh’s lawyer so he could get the arrest report, and called Singh about his arrest “while Clark covertly listened in.”

When Clark and the co-conspirator began “discussing murdering Dhillon” on October 3, Paradkar allegedly told them “to discuss the matter on a different chat without him present and to delete any and all discussion of the murder plot.”

He is also accused of sending Clark discovery on the Arkansas case, drafting questions over WhatsApp, then deleting the messages and turning on disappearing-message settings before calling Dhillon again with Clark listening.

The same document links Wedding and Clark to an earlier hit order on another truck driver, CC-1, a driver they believed had stolen a massive load. Under a section headed “Victims B, C, and D,” prosecutors write that: “On or before November 20, 2023, defendant Wedding and Clark issued an order to kill a driver co-conspirator whom they believed stole 300 kilograms of cocaine from them.”

According to the indictment, members of a Canadian-based assassin crew then “broke into a rental property in Caledon inhabited by Victims B, C, and D” and “shot and killed Victims B and C and shot and wounded Victim D, mistakenly believing that they were CC-1’s family members.”

Local coverage at the time identified the slain couple as Jagtar Sidhu, 57, and his wife, Harbhajan Sidhu, 57, both killed by gunshot wounds after officers were called to a late-night shooting. Their daughter was rushed to hospital in serious but stable condition. In an interview, the couple’s son — speaking on condition of anonymity — said he had been at work when the shooting took place and that his parents and sister were shot multiple times. He said his parents had travelled from India to visit him and his sister, who had come to Canada as international students.

Nearly ten months later, Paradkar is again alleged to have somehow obtained sensitive information and channelled it from Canadian police back to cartel command:

Before turning back to the Medellín murder allegedly counselled by Paradkar, the indictment sets out the staggering scale of the enterprise that made Acebedo-Garcia so valuable — and, allegedly, so expendable.

Prosecutors describe the Wedding Criminal Enterprise as “a billion-dollar drug trafficking organization and the largest supplier of cocaine to Canada,” operating simultaneously in “Mexico, Colombia, Canada, and the United States, among other countries.” They say the group sourced cocaine from Colombia, “cooking and testing it in ‘cocaine kitchens’ run collaboratively with a Colombian neo-paramilitary group and drug cartel,” then working “in conjunction with members and associates of prominent Mexican drug cartels” to move “hundreds of kilograms of cocaine from Colombia to Mexico at a time” by boat and plane.

In this telling, Southern California is the hub between Latin coca fields and Canadian and American drug dens.

“The Southern California Counties of Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and Riverside generally served as the ‘hub’ where the Wedding Criminal Enterprise’s cocaine was stored before being conveyed by Canadian drug transportation networks to final destinations in Canada and other American states, with the cocaine predominantly being distributed in Canada.”

The indictment says the enterprise’s purposes included “establishing control over the Canadian drug trade” and “violently retaliating” against anyone perceived to be co-operating with law enforcement.

As reported previously by The Bureau, the trucks and routes tasked by Wedding were controlled by Indo-Canadian crime networks. The U.S. government says that the Toronto lawyer Paradkar “introduced Wedding to the drug traffickers that have been moving Wedding’s cocaine and has also helped Wedding with bribery and murder.”

In late summer 2024, Acebedo-Garcia — Victim A — was still a trusted intermediary inside that system. Prosecutors allege that: “Between August 15, 2024, and September 6, 2024, using Victim A as an intermediary, defendant WEDDING purchased 300 kilograms of cocaine to be shipped from Colombia to Mexico.”

A Colombian lab manager, Carlos Eduardo Riascos, is then said to have received the order “for 300 kilograms of cocaine” from Wedding, and on September 11, 2024, to have been paid about two billion Colombian pesos which “had been converted from cryptocurrency” for “approximately 300 kilograms of cocaine.” Within weeks, Riascos allegedly launched a shipment of “approximately 240 bricks containing cocaine” out of Cali.

In parallel, U.S. authorities say they were mapping the Tether flows linked to this cargo. The truncated flow chart in the indictment shows large transfers moving from KuCoin accounts associated with financier Rasheed Pascua Hossain of Vancouver, and others into a hub wallet tied to Wedding — including a 564,571-USDT transfer directly from Wedding to Victim A. Those arrows, prosecutors argue, capture the way Acebedo-Garcia sat at the intersection of Wedding’s cocaine supply and his crypto-laundering machine.

On October 17, 2024, that world was exposed. A first superseding indictment, “Wedding I,” was unsealed in the same federal court, charging Wedding and Clark in a continuing-criminal-enterprise case. According to the new filing, it was in the aftermath of that disclosure — once it was clear that Victim A had become a co-operating witness — that the Toronto lawyer allegedly proposed killing him as a legal strategy.

“On or after October 17, 2024, defendant Paradkar advised defendant Wedding and Clark that if Victim A was killed, the charges against them in Wedding I and related extradition proceedings would necessarily be dismissed,” the record says.

In a prior exclusive report, sourced from U.S. law enforcement, The Bureau revealed that some American investigators believed Canadian police provided little assistance as bodies mounted.

From Mecca to Medellín

Prosecutors say Wedding responded by placing “a bounty of up to $5 million USD on Victim A in exchange for any person locating and killing Victim A.” He allegedly enlisted a Laval, Que., hitman, Atna Ohna, described as “a hired sicario”; a Colombian madame, Carmen Yelinet Valoyes Florez, who “operated a network of commercial sex workers”; a Colombian sex worker, Daniela Alejandra Tejeda, who provided Victim A’s personal information; and a cluster of Canadian intermediaries and unidentified locals in Colombia and Saudi Arabia.

Once the U.S. government’s first indictment against Wedding was unsealed and Paradkar allegedly advised that killing Victim A would “necessarily” collapse the case, the manhunt for Acebedo-Garcia moved quickly. Florez, operating a Medellín-based commercial sex-work network that included Tejeda, allegedly used that network to track Acebedo-Garcia’s movements and glean intimate details — addresses, routines, contacts — that could be passed back to Mexico.

Canadian associates, meanwhile, were allegedly funnelling information from home. Defendant Ramon Basilio Demorizi, a Canadian resident, is accused of trying to locate Victim A through Edwin Basora-Hernandez, a Montréal-based reggaeton artist. Basora-Hernandez is alleged to have supplied Victim A’s contact information and to have told Demorizi — and, indirectly, Wedding and Paradkar — that Canadian law enforcement had approached him seeking Victim A’s whereabouts. According to one overt act, it was at this point that Wedding himself stepped into the hunt.

Assuming the persona of a lawyer, he allegedly arranged a conference call with Basora-Hernandez and his real-life legal counsel, Deepak Paradkar, during which Basora-Hernandez revealed that Canadian law-enforcement officers had approached him for information about the fugitive witness’s whereabouts.

In January 2025, Clark allegedly hired a Canadian associate, Ahmad Nabil Zitoun, to physically hunt Acebedo-Garcia for “approximately $10,000 CAD plus expenses.” Zitoun is accused of travelling to Medellín and then to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, trying to spot the fugitive witness. While he was in Mecca, the indictment says, Clark offered him the actual murder contract. Zitoun declined — but still received “approximately $40,000 CAD for attempting to locate Victim A” once he returned.

Throughout these weeks, the document alleges, the conspirators were sending each other surveillance pictures of Acebedo-Garcia.

The assassination itself, on January 31, 2025, reads like a textbook cartel hit. One unidentified conspirator, LNU 1, is described as a motorcyclist who “conducted reconnaissance of Victim A by following Victim A to a restaurant in Medellín before Victim A was murdered.” Another, LNU 2, is said to have been the shooter: “Defendant LNU 2, a motorcyclist, shot Victim A approximately five times in the head while he was eating at the Restaurant.”

A third, LNU 3, allegedly ferried the gunman away; a fourth, LNU 4, is described as a photographer who “cased the Restaurant” beforehand and “photographed Victim A’s dead body” afterwards; and a fifth, LNU 5, picked the photographer up and helped him flee along the same escape route as the shooter.

Within minutes, prosecutors say, images of the killing were being sent back up the chain. On January 31, Wedding allegedly used Threema to inform Clark that “Victim A was dead” and to send a photograph of his corpse.

And then the murder became content. Defendant Gursewak Singh Bal, a Mississauga man described as the founder of “the Dirty News” urban news outlet, is accused of posting a celebratory Instagram story showing the restaurant and the lower half of a body, with the caption: “[Victim A] down…” and “BOOM! Headshot.” A longer Dirty News post, quoted in the indictment, called Acebedo-Garcia “one of the informants involved in dismantling Ryan ‘Snowboarder aka SB’ Wedding’s transnational organization/criminal network” and claimed “there were bounties being placed on every individual involved in ‘snitching’ on the kingpins operations,” including seven-figure “hits.”

more to come on this breaking story