Luc Sabourin wants re-examination of cases including alleged “mass shredding” of foreign passports that included suspects in Canada sought by CBSA
Luc Sabourin, a former CBSA officer, chokes back tears as he recalls the day a man from one of Canada’s most violent crime families — a refugee from Palestine linked to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel — stood outside Sabourin’s home in Gatineau, Que., and uttered brutal and visceral threats against Sabourin’s children.
Sabourin — a whistleblower who has complained of numerous serious incidents inside Canada Border Services Agency that he believes are due to organized crime infiltration — thinks a particular colleague may have leaked his home address to the drug trafficker, whom Sabourin was scheduled to testify against.
The alleged threats occurred well over ten years ago, and the gangster — whom The Bureau will not identify — has since died in Mexico. However, his close associates continue to endanger North America and are believed to have compromised Canadian and international officials.
Sabourin believes threats to his life and many alleged incidents of harassment against him and other CBSA staff fit into a pattern of corruption and a culture of secrecy across Canada’s government, which effectively silences whistleblowers.
But this isn’t just about government employees who claim to be isolated or railroaded out of Canada’s government, Sabourin says.
It’s about Canada’s security being compromised with stunning breaches that go unaddressed because the system of accountability is broken.
Among many examples that could suggest organized crime has penetrated CBSA systems, Sabourin discloses an especiallystunning case.
A CBSA unit learned that a band of armed men clad in combat fatigues appeared to be smuggling illegal migrants across Quebec’s border, which was then covered up internally, Sabourin says, possibly to the benefit of foreign mafias, human traffickers, drug smugglers, or terrorists.
“I asked within the agency via email if there was any reason why the Quebec Provincial Police and the RCMP were not notified about this,” Sabourin told The Bureau. “An hour later, the email disappeared from the generic mailbox and never reached top management.”
These compromises are the reason Sabourin has testified about his experiences in Parliamentary committees and pushed for new whistleblower protection legislation.
In a series of interviews, Sabourin says he has also paid close attention to The Bureau’s reporting on intelligence leaks that detailed China’s election interference, alleged collusion with Canadian MPs and Senators, and the penetration of Canada’s immigration systems in Hong Kong in the 1990s via organized crime.
All of this suggests Canada needs an independent anti-corruption agency to tackle the rot of collusion and ‘insider threats’ linked to criminal and foreign interference networks, Sabourin says, which appear to be spreading through multiple levels of government and various law enforcement agencies.
Sabourin is also calling for a re-examination of what he calls a particularly egregious case in 2015, in which a senior CBSA manager allegedly directed subordinates to illegally destroy hundreds of foreign passports.
Sabourin says he and a co-worker refused to follow the order, which was then carried out by a junior employee, leading to the destruction of passports that, in some cases, according to Sabourin, belonged to serious criminals whom CBSA was trying to locate within Canada for arrest or deportation.
The employee in question also followed directions to falsely report in federal databases that the destroyed passports had been returned to the embassies of the issuing countries, Sabourin alleges.
In interviews, Sabourin reiterates that his internal complaints on this incident — which he documented with photo evidence — were shut down.
So he engaged his Gatineau Liberal MP Greg Fergus, and ultimately former Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale, along with the office of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the RCMP, and the Public Service Integrity Commissioner.
This document shows RCMP’s national division reviewed Luc Sabourin’s allegations but didn’t advance an investigation.
All of this failed to register any changes in Ottawa. And Canada’s vulnerabilities are growing, Sabourin says.
He made this point in an April 2024 letter to Canadian Senators.
“Malicious actors (both local and foreign) have clearly identified the main weaknesses in our current administrative systems and processes, enabling them to operate for long periods with impunity and undetected, until potentially serious damage is done,” Sabourin wrote.
That’s why Sabourin turned to The Bureau for this story, also sitting for a lengthy videotaped examination. [The Bureau Podcast will air Sabourin’s allegations in full tomorrow. CBSA didn’t respond to questions by the deadline for this story; any responses will be included with Sabourin’s video interview.]
“The public don’t understand the jeopardy our country is being placed in by the potential entry of bad actors due to the wrongdoing and inaction of responsible authorities, including Parliament,” Sabourin said.
Broadly, the vulnerabilities he is exposing could gain fresh urgency, because Ottawa will start hearings in August with witnesses from CBSA and Public Safety Canada, to probe how two terror suspects tied to ISIS, and arrested on July 31, were able to enter Canada.
Ahmed Eldidi, 62, and his son, 26-year-old Mostafa Eldidi, were allegedly “in the advanced stages of planning a serious, violent attack in Toronto.”
In interviews Sabourin and Shannon Stinner, the co-worker who refused directions to destroy foreign passports, also said they believe their personal experiences in CBSA speak to broader signs of corruption surfacing in Ottawa in the past few years, such as the ArriveCan scandal.
In that case, an audit found CBSA’s new border entry app was budgeted for $80,000 but ended up costing taxpayers at least $60-million, with indications of collusion among government staff and contractors, and perhaps more ominous actors that have yet to be exposed.
“The system in place, the Public Service Disclosure Protection Act, and the internal disclosure process, are being weaponized by the people in positions of authority in government departments and agencies,” Sabourin said.
“People are in damage control mode, using this to identify what they refer to as ‘problem’ employees, who are actually loyal. For example, consider the ArriveCAN scandal. All the red flags and alerts raised by employees were ignored. When employees engage with internal affairs or professional standards, or meet with the office of disclosure, they get labeled and punished.”
Regarding Sabourin’s sharing his concerns on the mass shredding of foreign passports, which Sabourin believes was illegal, in an interview former CBSA worker Shannon Stinner said he also attended a meeting with Sabourin’s local MP Greg Fergus.
“We told him about the passports, that we weren’t getting anywhere within the agency,” Stinner said. “We told him the steps we took, backed that with paperwork and he just, that was it. After that meeting was done, nothing happened. He didn’t get back to us or anything.”
In response MP Greg Fergus, who is now Speaker of the House of Commons, told The Bureau that Fergus did convey Sabourin’s concerns within Trudeau’s government.
“As the Member of Parliament for Hull-Aylmer, Mr. Fergus considers it his fundamental duty to listen to the concerns of his constituents,” his office stated. “During his meeting with Mr. Sabourin, Mr. Fergus was deeply troubled by the situation described. In response, he brought this matter to the attention of the office of the Minister of Public Safety.”
Lost and Stolen Passports
Sabourin, who handled top secret records for Canada’s National Defence intelligence unit before joining CBSA, was uniquely placed to see gaps in Canada’s systems.
For CBSA, he worked on a small team in a secured room managing the entry of critical information into a federal enforcement database.
When other governments and intelligence agencies informed Canada that batches of international travel documents were lost, stolen, or exploited, and that dangerous people were approaching our borders, Sabourin and his colleagues raced to enter lists of compromised documents so that frontline officers at airports could know who to investigate and who to block.
Worldwide, and inside Canada, the problem of lost and stolen passports has surged since the early 2000s.
There is a massive international market for the exploitation of travel documents that is brokered by Chinese Triads, as The Bureau has reported, among other transnational criminal networks that are believed to include Middle Eastern mafias and terror-financing cells, and Mexican cartels.
Reporting on the trend in 2008, the Canadian Press cited an internal memo from Passport Canada that said “lost and stolen passports are extremely valuable to criminal organizations to facilitate and perpetrate illegal/clandestine operations such as human trafficking, smuggling, money laundering, and terrorism.”
And RUSI, a United Kingdom security think tank, explained how it works in 2007.
“Whereas only the very best forgeries can elude detection, traveling on a stolen passport is extremely difficult to detect,” RUSI reported. “Those with stolen documentation are usually only given away by a mistake when the passport was being filled out or if the passport has been listed in a database of stolen papers.”
Carefully guarding how much he can reveal about sensitive intelligence, in interviews Sabourin says for some reason, the number of exploited travel records spiked exponentially after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014.
During this period, from 2006 to 2015, as the international problem of lost and stolen travel documents grew, Sabourin says he started to notice documents going missing from his desk, within his secure unit.
Not only did records go missing, he says, but critical identity documents were also altered, and sometimes shredded.
And he began to suspect a particular co-worker, who reportedly had previously dealt with elements of organized crime, Sabourin says.
There were also several incidents, Sabourin says, when he was urgently entering large lists of compromised international passports that had gone missing in foreign states. And these large volumes of critical passport information went missing from his desk.
“As far as I am concerned someone did that to buy time for these individuals to travel to whatever destination these people were heading to,” Sabourin said. (A suspected co-worker) was seen entering my cubicle and the cubicles of others in my unit many times without justifications. And on each occasion items of operational value were damaged or sabotaged, passports under investigative process or for enforcement went missing. And some were never to be recovered.”
These concerning incidents culminated with an egregious case in 2015, Sabourin says, when he and Shannon Stinner were directed to destroy an estimated 1,000 foreign passports.
CBSA holds numerous foreign travel documents and is legally bound to return such documents to foreign embassies, Sabourin and Stinner told The Bureau.
When a student employee at CBSA undertook the mass shredding task, they destroyed about 300 passports before Sabourin’s complaint halted the process, he says.
He took pictures from within his secure unit of boxes of passports that the junior employee was in the process of destroying, Sabourin says, and provided the alleged evidence to The Bureau.
A redacted Government of Canada document shows that Sabourin reported allegations that CBSA shredded foreign passports, and Sabourin says he was targeted by management for refusing the task.
Sabourin says that from the shredded passports, he was able to recover about 50 that retained their cover sheaths, and by checking barcode information, he verified some of the owners had “wanted by CBSA notifications” on file, some had deportation orders in force, and some were suspected of serious criminality.
“This mass shredding would have assisted countless wanted criminals by destroying intelligence and evidence against them,” Sabourin said.
And guardedly, he hints at the most dire consequences.
“Let’s say that in a few years from now, another scenario like September 11 happens in Canada. And I’m being careful with my words. And eventually, these people are either arrested or identified. And it comes back that these people were those in the passports that we were looking for and [documents that were destroyed] had the last known picture of them.”
Asked by The Bureau what could have possibly motivated this alleged national security breach, Sabourin says its hard to say, but he can’t rule out a coverup of some sort.
“I don’t know the general intent, but it would definitely have assisted either organized crime or individuals that are involved in criminality or foreign actors,” Sabourin said. “Because, like I explained to the members of Parliament in my testimony, those were people that were wanted by CBSA. We didn’t know their whereabouts in Canada. And the order was totally against every rule and policies that we had in place. I had never seen this in eight years doing that work. It was urgent. We were told that this needed to be done, now.”
In numerous interviews with The Bureau, Sabourin presented his case with conviction and details, supporting his allegations with documents that prove he reported the mass shredding incident and other alleged corruption to numerous Canadian enforcement and political bodies.
And still, in isolation, his claims which suggest serious transnational crime has repeatedly penetrated CBSA’s systems and potentially corrupted employees, are not only jarring but sometimes incredible.
But the incidents Sabourin describes could plausibly fit into the threat brief prepared by CBSA in 2019 for the new Liberal Public Safety Minister Bill Blair.
The documents warned of “growing evidence of transnational criminal organizations seeking to exploit CBSA systems, processes and personnel and employing increasingly sophisticated concealment methods.”
Not only are transnational mafias seeking to corrupt CBSA officers, the brief said, but the systems exploited appear to match the circumstances that Sabourin described to The Bureau.
Specific vulnerabilities included CBSA computer systems conducting data processing, the brief says.
It adds that record-keeping, communications, telecommunications, account inventory and account management are also targeted by organized crime, and this is increasing threats to Canadians from “smuggling, counterfeit goods, human trafficking, money laundering and proceeds of crime.”
Sabourin’s former co-worker Shannon Stinner, in an interview, says he agrees with Sabourin that corruption and organized crime is likely behind the occurrences both men witnessed in CBSA.
And it all points to broader problems in Ottawa.
“I mean there’s a lot of little stories that have come out, whether it’s in news reports, or within question period in Parliament, that backs up stuff that Luc and I have been saying,” Stinner said. “It’s not just our little bit. There’s more to it, because there’s other people have been coming forward with the same thing, from different parts of the government.”
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When Justin Trudeau came to power in 2015, he memorably said that the welfare of Indigenous Canadians was his highest priority. He certainly has delivered on his promise, at least in terms of shovelling out money.
During his 10 years in office, budgeted Indigenous spending has approximately tripled, from about $11 billion to almost $33 billion. Prime Minister Trudeau’s instruction to the Department of Justice to negotiate rather than litigate class actions has resulted in paying tens of billions of dollars to Indigenous claimants over alleged wrongs in education and other social services. And his government has settled specific claims—alleged violations of treaty terms or of the Indian Act—at four times the previous rate, resulting in the award of at least an additional $10 billion to First Nations government.
But has this avalanche of money really helped First Nations people living on reserves, who are the poorest segment of Canadian society?
One indicator suggests the answer is yes. The gap between reserves and other communities—as measured by the Community Well-Being Index (CWB), a composite of income, employment, housing and education—fell from 19 to 16 points from 2016 to 2021. But closer analysis shows that the reduction in the gap, although real, cannot be due to the additional spending described above.
The gain in First Nations CWB is due mainly to an increase in the income component of the CWB. But almost all of the federal spending on First Nations, class-action settlements and specific claims do not provide taxable income to First Nations people. Rather, the increase in income documented by the CWB comes from the greatly increased payments legislated by the Liberals in the form of the Canada Child Benefit (CCB). First Nations people have a higher birth rate than other Canadians, so they have more children and receive more (on average) from the Canada Child Benefit. Also, they have lower income on average than other Canadians, so the value of the CCB is higher than comparable non-Indigenous families. The result? A gain in income relative to other Canadians, and thus a narrowing of the CWB gap between First Nations and other communities.
There’s an important lesson here. Tens of billions in additional budgetary spending and legal settlements did not move the needle. What did lead to a measurable improvement was legislation creating financial benefits for all eligible Canadian families with children regardless of race. Racially inspired policies are terrible for many reasons, especially because they rarely achieve their goals in practise. If we want to improve life for First Nations people, we should increase opportunities for Canadians of all racial backgrounds and not enact racially targeted policies.
Moreover, racial policies are also fraught with unintended consequences. In this case, the flood of federal money has made First Nations more dependent rather than less dependent on government. In fact, from 2018 to 2022, “Own Source Revenue” (business earnings plus property taxes and fees) among First Nations bands increased—but not as much as transfers from government. The result? Greater dependency on government transfers.
This finding is not just a statistical oddity. Previous research has shown that First Nations who are relatively less dependent on government transfers tend to achieve higher living standards (again, as measured by the CWB index). Thus, the increase in dependency presided over by the Trudeau government does not augur well for the future.
One qualification: this finding is not as robust as I would like because the number of band governments filing reports on their finances has drastically declined. Of 630 First Nation governments, only 260 filed audited statements for fiscal 2022. All First Nations are theoretically obliged by the First Nations Financial Transparency Act, 2013, to publish such statements, but the Trudeau government announced there would be no penalties for non-compliance, leading to a precipitous decline in reporting.
This is a shame, because First Nations, as they often insist, are governments, not private organizations. And like other governments, they should make their affairs visible to the public. Also, most of their income comes from Canadian taxpayers. Both band members and other Canadians have a right to know how much money they receive, how it’s being spent and whether it’s achieving its intended goals.
During his campaign, Ramaswamy proposed cutting 75% of the federal workforce. Musk recently suggested that he could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, or about one-third of total U.S. spending.
President-elect Donald Trump picked Tesla CEO Elon Musk and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a newly created Department of Government Efficiency.
The department’s acronym, DOGE, is a nod to Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency, dogecoin. Trump said the new group will pave the way for his administration to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulation, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies.”
Trump laid out lofty goals for the group in his announcement this week.
“It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhatten Project,’ of our time,” Trump’s announcement said. “Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of ‘DOGE’ for a very long time.”
It won’t be an official government agency, which will likely allow Musk and Ramaswamy to avoid public financial disclosures.
Trump said the change he’s looking for won’t come from within the existing federal government.
“To drive this kind of change, the Department of Government Efficiency will provide advice and guidance from outside the government, and will partner with the White House and Office of Management & Budget to drive large scale structural reform and create and entrepreneurial approach to government never seen before,” the announcement noted.
Trump said he looks forward to what Musk and Ramaswamy can accomplish.
“Importantly, we will drive out the massive waste and fraud which exists throughout our annual $6.5 trillion of government spending,” he said.
Trump also gave them a deadline: July 4, 2026.
“A smaller government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy will be the perfect gift to America” on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, according to the announcement.
Ramaswamy, who dropped out the race for the GOP nomination to endorse Trump in January, has previously proposed significant cuts. During his campaign, Ramaswamy proposed cutting 75% of the federal workforce.
Musk recently suggested that he could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, or about one-third of total U.S. spending. He’s been tossing out ideas on X, previously Twitter before Musk bought the company and changed the name.
“The world is suffering slow strangulation by overregulation. Every year, the noose tightens a little more,” Musk wrote in a post on X on Wednesday. “We finally have a mandate to delete the mountain of choking regulations that do not serve the greater good.”
Musk also said he isn’t a threat to democracy, but a threat to bureaucracy.
DOGE already has an X account. It’s first post: “Working overtime to ensure your tax dollars will be spent wisely!”
Some budget experts have called Musk’s pledge to cut $2 trillion a pipe dream, noting that many of the problems DOGE wants to address have proven intractable.
Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute think tank, called Musk’s proposal “a random number unattached to reality.”
Marc Goldwein, the senior vice president and senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said it could be done with 10 aggressive policies, mostly focused on Medicare and Medicaid.
“The government can legitimately save trillions over a decade by reducing waste and improving efficiency – and I hope we do,” Goldwein wrote on X. “Achieving these savings requires major changes to how and how much we pay for health care.”
Medicare (annual cost of about $1 trillion) is a federal health insurance program for people 65 or older, and some people younger than 65 with certain disabilities or conditions. Medicaid (annual cost of about $558 billion) is a joint federal and state program that helps cover medical costs for some people with limited income and resources.
The Government Accountability Office, which serves as the research arm of Congress, estimated annual fraud losses cost taxpayers between $233 billion and $521 billion annually, in a report in April. The fraud estimate’s range represents 3% to 7% of average federal obligations. The Office of Management and Budget publicly questioned that estimate, calling it “not plausible.”
“OMB has significant concerns that this report will not further efforts to prevent and reduce fraud, but rather will create confusion and promote misleading generalizations that have no factual connection to specific federal programs,” Jason Miller, the deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, wrote of OMB concerns in a three-page letter to officials with the Government Accountability Office.
On the campaign trail, Ramaswamy detailed his plan to reduce the federal workforce by 75% during an event at the America First Policy Institute in Washington in 2023.
Ramaswamy said he would shutter the FBI (about 35,000 employees); the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms a nd Explosives (5,099 employees); the U.S. Department of Education (about 4,200 employees); the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (about 3,000 employees); and the Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Services (about 1,500 employees).
Under Ramaswamy’s campaign plan, some 15,000 FBI employees would be moved to other agencies such as the U.S. Marshals Service, U.S. Secret Service, Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, Drug Enforcement Administration, Defense Intelligence Agency, and Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security.
Some groups called the Department of Government Efficiency goals a stretch. Others had more pointed things to say.
Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, a progressive consumer advocacy organization founded by Ralph Nader, said the government agencies and regulations Ramaswamy proposed cutting are in place to protect people.
“The purpose of government regulations is to protect the American people,” she said in a statement. “We all depend on these regulations to protect our air, water, workers, children’s safety, and so much more. ‘Cutting red tape’ is shorthand for getting rid of the safeguards that protect us in order to benefit corporate interests.”
