What did Canada Ever Do to Draw Trump Tariff on Immigration, You Ask? Plenty

By Todd Bensman as published by The Daily Wire

Much US national security and public safety damage from: an historic Canadian legal immigrant importation program and making Mexican travel visa-free.

President-elect Donald Trump bloodied Mexico and Canada with diplomatic buckshot this week by writing that, on his first day in office, he’ll levy devastating 25-percent trade tariffs on those two U.S. neighbors if they fail to crack down on illegal immigration and drug trafficking.

Much public puzzlement has filled international media coverage over why Trump would single out Canada for punishment equal to that of the far guiltier Mexico.

“To compare us to Mexico is the most insulting thing I’ve ever heard from our friends and closest allies, the United States of America,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said. “I found his comments unfair. I found them insulting. It’s like a family member stabbing you right in the heart.”

“We shouldn’t confuse the Mexican border with the Canadian border,” Canadian Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne said.

But this narrative seems intended to deflect public acknowledgement of what the liberal progressive government of Justin Trudeau did do to draw Trump’s tariff ire. In terms of immigration policy, the Canadian offenses are indeed much different from Mexico’s opened super-highway mass migration wave-throughs during the Biden-Harris years. But what Canada has done, arguably, damaged U.S. national security and public safety interests in harmful ways that media outlets on both sides rarely report.

Canada’s massive legal immigration program as a U.S. national security threat

Much of the damage arises from an historic Canadian legal immigrant importation program of unprecedented scope. Since the program’s 2021 implementation, the Great White North has imported some 1.5 million foreign national workers (400,000+ per year for the nation of 38 million) from dozens of developing nations and hundreds of thousands more foreign students in just 2023 – the third record-breaking year of those.

Why are those programs a U.S. problem? Because a spiking number of foreign nationals are apparently abusing the Canadian programs as a Lilly pad from which to illegally enter the United States between northern border land ports of entry, among them proven threats to U.S. national security and public safety.

Why this traffic leaking into the United States is a problem – even though the total numbers illegally entering from Canada are small relative to those crossing from Mexico – arises from the fact that many hail from Muslim-majority nations and have, Canadian media reports, fueled a spate of terrorism and anti-Semitic attacks throughout Canada. As well, far too many of the Mexicans Canada has allowed in turned out to be cartel drug traffickers and killers.

Those kinds of criminals are crossing the U.S. northern border in increasing numbers due to Canadian policies that Canada could address if it wanted to.

Consider that U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions in the brush between U.S.-Canada land ports of entry jumped from 2,238 in FY2022 to 23,721 in FY2024, neatly coinciding with Trudeau’s mass legal immigration programs.

Among those crossing in illegally from Canada, for instance, were 15,827 Indian nationals in FY 2023 and 2024, 8,367 Mexicans, and 3,833 from unspecified countries listed only as “Other” on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s public statistics website.

A border-crossing terror plot foiled

Concern on both sides of the U.S.-Canada line has simmered for some years as Canadians saw the newcomers carry out terror plots, actual attacks, and probably some of the record-breaking nearly 6,000 antisemitic incidents Canada logged since the Israel-Hamas war broke out.

What’s been happening in Canada was obvious to many.

“Canada has become a hotbed of radicalization, fanaticism, and jihadism,” wrote Casey Babb, Senior Fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Newsweek shortly after the arrest. “As un-Canadian as it sounds, Canada has a terrorism crisis on its hands and that should worry the United States for a whole host of reasons.”

Concern would reach an apogee in October 2024, when a joint U.S.-Canadian counterterrorism operation thwarted a plot by a Pakistani student on a Canadian visa to illegally cross the northern border to conduct an October 2024 massacre of Jews in New York.

Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, a 20-year-old Pakistani citizen legally issued a Canadian student visa in June 2023, now stands accused in U.S. federal court of plotting an illegal-smuggler-assisted northern border crossing to carry out a mass shooting of Jews in New York City to celebrate with blood the October 7 anniversary of the Hamas massacre in Israel. Khan hoped it would go down in history as “the largest U.S. attack since 9/11”.

“We are going to nyc (sic) to slaughter them” with AR-style rifles and hunting knives “so we can slit their throats,” Khan told an undercover FBI agent he believed to be a co-conspirator, according to an agent complaint. “Even if we don’t attack an event we could rack up easily a lot of Jews.”

His was among the record-breaking 400,000 foreign student visas Canada issued in 2023.

That alarming new terrorism prosecution in New York State should have been enough to renew Trump’s interest in turning diplomatic pressure onto Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau’s mass legal immigration policies and border security on its side.

But terrorists cannot be the only concern.

Mexican cartel killers and traffickers in Canada crossing too

The incoming Trump administration 2.0 will need to force resolution of another issue of U.S. public safety concern dating to an especially damaging 2016 Trudeau move that went unaddressed until only recently. Trudeau rescinded 2009 visa requirements on Mexican citizens and against the advice of his own government that Mexican criminals would abuse the policy to fly in at will and bedevil Canadian cities and northern American ones too.

That’s just what was happening again by early 2017. A sustained surge was underway of Mexican nationals who, unable to easily cross the southern border under Trump 1.0, were flying over the United States into Canada. They would claim Canadian asylum, then cross southward over the less tended northern U.S. border.

Among them were the predictable – and predicted – Mexican cartel operatives.

Leaked Canada Border Services Agency intelligence reports said Mexican “drug smugglers, human smugglers, recruiters, money launders and foot soldiers” were turning up in greater numbers than ever before. The cartels went to work building human smuggling networks to move other Mexicans south over the American border, just as they did all along the southern border.

In July 2017, Global News quoted published the intelligence reports saying the ultra-violent Sinaloa cartel had turned up in Canada to “facilitate travel to Canada by Mexicans with criminal records.” Others identified included La Familia Michoacana, Jalisco New Generation, and Los Zetas.

For instance, whereas the reports said 37 Mexicans linked to organized criminal groups had entered between 2012 and 2015, 65 involved in “serious crimes” were identified midway through just 2017, compared to 28 in 2015. By May 2019, at least 400 Mexican criminals connected to drug trafficking, including sicario hitmen, were plying their trades in Canada, at least half of them in Quebec, according to a May 24, 2019, report in the Toronto Sun and other Canadian media outlets.

All had entered through the Trudeau visa loophole for Mexicans.

By the end of 2019, Canada saw a 1,400 percent spike in the number of bogus Mexican refugee claims, the vast majority naturally rejected, and of associated detentions.

Canada finally about to face the music

Only in February 2024 did the Americans pressure the Canadians finally begin to roll back some – but not all — of its visa-free Mexicans policy, because the influx had clogged Canada’s asylum system with too many bogus claims and also sent too many Mexicans illegally over the U.S. border, which presented a politically terrible look as the 2024 presidential election campaign got underway. Now, only Mexicans who already hold a US visa or old Canadian one can travel visa-free, while most other Mexicans with neither will have to apply for a Canadian one.

But the damage that must be managed today is by now well baked into the cake.

From January to mid-October 2022, for instance, 7,698 Mexican asylum seekers took direct flights from Mexico City to Montreal, according to a November 2022 Canadian Press story. The paper quoted officials at nonprofit refugee assistance groups attesting that most fly to Canada because they found out Trudeau’s visa-free policy also got them government financial assistance while awaiting their mostly denied asylum applications.

In their October 2021 book, The Wolfpack: The Millennial Mobsters Who Brought Chaos and the Cartels to the Canadian Underworld, journalists Peter Edwards and Luis Najera established that the Sinaloa Cartel now has a foothold across eastern Canada, with “solid control of cocaine shipments in and out of Canada.” The Arellano Felix group has its foothold in Vancouver and in the state of Alberta.

The Zetas are in Canada “involved with temporary migrant workers”.

Asked in 2023 if Canada’s importance to Mexican organized crime had increased “in recent years,” co-author Luis Najera answered: “I would say it has increased since criminal cells moved up north to settle and expand operations here. It is also strategic to have groups operating north of the U.S. border, close to key places such as Chicago and New York, and without the scrutiny of the DEA and rival groups.”

Canada is not Mexico but its policies pose consequences for the United States. Any normal U.S. administration would put Canada on the hook for adjusting its policies and more robustly guarding its supposedly treasured neighboring ally, the United States, from harm. If punishing trade tariffs finally focus Canada’s attention on those policy-driven harms, let them last until Canada fixes what it recklessly broke.

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Crime

As Trump 2.0 Scrutinizes Canadian Fentanyl Networks, British Columbia Advances Forfeiture on 14 Properties Linked to Alleged PRC Triad Associate

Published on December 9, 2024

Todayville

Vancouver journalist Bob Mackin reported that Paul King Jin, (red shorts and black T-shirt) met with a BC NDP politician at Jin’s boxing gym, which is linked to B.C.’s forfeiture claims. Also at this meeting were members of Beijing’s United Front Work Department groups in Vancouver.

The Pacific coastal metropolis, famous for its gleaming glass towers set against forested mountain peaks, isn’t merely concealing a toxic node of global narco-laundering. It has also become known as the “Dubai of the West” among transnational crime investigators, serving as a key encryption technology hub for various shadowy companies tied to Chinese Triads, Mexican cartels, and Iranian state-sponsored mafias and terror financiers

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — In a long-running legal effort to curb transnational money laundering believed to be fueling North America’s deadly fentanyl trade, the British Columbia Civil Forfeiture Office has secured a procedural victory in its pursuit of 14 Vancouver properties linked to an accused Chinese underworld financier, Paul King Jin.

Jin and his associates in Vancouver and Toronto — tied to “The Company” cartel and the notorious, U.S.-sanctioned Triad leader “Broken Tooth Koi,” according to RCMP sources — have drawn increasing interest from American enforcement and intelligence agencies in recent years.

Despite surmounting a legal hurdle in Jin’s case, Canada’s broader struggle to bring such figures to justice speaks to deep systemic vulnerabilities, enforcement experts say. Meanwhile, the United States grows more impatient with its northern neighbor’s susceptibility to global narcotics trafficking.

David Asher, a senior financial crime investigator in President Trump’s first administration, who recently credited The Bureau’s investigations into fentanyl trafficking networks at a security conference in Vancouver, says Triads in Toronto and Vancouver are “command and control” for laundering warehouses of cash stockpiled across North America by Mexican cartels that distribute toxic opioids for Chinese mafias that provide the precursors.

Citing a July 2024 memo from Asher, CBC reported today that the memo is reportedly now circulating among Trump’s transition team. Asher argues “Canada should be making substantive, systemic changes,” including implementing anti-racketeering laws and sharing intelligence with Washington on Canada-based fentanyl networks, CBC reported.

Asher’s memo does not pull punches.

“The key is to attack Cartel and Triad finances by targeting their complicit financial institutions,” it says, adding there is “massive money laundering” through a specific Canadian bank.

“It appears that almost all leading U.S. banks are complicit in accepting suspected narco cash to purchase real estate from native Communist Chinese investors,” the memo adds.

On paper, the B.C. government’s recent win seems straightforward: In September 2024, the B.C. Supreme Court effectively sided with the Director of Civil Forfeiture, allowing the province to proceed with a case to forfeit roughly $9.5 million in Vancouver-area real estate.

The 14 properties, the government asserts, served as conduits for illicit proceeds — illegal gaming, underground banking, and laundering activities tied to Mr. Jin’s network and, by extension, a web of international criminal enterprises, including Triads and diaspora banking brokers connected to cartels spanning Asia and the Americas.

But this portfolio is only part of the picture. The forfeiture claim notes that after Jin was banned from B.C. casinos, he established illegal gaming houses which, according to official filings, generated more than $32 million in net profit over just four months in 2015. These gambling dens formed another key node in the broader ecosystem of cash-based offenses believed to be driving the surge in dangerous synthetic drugs throughout North America.

The legal drama in B.C.’s latest claim — the fourth forfeiture suit against Jin in three years — began in November 2022. Everwell Knight Limited, a China-incorporated entity registered in Hong Kong that holds mortgages on the 14 contested properties, attempted to have the government’s forfeiture claim dismissed. Everwell argued that the Director of Civil Forfeiture had failed to meet procedural standards. The Vancouver lawyer representing Everwell invoked the Canadian Charter of Rights — a common strategic defense in Canadian money laundering cases.

In April 2023, the Director of Civil Forfeiture responded with an application for judgment by default against Mr. Jin. By failing to file a defense, the Director argued, Mr. Jin effectively conceded key allegations.

This fourth claim also highlights an absurd game of cat and mouse between Jin and the Director.

“Counsel for the Director received a phone call from a lawyer who advised he may be acting for P. Jin with respect to civil forfeiture matters,” the Director’s April 2023 application says. “Since that communication, the Director’s counsel has not received any further communications from that lawyer or from any other lawyer purporting to act for P. Jin in this action.”

The court was asked to deem that Mr. Jin had admitted essential facts, including his true role behind Everwell, YSHJ Investment Holding Ltd., and JYSH Investment Ltd. — entities allegedly held through Jin’s niece as nominee owners.

Everwell, YSHJ Investment Holding Ltd., and JYSH Investment Ltd. have all filed defenses denying any wrongdoing.

Key to B.C.’s case is the allegation that YSHJ and JYSH bought Vancouver properties and soon after, the Hong Kong-based Everwell registered mortgages and assigned rents against the units, suggesting a clever scheme to launder funds via rent and mortgage payments.

“The mortgages held by Everwell against the real property are not legitimate mortgages and were used by the defendants to launder proceeds of crime,” B.C.’s lawsuit says.

But from a broader perspective, B.C.’s procedural win may resemble a Pyrrhic victory. Civil forfeiture often serves as a fallback in Canada because prosecuting sophisticated international money launderers remains daunting. High-profile criminal cases — including the RCMP’s “E-Pirate” probe into the sprawling Richmond, B.C.-based Silver International underground bank, allegedly linked to Mr. Jin and his partner, Jian Jun Zhu — collapsed amid onerous disclosure rules and the immense challenge of translating millions of intercepted communications.

A B.C. special prosecutor’s review of the related “E-Nationalize” investigation, which focused on Mr. Jin’s networks, similarly fell apart. The review cited “considerable dispute” over police-gathered material — including over two million communications needing Chinese translation — and highlighted legislative gaps that make it hard to convict Jin.

Notably, the review acknowledged that running an underground bank like Silver International could be prosecuted as a criminal offense in the U.S. and U.K., but not in Canada.

Civil forfeiture, with its lower burden of proof, can freeze and seize suspicious assets. Yet it does not carry the moral weight or deterrent punch of a criminal sentence. The current case spotlights Jin’s alleged laundering through B.C. casinos and Silver International — the now-defunct underground bank run by Mr. Zhu, who was killed in a 2020 shooting at a Japanese restaurant in Richmond. An RCMP source said that night in the restaurant, senior Toronto-area figures linked to Tse Chi Lop’s “The Company” cartel were present alongside Jin and Zhu, illustrating both the proximity of violence to Jin’s affairs and his apparent ties to Tse’s networks.

According to a report from the Financial Action Task Force, a G7 anti-money laundering initiative, Silver International serviced Asian, Middle Eastern, and Mexican organized crime groups, laundering about $1 billion a year globally. The bank, one of numerous similar outfits in Vancouver and Toronto, was connected to Chinese underground bankers in diaspora communities across Latin America, as well as hundreds of related bank accounts in China, according to the RCMP’s case.

This underscores Vancouver’s role as a nexus in a global scheme that U.S. authorities say directly contributes to the fentanyl crisis ravaging American cities. The Pacific coastal metropolis, famous for its gleaming glass towers set against forested mountain peaks, isn’t merely concealing a toxic node of global narco-laundering. It has also become known as the “Dubai of the West” among transnational crime investigators, serving as a key encryption technology hub for various shadowy companies tied to Chinese Triads, Mexican cartels, and Iranian state-sponsored mafias and terror financiers, as Canada’s case against RCMP intelligence mole Cameron Ortis revealed.

As one senior U.S. law enforcement source familiar with DEA probes into Triad leader Tse Chi Lop — said to control “The Company” network and connected to both Paul Jin and Silver International — explained, “Canada’s lenient laws make it an attractive market.” The source added: “If someone gets caught with a couple of kilos of fentanyl in Canada, the likelihood of facing a 25-year sentence is very low.”

Jin, once targeted by Canada’s most ambitious anti-money laundering efforts, remains unscathed by criminal convictions. Still, Jin’s extensive travels to Mexico, Colombia, and Panama have, according to RCMP sources, led investigators to believe he is leveraging a global network of underground bankers and traffickers. His name surfaces alongside once-dominant figures like Xizhi Li, a Chinese Mexican gangster taken down by the DEA, and Tse Chi Lop, whose arrest in 2021 created a vacuum in major narcotics and money laundering operations.

“Jin has evolved from a local massage parlor manager to someone who has now expanded his business dealings nationally and internationally,” one RCMP source said. “One can surmise that voids are created with the arrests of Li and Tse. And historically speaking, when voids are created, they tend to be filled. The question is: Who is in a position to fill that?”

In recent years Jin was detained and searched by Mexican border officials, the source said. Although he carried nothing substantial beyond a single cannabis gummy and some empty boxes, officials reportedly discovered documents linking him to Vancouver loan-sharking disputes. More tellingly, they found a business card connected to “Broken Tooth Koi,” a Triad leader whose laundering operations stretch from Hong Kong into Canada’s financial systems, as previously documented in filings before the Cullen Commission.

In December 2020 U.S. sanctions highlighted Koi’s links to Beijing.

“Wan Kuok Koi, also commonly known as “Broken Tooth,” is a member of the Communist Party of China’s (CCP) Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference,” the sanctions say, “and is a leader of the 14K Triad, one of the largest Chinese organized criminal organizations in the world that engages in drug trafficking, illegal gambling, racketeering, human trafficking, and a range of other criminal activities.”

“The other piece that will connect to what you are interested in, is [Paul King Jin] had a business card that connects him to Broken Tooth Koi,” the source said. Asked if this indicated Jin was working with ‘The Company’ — a sophisticated Triad-linked entity moving cash worldwide — the source replied, “That would fit.”

“He seems to have stepped into a leadership role,” the source continued. “He has been heading to Central America a lot, and he is barely home anymore.”

The Bureau has not been able to reach Jin for comment through a Vancouver lawyer that represented him at the Cullen Commission.

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Alberta

Edmonton Murder Shows Trudeau Has Lost Control Of Crime

Published on December 8, 2024

Todayville

Harshanedeep Singh from rozanaspokesman.com

News release from the Conservative Party of Canada

After nine years, the NDP-Liberal government has lost control of crime. Violent crime has skyrocketed by 50 percent since Trudeau became Prime Minister and 256 people were killed by a criminal who was out on bail or another form of release in 2022, the latest year available with full data.

On Saturday, Canadians witnessed the shocking, heinous murder of Harshandeep Singh, a 20-year-old security guard in Edmonton, Alberta. Singh was shot in the back while thanklessly doing his job as a nighttime security guard at a central Edmonton apartment building. A promising young life was snuffed out by a cold-blooded monster.

“One cannot imagine how Harshandeep’s family and friends feel,” said Tim Uppal, Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. “Our thoughts and prayers go out to his family at this incredibly difficult time.”

Edmonton Police have since arrested two individuals and charged them with first degree murder: “Evan Rain, 30, and Judith Saulteaux, 30, were arrested and charged with 1st degree murder in relation to Singh’s death.”

Early indications suggest that Rain has a known prior violent history, with media reports aligning with Rain’s current age. In 2018, an “Evan Chase Francis Rain”, then age 24, was charged for a violent kidnapping in Wetaskiwin, one hour south of Edmonton. A woman was forced into the trunk of a car at gunpoint. It is not clear from media reports how this case was concluded.

In 2022, “Evan Rain, 28, of Paul First Nation” (45 minutes west of Edmonton) faced twenty-nine charges for a violent robbery in northern Saskatchewan involving firearms.

This is from the 2022 RCMP news release at the time:

Evan Rain, 28, of Paul First Nation, is charged with:

-one count, robbery, Section 344, Criminal Code;
-one count, have face masked with intent to commit an indictable offence, Section 351(2), Criminal Code;
-eight counts, possess a firearm knowing it was obtained by the commission of an offence, Section 96(2), Criminal Code;
-one count, possession of property obtained by the commission of an offence, Section 354(1)(a), Criminal Code;
-one count, mischief under $5,000, Section 430(4), Criminal Code;
-sixteen counts, possess a firearm while prohibited, Section 117-01(3), Criminal Code; and
-one count, point a firearm, Section 87(2), Criminal Code.

The status of these charges is not readily apparent. The RCMP’s 2022 news release does make clear that Rain was already prohibited from possessing firearms: “sixteen counts, possess a firearm while prohibited, Section 117-01(3).”

“It appears that our so-called ‘justice’ system terribly failed Harshandeep Singh – just as it has outrageously failed so many others,” said Uppal. “Harshandeep Singh’s murder cannot be accepted as just an unfortunate, unavoidable reality in our society. Authorities should answer to Rain’s prior police interactions and potential criminal history, including whether he was out on bail or some other form of release order.”

Life wasn’t like this before Justin Trudeau. Since the NDP-Liberal government passed Bill C-75 and Bill C-5, which gave high priority to releasing repeat violent offenders and took away mandatory jail time for certain violent crimes, a crime wave has been unleashed across the country. This was evident in a report from the Fraser Institute which showed that Canada’s violent crime rate is 14 percent higher than that of the United States’.

Trudeau’s only response to this has been to crack down on law-abiding firearms owners and Indigenous hunters which has done nothing to improve Canada’s public safety. Instead, violent gun crime is up by a staggering 116 percent since the Liberals formed government.

Enough is Enough. Canadians deserve to feel safe in their communities. Only Common Sense Conservatives will bring home safe streets by ending Justin Trudeau’s catch-and-release justice system and bringing jail, not bail, for repeat violent offenders.