A Border Patrol agent standing watch at the Montana-Canada border in the CBP Spokane Sector. The Spokane Sector covers the U.S.-Canada border along the northwestern section of Montana, part of Idaho, and the eastern part of Washington.    Photo from U.S. Customs and Border Protection

From The Center Square

By Bethany Blankley

Cites smuggling, national security threats

President Donald Trump on Saturday declared a national emergency at the U.S.-Canada border, citing an influx of human and drug smuggling coming from Canada presenting a national security threat to Americans.

He did so after a record number of illegal border crossers were reported entering the U.S. from Canada, the greatest number of known or suspected terrorists were apprehended coming from Canada, and northern border terrorist arrests soared under the Biden and Trudeau administrations, The Center Square first reported.

Unlike the 1,954-mile U.S.-Mexico border, there are no border walls and significantly less technological equipment and agents to patrol the U.S.-Canada border, the longest international border in the world, The Center Square reported.

With far fewer agents in the field, less technological surveillance and increased national security threats posed by Canadian policies, U.S. officials have warned about a lack of operational control at the U.S.-Canada border, The Center Square first reported.

Trump’s Feb. 1, 2025, executive order “Imposing Duties to Address the Flow of Illicit Drugs across our Northern Border” states that the “sustained influx of illicit opioids and other drugs has profound consequences on our nation, endangering lives and putting a severe strain on our healthcare system, public services, and communities.”

He declared a national emergency citing the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, National Emergencies Act, section 604 of the Trade Act of 1974, and section 301 of title 3, United States Code.

The order expands the national emergency he declared on his first day in office declaring an invasion at the southern border. The national emergency now includes the northern border “to cover the threat to the safety and security of Americans, including the public health crisis of deaths due to the use of fentanyl and other illicit drugs, and the failure of Canada to do more to arrest, seize, detain, or otherwise intercept [drug trafficking organizations], other drug and human traffickers, criminals at large, and drugs.”

“Gang members, smugglers, human traffickers, and illicit drugs of all kinds have poured across our borders and into our communities. Canada has played a central role in these challenges, including by failing to devote sufficient attention and resources or meaningfully coordinate with United States law enforcement partners to effectively stem the tide of illicit drugs,” the order states.

DTOs “are the world’s leading producers of fentanyl, methamphetamine, cocaine, and other illicit drugs” that “often collaborate with transnational cartels to smuggle illicit drugs into the United States, utilizing clandestine airstrips, maritime routes, and overland corridors.”

While much focus has been on the southern border, “There is also a growing presence of Mexican cartels operating fentanyl and nitazene synthesis labs in Canada,” the order states. Illicit drugs are being shipped into the U.S. from Canada “due to the existing administrative exemption from duty and taxes, also known as de minimis,” under U.S. Code, which has created a public health crisis in the U.S. prompting Trump to designate the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.

The order points to a Canadian Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre report on the laundering of proceeds of illicit synthetic opioids as domestic production of fentanyl increased primarily in British Columbia. This contributed to Canada’s growing footprint in international narcotics distribution.

Last year, the Canadian Parliament held hearings expressing alarm about increased terrorism threats due to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visa policies and U.S. lawmakers called for additional security at the northern border for similar reasons.

“Immediate action is required to address threats from Canada,” the order states, “which will not happen unless the compliance and cooperation of Canada is assured.”

Trump also imposed a 25% tariff on Canadian goods and a 10% tariff on energy resources effective Feb. 4.

If the Canadian government retaliates, the order states that Trump may increase or expand the scope of the tariffs. If the Canadian government fails “to take adequate steps to alleviate the illegal migration and illicit drug crises through cooperative enforcement actions,” additional action will be taken.

The order directs several cabinet leaders to coordinate and communicate with him and Congress “on the situation at our northern border.” Once the Canadian government “has taken adequate steps to alleviate this public health crisis through cooperative enforcement actions,” the tariffs may be removed.

Sam Cooper

Briefings to Liberal Government on Chinese Infiltration of Vancouver Port and Canada’s Opioid Scourge Ignored

Trump Tariffs Loom as Critics Decry Ottawa’s “Fox in the Hen House” Approach to Border Security

As President Donald Trump readies sweeping tariffs against Canada on Saturday—citing Ottawa’s failure to secure its shared North American borders from fentanyl originating in China—The Bureau has obtained a remarkable December 1999 document from a senior law enforcement official, revealing Ottawa’s longstanding negligence in securing Vancouver’s port against drug trafficking linked to Chinese shipping entities.

The letter, drafted by former Crown prosecutor Scott Newark and addressed to Ottawa’s Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC), urged the body to reconsider explosive findings from a leaked RCMP and CSIS report detailing the infiltration of Canada’s “porous” borders by Chinese criminal networks.

Titled “Re: S.I.R.C. Review in relation to Project Sidewinder,” Newark’s letter alleges systemic failures that enabled Chinese State Council owned shipping giant COSCO and Triads with suspected Chinese military ties to penetrate Vancouver’s port system. He further asserts that federal authorities ignored repeated briefings and warnings from Canadian law enforcement—warnings based on intelligence gathered by Canadian officials in Hong Kong, who initiated the Sidewinder review.

Newark also warned that Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s decision to dismantle Canada’s specialized Ports Police and privatize national port control had left the country dangerously exposed to foreign criminal networks, noting he had personally briefed the Canadian government on these concerns as early as 1996.

Addressing his letter to SIRC’s chair, Quebec lawyer Paule Gauthier, Newark wrote:

“As the former (1994-98) Executive Officer of the Canadian Police Association, I was assigned responsibility for dealing with the issue of the federal government’s changes to control of the national ports and policing therein.”

“This involved close examination of matters such as drug, weapon, and people smuggling through the national ports and, in particular, both the growing presence of organized criminal groups at ports and the ominous hazard control of those ports by such groups represented.”

Newark’s letter goes on to allege widespread failures in Ottawa that facilitated Chinese Triad infiltration of Vancouver’s port, revealing federal authorities’ reluctance to act on warnings from RCMP officer Garry Clement and immigration control officer Brian McAdam—former Canadian officials based in Hong Kong who had sounded the alarm, prompting the Sidewinder review.

Newark explained to SIRC’s chair that, during his tenure as Executive Officer of the Canadian Police Association, he prepared approximately fifty detailed policy briefs for the government and regularly appeared before parliamentary committees and in private ministerial briefings.

The letter continues, noting that in October 1996, Newark met with Chrétien’s Transport Minister David Anderson—later addressing the Transport Committee—to highlight the imminent threat posed by Asian organized crime’s infiltration of port operations. Newark’s written briefing to the Minister underscored the gravity of the situation with a blunt question:

“Who exactly are the commercial port operators?”

Citing the Anderson briefing document, Newark’s letter to SIRC states that Anderson had been warned:

“We are, for example, aware of serious concerns amongst the international law enforcement community surrounding the ownership of ports and container industries in Asia and, in particular, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the People’s Republic of China. There is simply no longer any doubt that drugs like heroin are coming from these destinations through the Port of Vancouver, moved by organized criminal gangs whose assets include ‘legitimate’ properties.”

The Anderson briefing also referenced a British Columbia anti-gang unit report, titled “Organized Crime on Vancouver Waterfront,” which made clear that the Longshoreman’s Union had been infiltrated by the Hells Angels.

“The movement of goods through Canada’s ports requires an independence in policing that is impossible without public control,” the report warned.

It concluded:

Scott Newark’s letter to SIRC then turns to new intelligence—gathered from Canadian and U.S. officials—that further underscored the vulnerability created by Chrétien’s border policies.

“To now learn that law enforcement and public officials in Canada and the United States have linked a company (COSCO), granted docking and other facilities in Vancouver, to Asian organized crime, arms and drug smuggling is, to say the least, disturbing,” Newark’s December 1999 letter states.

“That this company, its principals, subsidiaries, and partners have been associated with various military agencies of a foreign government—agencies themselves identified by Canadian and American officials as having unhealthy connections to Triad groups—makes a bad situation even worse.”

Newark next addressed the broader implications of Canada’s failure to enforce border security, particularly in relation to the deportation of foreign criminals—a process he had sought to reform while serving with the Canadian Police Association.

Drawing on his experience, he described a deeply flawed immigration enforcement system, one that allowed individuals with serious criminal records to remain in Canada indefinitely. The problem, he wrote, was twofold: not only were foreign criminals able to enter Canada with ease, but authorities also failed to deport those with outstanding arrest warrants.

Newark recounted how, in 1996, a Cabinet Minister requested that he meet with Brian McAdam, a former senior foreign service officer in Hong Kong who had spent years uncovering organized crime’s grip on Canada’s immigration system. McAdam’s detailed revelations, he wrote, had directly led to the launch of Project Sidewinder.

Newark told SIRC that even after leaving the Canadian Police Association in 1998, he remained in contact with McAdam and other officials working to expose this vast and complex national security risk posed by foreign criminal networks.

It was this ongoing communication that led to an even more alarming discovery. Newark wrote that he was stunned to learn that Canada’s government had not only terminated Project Sidewinder but had gone so far as to destroy some related files.

Newark suggests SIRC’s chair, in her review of Sidewinder, should determine whether “Sidewinder should not have been cancelled … why such inappropriate action was taken and at whose direction this was done.”

He concludes that SIRC should also freshly examine why intelligence reporting from the Canadian officials in Hong Kong, Brian McAdam and Garry Clement had been ignored in Ottawa.

Newark’s letter to SIRC says these failures to act on intelligence included the “Inappropriate granting of visas to Triad members or associates” and “Granting of docking facilities with attendant consequences to COSCO”—and “Failure of CIC and Foreign Affairs to respond appropriately to the various information supplied by McAdam and Clement in relation to material pertaining to Sidewinder.”

In an exclusive interview with The Bureau, Garry Clement, who contributed to investigations referenced in Newark’s letter, corroborated many of its claims and provided further insight. Clement recalled his role in Project Sunset, a 1990s investigation into Chinese Triads’ efforts to gain control over Vancouver’s ports.

“I can remember having a discussion with Scott when he wrote that to SIRC because Scott and I go back a long time,” Clement said. “I knew about him writing on it, but I knew it was also buried.”

He described his own intelligence work during the same period:

“I wrote in the nineties when I was the liaison officer in Hong Kong, a very long intelligence brief on the Chinese wanting to basically acquire or build out a port at the Surrey Fraser Docks area. And it was going to be completely controlled by that time, with Triad influence, but it was going to be controlled by China.”

Clement expressed frustration that decades of warnings had gone unheeded:

“The bottom line is that here we are almost 40 years later, talking about an issue that was identified in the ‘90s about our ports and allowing China to have free access—and nothing has been done over that period of time.”

Newark’s urgent recommendation for SIRC to reconsider Sidewinder’s warnings on Vancouver’s ports was never acted upon.

“We still don’t have Port Police. We got nobody overseeing them,” Clement added. “The ports themselves, it’s sort of like putting a fox in the hen house and saying, ‘Behave yourself.’”

Finally, when asked about the Trudeau government’s claim this week that Canada is responsible for only one percent of the fentanyl entering the United States—a figure reported widely in Canadian media—Clement’s response was unequivocal.

“The fact that we’ve become a haven for transnational organized crime, it’s internationally known,” he said. “So when I read that, with the fentanyl—Trump is wrong in that there’s less than 1% of our fentanyl going to the United States. That’s a crock of shit. If you look at the two super labs that were taken down in British Columbia—I think there’s three now—the amount they were capable of producing was more than the whole Vancouver population could have used in 10 years. So we know that Vancouver has become a transshipment point to North America for opiates and cocaine and other drugs because it’s a weak link, and enforcement is not capable of keeping up with transnational organized crime.”

That opinion is evidently acknowledged by British Columbia Premier David Eby, according to documents from Canada’s Foreign Interference Commission that say Eby sought meetings with Justin Trudeau’s National Security Advisor.

A record from the Hogue Commission, sanitized for public release, outlines the “context and drivers” behind Eby’s concerns, including “foreign interference; election security; countering fentanyl, organized crime, money laundering, corruption.”

The documents state Ottawa’s Privy Council Office—which provides advice to Justin Trudeau’s cabinet—had recommended that British Columbia continue to work with the federal government on initiatives like the establishment of a new Canada Financial Crimes Agency to bolster the nation’s ability to respond swiftly to complex financial crimes.

Additionally, the PCO highlighted that Canada, the United States, and Mexico were supposedly collaborating on strategies to reduce the supply of fentanyl, including addressing precursor chemicals and preventing the exploitation of commercial shipping channels—a critical area where British Columbia, and specifically the Port of Vancouver, plays a significant role.

Eby acknowledged the concerns again this week in an interview with Macleans.

“I understood Trump’s concerns about drugs coming in. We’ve got a serious fentanyl problem in B.C.; we see the precursor chemicals coming into B.C. from China and Mexico. We see ties to Asian and Mexican organized crime groups. We’d been discussing all of that with the American ambassador and fellow governors. That’s why it was such a strange turnaround, from ‘Hey, we’re working together on this!’ to suddenly finding ourselves in the crosshairs.”

Yet, despite Eby’s claims of intergovernmental efforts, critics—including Garry Clement—argue that nothing has changed. Vancouver’s port remains alarmingly vulnerable, a decades-old concern that continues to resurface as fentanyl and other illicit drugs flood North American markets.