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

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13 minute read

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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Long Ignored Criminal Infiltration of Canadian Ports Lead Straight to Trump Tariffs

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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.

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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.

“I can assure you that in all of that time, no clearer warning was ever given by Canada’s rank and file police officers to the national government than what was done in our unsuccessful attempt to prevent the disbandment of the specialized Canada Ports Police in combination with the privatization of the ports themselves,” Newark’s letter to SIRC states.

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:

“This report should be taken as a specific warning to this Government that, prior to downloading operational control over the ports themselves to private interests, Government be absolutely certain as to who owns what—and that it can continue that certainty with power to refuse acquisition of port assets in the future.”

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.

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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.”

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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.

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Former UK MP says ‘nothing was done’ with child trafficking information given to police, MI5

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From LifeSiteNews

By Emily Mangiaracina

Andrew Bridgen says UK security agencies ignored detailed information about child trafficking, including names of people involved and where the children were being taken.

A former UK Member of Parliament says the top security agencies of Britain, including the police and MI5, are refusing to act on detailed information they’ve been given about child trafficking into the country.

Andrew Bridgen, who served as a popular Conservative MP for North West Leicestershire from 2010 until 2024, told Infowars founder Alex Jones in a Friday interview how he had raised concerns while in Parliament about “a number of individuals” who were evidently pedophiles.

“It was always passed to the police, to the National Crime Agency, and it involves senior politicians, very senior police officers, and nothing was ever done about it,” Bridgen told Jones.

He had explained that early in his career he had seen London police quash an investigation into child prostitution — and so this appeared to be a repeating pattern of cover-up of child sex crimes.

A former policeman named Jon Wedger had discovered that “children were being taken from children’s homes in the UK and prostituted on the weekend,” and were returning “under the influence of drugs and often with terrible venereal diseases, and the people at the homes were doing nothing about it.”

Upon further investigation, Wedger “wrote a report he sent to his superiors pointing out that child prostitution in London had not been investigated for decades.” However, instead of attempting to protect the children and stop the abuse, the police “threatened” Wedger, told him to retract the report, and fired him from the police force “on false pretenses,” according to Bridgen.

Later, Bridgen met a man who conducted a two-year investigation into sex abuse by pedophile and deceased Prime Minister Edward Heath. The police concluded that, were Heath alive, “he would have been arrested and charged with pedophilia.”

“If a former MP could have been a pedophile and it was covered up, then anything is possible,” Bridgen remarked.

He then told how last year a source approached him with “information about child trafficking into the UK,” including “detailed names of people involved on the ground; where the children were being brought in; where they were being taken; where their photographs were being taken; and the name of the company that was instrumental in laundering the money” used to buy these children.

“Meaning they were tipped off,” Jones noted.

Bridgen told how the source had recorded all of his phone calls with MI5, the police force, and the National Crime Agency, and when they failed to act, Bridgen “sent a file with all the information to senior politicians.”

“Eventually, all I got back was, ‘Take it to the police.’ I pointed out this had already been to the police, and it had been to MI5. There actually was an MI5 officer who had been very sympathetic and realized how important this evidence was. And he tried to push it. He was removed from the service. That’s how deep the corruption runs.”

In a June 2024 interview on the Resistance Podcast, Bridgen elaborated, “And then when you see the names, you see why. They are known names.”

He shared further horrifying details about the final end of the children who are trafficked and abused.

“They use them in the sex trade for about three years and then when they’re worn out they organ harvest them,” Bridgen shared.

“No one’s interested. No one wants to talk about it. No one wants to talk about a lot of things.”

Bridgen believes this demand for child trafficking is an explanation for the drive to continue wars around the world, including the war in Ukraine, because the conflicts present “a huge opportunity for child trafficking.”

Jones pointed out it was publicly admitted that decades ago, sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein entered war zones in Kosovo and Serbia and bought “nine- and 10-year-old girls” in order to sell them into sex slavery in the U.S. The father of Epstein’s girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, was one of the main directors of the “blackmail pedophile operations” of “MI6 and Mossad,” according to Jones.

“Ultimately, I think it’s the glue that holds the self-proclaimed elites around the world together, because once they’re involved in pedophilia or profiting from child trafficking, it’s the ultimate blackmail,” Bridgen said. “There’s no way out of the club for them. They all have to go down together.”

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