Lax Canadian Port Inspection Invites Trafficker Exploitation

"British Columbia’s Pacific ports are economic lifelines for Western Canada, moving exports and keeping supply chains running. They are also under-secured."

"Traffickers treat inspection risk as negligible and build their business model around the odds."

"Canada needs a standing Pacific port security task force, not another temporary working group." 

"Canada can have a Pacific trade strategy, or it can have a thin-security Pacific gateway. It cannot credibly have both."

Scott McGregor senior adviser, Council for Countering Hybrid Warfare 

New report says weak inspections, fragmented oversight and outdated security leave Canada’s western trade gateway exposed

 

A new report focuses on the lack of inspection of shipping containers at the Port of Vancouver, which traffickers use to their advantage to ship tons'-weight of methamphetamine to Australia. Released by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, the report centres on Vancouver and Prince Rupert which move huge volumes of cargo, very little of which is checked, while there is no single agency responsible for overseeing inspections.

 

Shipping containers are fractionally imaged, with fewer than one percent physically searched in Metro Vancouver, according to a City of Delta report written by former RCMP deputy commissioner Peter German, which the municipality had commissioned back in 2023. An audit by an internal Canada Border Services Agency of marine-mode targeting from 2020 to 2022 similarly concluded that the agency failed to target exports, outbound vessels or crew, leaving cargo exiting Canada with less scrutiny than on arrival.

 

The Canada Border Services Agency announced in June of 2023 that over 6,330 kilograms of methamphetamine hidden in jugs labelled as canola oil bound for Australia -- one of the four Metro Vancouver busts -- with a seizure of close to 3,000 kilograms representing the largest methamphetamine seizure in the agency's history, serves as an example of the scale of trafficking. 

 

Canada, points out senior adviser with the Frontier Centre, is used as a launch point as the drugs' value is considerably increased overseas. While not a major destination, Canada has become one of the world's leading source countries to achieve  higher margins abroad. Yet a Public Safety Canada briefing note claims little to no evidence exists from Canadian or U.S. law enforcement that fentanyl produced in Canada is a growing threat to the United States.  

Port of Vancouver freight container shipping dock. Photo by NICK PROCAYLO /10109967A

 

The RCMP dismantled, it said, the largest, most sophisticated drug superlab in Canadian history at Falkland, British Columbia in October of 2024. The fentanyl and precursor chemicals seized would have produced over 95 million potentially lethal doses. One individual was arrested in that raid. The problem, the report points out, is that no government body is in charge, with port security responsibility split among port authorities, the CBSA, RCMP and Transport Canada; no single body accountable for the system.

 

The Ports Canada Police dedicated ports force in Canada was disbanded in 1997 by the federal government, while funding for an RCMP-led waterfront enforcement unit was ended by the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority in 2015. The country, pointed out McGregor, author of the report, requires intelligence-led port security, not paperwork-led security where large busts are announced as a public-reassurance method, which has no impact on how traffickers operate.

 

The same gaps allowing traffickers to operate could be exploited by hostile states for sanctions evasion and foreign interference, points out Mr. McGregor, speaking from the perspective of his work on hybrid warfare...framing a warning risked by lax inspection leaving the country vulnerable on many counts. Should Canada not secure its ports representing Canada's economic trade engine, they will be used by malign players; equating national security with economic security. 

 

And nor is the West Coast ports the sole shipping-security vulnerability in Canada. In the east, the Port of Montreal is just as lax. And there police have been alerted to an epidemic plague of stolen vehicles being shipped abroad; the lack of inspection taken full advantage of by criminal gangs. Those gangs hire young thugs to steal vehicles throughout cities like Toronto, and the profits realized from shipping and selling them abroad fuel their purchase and smuggling of illegal weapons, primarily from the U.S. into Canada.

 

Shipping containers in the Port of Montreal are photographed in Montreal on Thursday, Sept. 11, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christopher Katsarov

 

 Fewer than two per cent of inbound containers at Metro Vancouver receive imaging and fewer than one per cent are physically searched.

Canada lacks a systematic program for targeting outbound cargo, vessels and crews despite major export drug seizures.

Responsibility for port security is divided among multiple federal agencies and port authorities, leaving no single organization accountable.

Organized crime exploits insider access, limited inspections and fragmented governance to move illicit goods through Canada’s Pacific gateway.

Hostile foreign states can exploit many of the same vulnerabilities for espionage, sanctions evasion and supply-chain disruption.

Inland logistics hubs and foreign trade zones require stronger oversight as part of Canada’s port security system.

The report recommends 10 reforms, including a permanent joint task force, expanded inspections, stronger cyber security and improved accountability.

Frontier Centre for Public Policy 

Most border enforcement focuses on imports, yet major drug seizures continue to involve exports destined for overseas markets.

  

Extraordinary Gift-Giving

"Meth, until recently, has been largely seen inside North Korea as a kind of very powerful energy drug -- something like Red Bull, amplified." 
"[That very misconception underscores a] significant underestimation [within the country of the risks inherent in drug abuse]."

Andrei Lankov, North Korea expert, Kookmin University, Seoul, South Korea

"[Though illegal in the North it has obtained the cachet of legality] because officials take bribes to look the other way, and because the state indirectly benefits from a food chain of bribes that goes all the way to the top."
Justin Hastings, political scientist, University of Sydney, Australia

"For as long as drug use does not pose a challenge to the regime, but instead dulls the wills and minds of the North Korean people, the government tacitly allows it to go on."
Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director, Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, Washington

Kim Il-sung Square on Lunar New Year’s Day, 2017   Wikimedia Commons

Mr. Scarlatoui from his vantage point in a Washington think tank observes that Kim Jong-un's regime was entirely focused on placing its state resources on what it deems are national priorities. Controlling the use of psychotropic drugs is not anywhere close to a priority. Not in an impoverished country where health care itself is not recognized as a national need to be fulfilled, and where people, under-serviced in that area, will take to self-medicating with mind-alterants.

On the other hand, what is recognized as top priorities that the government places all its attention on is self-evident from the news, sometimes hysterical, that comes out of the hermit kingdom. Its development of long-range missiles, its preoccupation with 'defence' enabling it to lob viral warning to its perceived enemies, most of its neighbours whom the North believes have collaborated with the United States to undermine North Korea's progress. And its nuclear program, which has long alarmed the world at large.

This month during celebrations of the Lunar New Year, North Koreans have been exchanging gifts to one another. Choosing to present to those they care about, crystal meth. Methamphetamine, viewed by the outside world as a health and addiction threat has become in North Korea a casual, oft-used recreational and health aid. A powerful stimulant it may be, but in North Korea it is seen as beneficial to the user, used as lightly as smoking a cigarette. Its harmful effects evidently completely ignored.

The drug was originally introduced to the Korean Peninsula during the colonization period by occupying Japan. And during the 1970s North Korean diplomats were arrested while abroad, charged with drug smuggling. By the 1990s North Korea began manufacturing its own meth for export not too long after it sponsored local opium cultivation and opiate production, according to a study conducted by University of Missouri political scientist Sheena Chestnut Greitens.

Which opened a vigorous trade opportunity for the drug to be shipped across the border to China, or transferred at sea to the hands of criminal organizations such as Chinese triads or the Japanese yakuza, until the mid-2000s when government-sponsored meth production declined, leaving a surplus of people with manufacturing skills who began selling their product to the local market.

Though North Koreans in the face of a chronic shortage in health care have taken to self-help with the use of opiates and amphetamine-like stimulants, the government denies any of its citizens produce or make use of methamphetamine. Crystal meth, called "pingdu" as a transliteration of the Chinese word for "ice-drug", is customarily given as a gift, a particularly popular custom among young North Koreans.

Image via Shutterstock (L); and Flickr user Zennie Abraham, CC licence 2.0 (R)

"Ice has become a best-selling holiday gift item. Most of the buyers are young people, even those still in middle school."
"They usually buy ice to snort together during holidays. They want to forget their harsh reality and enjoy themselves… Social stigmas surrounding drug use [have disappeared], so people now feel that something big is missing if they don’t have ice or opium prepared as a holiday gift."
DPRK Anonymous Source