2025 Risk Report Confirms Hezbollah Crime Networks in Canada, Echoing U.S. Warnings Ottawa Ignored: Op-Ed

A federal assessment admits Hezbollah is tied to Canada’s fentanyl crisis and auto-theft epidemic—validating U.S. intelligence and my 2019 reporting, while exposing years of dangerous inaction.

OTTAWA — In 2019 I reported that professional money-laundering networks—linking Hezbollah operatives and Latin American cartels—were thriving almost with impunity in Canada, with what United States government sources called leadership cells for Western Hemisphere operations believed to be located from Halifax to Montréal to Windsor to Toronto to Vancouver.

These networks were washing drug cash at scale and combining with dominant new money-laundering service providers from China to warp the real-estate markets in Vancouver and Toronto. Ottawa’s response under Public Safety Minister Bill Blair at the time was tepid at best, proposing new federal anti-money-laundering measures that have done effectively nothing to counteract these networks. As I reported in 2019, my source with awareness of DEA probes into Canadian Hezbollah networks believed Canada had understood the threat for years and chose not to act decisively.

On top of that, two senior sources confirmed, the DEA had significant concerns that corruption within the RCMP was compromising their intelligence sharing and operational plans with Canada.

In January 2008, my source confirmed, a team of United States Drug Enforcement Administration agents traveled to Ottawa to meet RCMP leaders with what they described as “dirty calls”—live evidentiary intercepts—connecting Colombian narco-kingpins to operatives in Halifax, Vancouver, Calgary, and London, Ontario. The package included allegations from an elite Colombian police unit and extensive DEA wiretap records.

“We were giving RCMP dirty calls to phone numbers and identified targets in Canada,” a former senior United States official with knowledge of the meeting told me. “In our minds that should have been enough to begin intercepts in Canada.” According to this former official, RCMP leaders declined to pursue the cases, citing differences in court-disclosure rules and questions about the use of confidential sources. “We were dumbfounded,” the United States source said.

This week Ottawa reiterated what those American warnings signaled nearly two decades ago. A national risk assessment released by Canada’s Department of Finance details how Hezbollah and Hamas are carrying out a range of activities here to generate revenue. The report links Hezbollah’s financial operations to Canada’s fentanyl crisis and to our worsening car-theft epidemic, and spells out a route that has long been watched by investigators: the Port of Montréal is a “known link where luxury vehicles are shipped to Lebanon, financially supporting Hezbollah.” It also describes abuse of non-profit and charitable activities in Canada, and the use of both licit and illicit financial transactions to move value for extremist actors. Ottawa notes some recent counter-action—more outbound inspections, a national push on auto theft, and enhanced information-sharing.

But this is the first real public acknowledgment, though barely recognized yet in media reporting, as Macdonald-Laurier Institute security expert Casey Babb has noted, that foreign terror networks involved in extremism and pressure campaigns tied to the Middle East are also major organized-crime actors using Canada.

The federal document is unusually specific about how the money moves. It describes professionalized export pipelines for stolen vehicles in the Greater Toronto and Greater Montréal areas; freight forwarders and consolidators; shell and front companies; and trade-fraud techniques to disguise vehicle origin and value. In one strand that should focus policymakers, the assessment lays out used-car trade typologies previously seen in American cases: North American vehicles purchased or stolen, shipped through third-country hubs, resold for cash or equivalent value, and ultimately diverted into channels that benefit Hezbollah. These findings, drawn from DEA investigators, have been key sources for The Bureau’s ongoing reporting into transnational organized crime and money laundering across North America.

On the drug side, the government’s analysis places illegal drug trafficking at the top of Canada’s money-laundering threat landscape and underlines that laundering “enables criminal activity such as fentanyl trafficking leading to opioid overdoses that are devastating communities and families across Canada.”

The report situates Hezbollah within that criminal economy, not as a peripheral beneficiary but as a disciplined financial actor with relationships spanning Latin America, Canada, and the United States. That conclusion aligns with years of field intelligence that tracked Hezbollah figures moving between narcotics brokers, used-car exporters, and remittance and trade channels, with proceeds routed toward the group’s military aims.

The report also turns to the charitable and non-profit sector. It emphasizes that the vast majority of Canadian organizations present little or no risk. But it is explicit that misuse of charities and non-profits has been observed as a prominent financing method for Hamas and Hezbollah.

As the new report reminds readers: “Several terrorist entities listed under the Criminal Code in Canada that fall under the category of politically motivated violent extremism, such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Khalistani violent extremist groups Babbar Khalsa International and the International Sikh Youth Federation, have been observed by law enforcement and intelligence agencies to receive financial support originating from Canada. FINTRAC’s 2022 Operational Alert on Terrorist Activity Financing identified Hezbollah as the second most frequently identified international terrorist entity to receive outgoing Canadian funds.”

The new document doesn’t probe as deeply as my 2019 reporting, which showed that by 2014 Canadian and American officials were converging on the same conclusion: Hezbollah had embedded itself in cartel operations. A resurgent offshoot of the Medellín Cartel, La Oficina, along with other syndicates, was purchasing services from Hezbollah’s elite business wing—known in DEA records as the Business Affairs Component. Its mandate, according to those records and Colombian prosecutors, was to funnel a share of billions in drug-smuggling and professional money-laundering proceeds directly into Hezbollah’s military objectives. These pipelines did not operate in isolation. Criminal networks and businesses in China and Hong Kong played crucial roles in the money-washing schemes that simultaneously fueled North America’s drug markets and financed Middle East violence.

Hezbollah’s reasoning, captured in a 2016 Miami affidavit I obtained, was not only financial but strategic: the group believed the drug trade was “damaging or weakening their enemies both in the form of drug addiction and in terms of the societal and economic costs associated with combating trafficking and addiction.”

That logic helps explain why veteran American agents named the sprawling, years-long inquiry “Operation Cassandra”—after the Greek figure cursed to issue true warnings no one would heed. When U.S. investigators later revisited the evidentiary record, they were struck by how frequently Canadian cities surfaced alongside established narco-terror hubs such as Panama, Beirut, and Jordan.

“It really bothered me. It was very clear how Canada was a very, very big part of Hezbollah’s transnational narco-terrorism,” a former U.S. official told me in 2019. “But RCMP made it very clear at that time they didn’t want to bear down on money laundering and drug trafficking.”

Even Canada’s own financial watchdog has now confirmed the trend.

But Canada has been largely inactive while an integrated terror-crime economy took root in our export lanes, our ports, and our financial circuits. The government has now acknowledged the core facts in its own words. The next step is operational. Will Canada heed the recommendations of experts from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and update our laws such as Stinchcombe, which are cited by Canadian police and prosecutors as reasons not to work with American agencies to prosecute global fentanyl and terror networks that are using Canada with ease? Anything less, and this week’s assessment will read, years from now, like one more ignored Cassandra warning.