Canada’s Pacific Gateway Is Wide Open to Cartels and Hostile States

A new analysis warns that British Columbia’s ports have become a predictable platform for drug trafficking, sanctions evasion and foreign-state penetration—because Ottawa failed to invest in security.

B.C.’s northern Prince Rupert port is as exposed to foreign threats and cartels as Vancouver’s Deltaport, McGregor writes.

VANCOUVER — British Columbia’s Pacific ports have become an exploitable platform for what a new security analysis calls “hybrid threat pressure” — the non-kinetic tactics by which hostile states and transnational criminal networks penetrate supply chains, move contraband, launder money and position themselves inside critical infrastructure — because Canada never built the security architecture to match the trade strategy it laid over the Pacific.

That is the conclusion of a Frontier Centre for Public Policy essay published by Scott McGregor, a senior fellow at the think tank, combat veteran, and former intelligence adviser to law enforcement and government.

His finding is blunt.

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

That echoes earlier reporting by The Bureau on the work of Ashleigh Rhea Gonzales, a former Simon Fraser University data scientist and Mounted Police analyst, who argued that the Pacific Rim strategy begun under Pierre Trudeau curdled over decades into a vector for money laundering and foreign interference — with underground diaspora banking, opaque by design and knit together by community trust, its most predictable weakness and a lever Beijing's party-state was positioned to pull. Gonzales followed the money; McGregor follows the ports; each lands on a state that wrote a trade strategy without the security architecture to hold it.

The threat picture McGregor assembles is as sophisticated as the foreign adversaries that are exploiting Ottawa’s myopic failings.

“British Columbia’s ports move exports, keep store shelves stocked and connect Western Canada to global markets,” he writes. “They also sit at the front line of two converging problems: a lethal synthetic-drug economy that fuels organized crime and community harm, and a renewed era of state competition where adversaries use hybrid tactics, pressure below the threshold of open conflict, to gain leverage over supply chains, data and critical infrastructure.”

Drug traffickers use the ports to bring fentanyl precursors and cocaine in and to ship methamphetamine out to premium markets like Australia. Organized crime has infiltrated the port workforce itself, giving networks the insider access to contaminate containers and time shipments around enforcement. And hostile states — China foremost among them in McGregor’s analysis — along with sanctioned regimes such as Iran, per the advisories the essay cites, exploit the same seams for commercial intelligence collection, sanctions evasion and strategic positioning. Canada’s Centre for Cyber Security assesses that state-sponsored actors will “very likely” continue targeting the marine transportation sector to steal logistical and operational data.

The same footholds, the essay notes, can support disruption in a crisis. The gaps that let a trafficker move a container of fentanyl pills are the same gaps that let a state adversary map, penetrate and, if needed, paralyze Canada’s Pacific gateway.

The numbers underneath the argument come from Canada’s own public record. Citing the Policing Our Ports report commissioned by the City of Delta and prepared by Peter German & Associates in 2023, McGregor notes that while the Canada Border Services Agency scans all inbound containers for radiation, less than two percent of containers moving through Metro Vancouver are imaged with X-ray or gamma equipment, and less than one percent are physically opened and searched. At those rates, the essay argues, “traffickers treat detection as a manageable risk, not a deterrent” — the business model is simply built around the odds.

The outbound picture is worse, because there effectively is no outbound picture. CBSA’s own internal audit of marine-mode targeting, McGregor reports, states that the agency’s National Targeting Centre does not conduct targeting of exports, outgoing shipments, outbound vessels or outbound crew at all.

That structural blind spot exists even as export trafficking through British Columbia has been documented at industrial scale.