Half-Tonne of Opium Lands at a Troubled B.C. Port, and a Surrey Arrest Points to a Widening PRC-Mexico-Canadian Drug Pipeline

VANCOUVER — The container arrived carrying twenty industrial rolls of paper, and concealed inside ten of them was 520.6 kilograms of opium — the raw material of the Big Circle Boys’ heroin trade that drove Vancouver’s overdose deaths for decades, before fentanyl exploded in the Downtown Eastside around 2012.

Canada Border Services Agency officers made the find at the Tsawwassen Container Examination Facility, five kilometers from the Deltaport terminal, after intelligence from the agency’s National Targeting Centre and U.S. Customs and Border Protection flagged the shipment in January.

The disclosure came late, as it had before: officers intercepted the container in January but the agency announced it only this week — the same months-long lag that preceded its October disclosure of a May 2025 seizure of 4,300 liters of Chinese precursor chemicals bound for Calgary. The number carries political weight on its own. A single container held more opium than the 329 kilograms of opioids border officers seized across all of British Columbia in 2025.

It is the original product — the botanical opiate that built the heroin trade dominated by Chinese Triad networks led by the Big Circle Boys and Canadian-based narco kingpins including Tse Chi Lop decades before the synthetic era — surfacing in volume at the port that U.S. and Canadian officials have for years called the softest point in North America’s drug perimeter.

The day before the border agency went public, Surrey police announced the results of Project Phantom, a four-month investigation that ended in May with a search warrant, executed with border-agency assistance, on a single Surrey home.

What officers carried out amounted to a catalog of cartel distribution: 15.89 kilograms of opium, 35 grams of heroin, 468 grams of fentanyl — roughly 234,000 lethal doses — along with methamphetamine, cocaine, cannabis, and the scales, cookware and packaging of a distribution operation. Three men were arrested. Two, both foreign nationals, were removed from the country by the border agency without charge. The third, Gurjot Singh, 24, was charged with one count of trafficking and five of possession for the purpose of trafficking, and remanded into custody.

The two opium events are separate — a half-tonne marine container and a 16-kilogram household stash are not the same shipment, and nothing yet ties them. But they sketch the same picture: the botanical product moving alongside the synthetic, not in place of it.

The Bureau reported in December that synthetic inputs continue to pour through the same gateway, with Chinese precursors increasingly routed toward Vancouver as the southern U.S. border and Caribbean sea lanes close.