Inside China’s New Fentanyl Pipeline: From Mazatlán Through Vancouver to Los Angeles

U.S. officials believe Canada’s prime minister has minimized Canada’s role in global fentanyl markets as China shifts precursor and pill flows from Mexico.

BRITISH COLUMBIA — Chinese and Mexican cartel networks have increasingly routed container shipments of fentanyl pills and precursor chemicals through Vancouver as a production and export hub into the western United States and Asia-Pacific markets, a Trump-administration source has alleged, adding that U.S. officials believe Prime Minister Mark Carney has downplayed Canada’s role in fentanyl markets in meetings with senior State Department officials.

A U.S. investigator involved in global fentanyl investigations contacted The Bureau with these claims, citing details of recent seizures that, in their view, point to cartels exploiting Vancouver’s port as a convenient transshipment hub—moving narcotics globally under the cover of Canada’s trusted trade status.

“We are seeing containers going north from Mexico, from the port of Mazatlán, full of fentanyl pills going up to Vancouver and then being shipped down to western ports in the U.S. to make it look like the containers originated in Canada, to spoof our customs inspections,” the U.S. government source informed The Bureau, noting that Ottawa was receiving this sort of information from multiple U.S. sources, in addition to the FBI and Director Kash Patel.

What differentiates these claims from earlier statements by Kash Patel—who said in June that Mexican and Chinese gangs were shifting fentanyl production operations into Canada—is that the senior U.S. investigator interviewed by The Bureau pointed to ongoing probes tied to seizures that did not occur at Canada’s northern border, and to specific intelligence reporting informing those investigations.

Patel’s public comments came several weeks after a massive 4,300-litre seizure of chemical precursors shipped from China was intercepted in the Vancouver port system.

The Bureau has confirmed that the primary source of this story has knowledge of high-level meetings this year involving Canadian officials tasked with responding to increased pressure from President Trump, who has rapidly escalated a war on synthetic narco-traffickers by classifying fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction and designating a handful of Latin cartels as narco-terrorist entities.

“Another thing is we’re seeing fentanyl precursors going into Vancouver on a very large scale,” the U.S. global fentanyl investigation source added. “Sometimes they stop in Mexico and then get shipped north; a lot of times they just go straight from China.”

The U.S. official interviewed by The Bureau asked not to be named due to sensitivities in ongoing investigations. Broadly, Derek Maltz, who recently retired as acting DEA director for President Trump, confirmed a number of points made by the unidentified senior U.S. official cited in this story.

“A hundred percent, I agree with that assessment,” Maltz told The Bureau. “The criminal networks are always going to shift their operational routes, because the U.S. administration has made unprecedented movement against the supply side of the production of these deadly fentanyl substances.”

Maltz says that means Chinese-linked supply chains will likely adjust, routing more shipments through the Port of Vancouver—the fourth-largest port in North America by cargo tonnage—in part, he argues, because Chinese Communist Party–linked criminal networks have spent decades building a durable base in British Columbia. Yet, as he tells it, Ottawa’s enforcement capacity—and its candour about the scale of the threat—has lagged behind.

“You’re shutting down the southern border, you’re blowing up these fast vessels in the Caribbean, so we’re shutting down their ability to get stuff into America, and they’re just going to go to a different place. And Canada’s prime for that, because people in Canada haven’t been truthful.”