Stonewalled: RCMP Rejected U.S. Bid to Target Cartel–Indo-Canadian Trucking Routes as Cocaine and Meth Surged North
Projects Cobra and Brisa, once hailed as record seizures, collapsed in court as weak laws and timid leadership in Ottawa shielded cartel networks.
TORONTO — Canada’s federal police stonewalled a U.S. government request six years ago to jointly investigate a surge of Canadian commercial trucks traveling into the southern United States to pick up staggering amounts of cocaine and methamphetamine from Mexican cartels and drive it back into Canada for consumption and onward shipment overseas, a U.S. official told The Bureau.
They said the refusal was another major example of non-cooperation between American and Canadian police—alongside allegations that the RCMP also blocked DEA efforts to probe the fentanyl superlab in Falkland, B.C.—and helps explain why cartel trafficking into Canadian cities has exploded in recent years.
Canada’s systemic failure was most clearly exposed in two marquee cases, Project Brisa in Ontario and Project Cobra in Alberta, where record-breaking seizures and triumphant press conferences collapsed in court, with all charges dropped, millions in taxpayer funds wasted, and suspects and cartel infrastructure released. Today, unprecedented hauls continue to move north through corridors in Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec, and across the Akwesasne border crossing in southeastern Ontario and northern New York.
More broadly, the RCMP’s decision to decline joint work with American agencies on commercial trucking routes before 2020 is seen by investigators on both sides of the border as symptomatic of a deeper crisis involving Canadian laws that provide powerful legal protection for transnational drug gangs.
Combined with weak and politically influenced police leadership, these flaws have allowed Mexican cartels to exploit commercial trucking networks dominated by Indo-Canadian operators to flood narcotics into Canada. Recent statements from Canadian police—and notably, a CBC report highlighting an unprecedented wave of 6,000 tons of cocaine moving across the northern border from the United States in less than a year—address the scale but fail to explain the cause.
Shockingly, a senior U.S. official said Canadian authorities have not only refused to work jointly with their American counterparts on Mexican cartel trucking networks, but also complained when U.S. investigators intercepted Indo-Canadian trucking drug pickups inside the United States. Instead, Canadian police often insisted on letting the trucks roll north in hopes of making seizures on Canadian soil, even when larger interdictions and successful prosecutions under stronger American laws could have been made earlier south of the border.
“This is the biggest threat facing Canada, because it’s just open borders,” a senior U.S. source said of Mexican cartels moving drugs across the U.S.–Canada frontier. “We’ve been talking to RCMP for years about this, but nobody really wants to take it head on as a North American project. Six years ago, we went to the RCMP and said, ‘Hey, we really need to work this together.’ They said, ‘No, there’s no appetite.’”
The source said U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officers later discovered that Canadian police had become aware of Canadian trucking companies planning drug pickups in the United States. Instead of sharing information and working with American counterparts, Canadian police allowed the shipments to cross the border, hoping to make arrests in Canada. When that happens, the source said, in most cases the Canadian legal system lacks the capacity to dismantle the suspected networks—if they even make it to trial.
In the Brisa and Cobra cases, where there was some information sharing but far short of full cooperation, entire prosecutions were eventually thrown out.
Two Canadian laws now widely acknowledged by policing experts as structural hurdles—Jordan and Stinchcombe—were leveraged by defence lawyers in both cases. Jordan requires that defendants receive a trial within a strict timeline, putting serious pressure on Crown prosecutors to move complex cases through the courts. Stinchcombe compels police to turn over virtually all investigative information requested by defence lawyers. Together, the two rulings have repeatedly turned Canada’s biggest organized-crime investigations into collapsed prosecutions.
A pair of American and Canadian federal sources, who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak on sensitive cases, argued that while these laws represent a significant impediment, they can also be used as excuses by politically motivated police leaders in Canada.
“RCMP inaction and reticence has damaged international policing relations for decades,” a Canadian enforcement veteran asserted. “The work done by investigators however is not usually the problem. The majority of the damage has been caused by senior managers beholden to Ottawa. Bureaucrats and senior RCMP officials avoid risks that could affect their further political appointments, promotional opportunities or post-RCMP governmental careers.”
Brisa
The case of Brisa provides a stunning case study that helps explain why Mexican cartels are flooding Canada with cocaine and methamphetamine and producing fentanyl in remote superlabs. In June 2021, Toronto Police and federal partners announced the results of Project Brisa at a high-profile press conference, describing it as the largest drug seizure in the service’s history. At the centre of the investigation were tractor-trailers equipped with sophisticated hydraulic traps, designed to conceal and move hundreds of kilograms of narcotics per trip. The network was said to move cocaine and methamphetamine from Mexico, through California, and into Canada, supplying distribution hubs from Vancouver to Halifax.
More than 1,000 kilograms of narcotics were seized, including 444 kilograms of cocaine, 157 kilograms of crystal meth, 427 kilograms of marijuana and 300 oxycodone tablets. Police also seized nearly one million dollars in cash, 16 vehicles, and five tractor-trailers. Raids stretched across the country, touching major nodes of the Canadian trafficking economy: Vancouver, Surrey, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, Kitchener, Sarnia, Windsor, London, Guelph, Montreal, and Halifax.
But within two years the prosecutions collapsed. By 2023, Crown prosecutors had stayed all 182 charges, offering no public explanation. Defence lawyer Greg Lafontaine told CTV News Toronto that all the accused were free to go, adding that the Crown’s case began to unravel as defence counsel pressed on police investigative tactics. “They couldn’t do it in a timely fashion. At the same time, they were concerned about the evidence [that] was coming out was tending to bring various police techniques and sources of information into play potentially,” Lafontaine said.
That explanation points directly to the impact of Jordan and Stinchcombe.
A U.S. source pointed out the contradiction between Brisa’s public triumph and its courtroom collapse. “Project Brisa. That was commercial trucks. We’ve been telling them for years: let’s work commercial trucks together,” the source said. “They’re Canadian commercial trucks going to the U.S., picking up thousands of pounds of contraband. What better way to work it together?
“And then they have this press conference about Brisa, the largest drug seizure in the history of Toronto Police, all coming from California in commercial trucks. And then within a year they stayed all 182 charges and gave back all the evidence, the trucks.
“We were thinking, What are you doing? A, you just wasted all that money, and B, if you would just work with us in the United States, we could have put all those people in jail. But it seems like in Canada — No one asks the question I would ask: you just spent $5 million of taxpayer money on an investigation that resulted in nothing. How do you take responsibility for that? It’s mind-boggling for us on the U.S. side to see that. From a law enforcement perspective, we just want to stop that stuff, whatever it takes, whether it’s in the U.S. or Canada or both. And they just don’t want that.”
Toronto Police Service didn’t respond to detailed accountability questions for this story.
Cobra
The U.S. source also provided an unprecedented account of the collapse of Project Cobra in Alberta, including never-before reported allegations of dysfunction between Canadian and American police on the case.
“They dismissed all the charges last year, and it seems like they have no problem spending millions of dollars on investigations for several years and then just dropping every charge and then it goes by the wayside,” the source said of Cobra. “For us, that’s not acceptable, especially when we’re partners in that.”
In the midst of secret federal court proceedings, federal Crown prosecutors terminated the prosecution of five alleged leaders accused of running a cross-border drug trafficking operation for Mexican cartels. When charges were first laid, police described Cobra as Alberta’s largest drug case, involving the seizure of nearly one metric tonne of methamphetamine and six kilograms of cocaine with an estimated street value of $55 million. Police also seized luxury assets including a waterfront home and high-end vehicles. According to CBC, for the alleged leader, Ricco King—who has ties to Calgary and Halifax—it was the second time in five years he had avoided international drug importation charges. Four co-accused also had their cases stayed.
The decision came one day before defence lawyers were set to argue for a dismissal under Jordan. At the same time, defence counsel was seeking disclosure in federal court of information the Attorney General opposed releasing on national security grounds, involving sensitive RCMP investigative techniques.
But troubled relations between the RCMP and DEA meant the massive case was already in jeopardy even before defence counsel leveraged Jordan and Stinchcombe.
“We would find out that their targets would go into the States, pick up 500, 600, 700 kilos of meth, and then try to bring it back to Canada. We’d stop it, and then they’d get upset with us,” the U.S. source said.
The official added that Canadian investigators often insisted on operating unilaterally while presenting cases as “joint.” In their view, Canadian authorities preferred to avoid liability, erring on the side of staying or dropping charges rather than risking exposure of RCMP failures.
“On Cobra, it got to the point where we let them just do whatever they wanted to do,” the source said. “Then fast forward a year, year and a half—they drop all the charges. It’s usually a combination somewhere along the prosecution they messed up, and RCMP for the most part. But I think most of them in general, they try to weigh the risk-reward versus liability, and they want no liability whatsoever. So they always err on the side of dropping charges.”
Broader Breakdown
A Canadian source, directly aware of the breakdown in trust from U.S. officials in similar cases, said in a prior interview that American agencies have long worried the Canada Border Services Agency is plagued by corruption concerns and widely viewed as incompetent, even if many frontline officers are doing their best within what was described as a broken system. “CBSA were seen as tax collectors. It was a longstanding joke that they were basically collecting taxes for a mom and dad driving back with two packs of cigarettes and too many six-packs of beer, while behind it, there’s a truck coming with 200, 300, 500 kilos of cocaine. It was just ridiculous. And that’s how Homeland Security and DEA saw our CBSA.”
Asked to respond to U.S. allegations in this story—specifically regarding cases such as Brisa and Cobra—the Canadian source pointed to an even earlier precedent of non-cooperation. This time, it was RCMP leaders blocking their own officer’s proposal to work with American agencies to stop cocaine flooding north into Canada.