The “Strong Borders Act,” Misses the Mark — Only Deep Legal Reforms Will Confront Canada’s Fentanyl Networks: OpEd

At a news conference in 2025 an RCMP officer powers up a commercial grade fentanyl lab structure seized in a BC investigation.

OTTAWA — Bill C-2, Ottawa’s so-called “Strong Borders Act,” promises to secure Canada’s frontiers with new surveillance powers, sweeping ministerial discretion, and higher penalties. But as veteran Canadian investigators know, the bill misses the point. It is an omnibus solution that expands the state’s reach online, while leaving untouched the very legal choke points that have made Canada a permissive financial platform and fentanyl laboratory for cartels, Triads, and state-linked terror networks.

For more than a decade, Canadian and U.S. enforcement leaders have pointed to the same failures. Police are confronting transnational fentanyl labs, a flood of Chinese chemical precursors, Hezbollah-linked laundering, and Mexican cartels setting up on Canadian soil.

Yet they are forced to fight these threats with laws “never designed for today’s criminal landscape,” as Canadian Chiefs of Police president Thomas Carrique recently warned.

Former RCMP investigator Calvin Chrustie testified before British Columbia’s Cullen Commission that, due to judicial blockages arising from Charter of Rights rulings, by 2015 it had become effectively impossible to obtain wiretaps on Sinaloa Cartel figures in Vancouver.

This year, RCMP Assistant Commissioner David Teboul said a proliferation of “commercial-grade chemistry” fentanyl labs in British Columbia — like the sophisticated factory dismantled last year in Falkland, north of Lake Okanagan, where Mexican cartels have quietly taken over domestic biker gang networks — underlined the urgent need for legislative reform.

Canada wasn’t always so overwhelmed by lethal foreign gangs. What happened? Overly permissive immigration rules and porous borders explain part of the story, but the deeper problem lies in the laws that have steadily eroded enforcement power since the early 1990s.

Instead of enabling prosecutions against transnational traffickers of humans, narcotics, and weapons, unintended consequences from misguided jurisprudence surrounding Canada’s Charter of Rights now ensure these cases almost always collapse, or are simply avoided by the Crown.

Two Supreme Court rulings — Stinchcombe and Jordan — have gutted the capacity to prosecute complex crime. Stinchcombe requires exhaustive disclosure of sensitive intelligence, often impossible in Five Eyes investigations that depend on close cooperation between Canada and the United States.

Jordan imposes strict trial ceilings that tick down while Stinchcombe disclosure battles drag on. Criminal lawyers know these two rulings function as trump cards stacked in favor of their clients.

The fallout is a grim roll call of major investigations that collapsed before trial in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec: Project E-Pirate, E-Nationalize, Syndicato, Cobra, Brisa, and Endgame all aborted. Project Collecteur — a landmark probe linking Hezbollah and foreign terror-financing networks across Canadian cities to transnational drug money laundering, built on U.S. and Australian intelligence — barely made it to court, despite its far-reaching implications.

It was crippled by RCMP corruption and by underfunded, risk-averse agencies that abandoned Canadian leads painstakingly developed by Five Eyes partners.

How bad was it?

Farzam Mehdizadeh, a major Iranian money launderer and suspected weapons proliferation actor who ran a Toronto currency exchange while shuttling bags of drug cash between Toronto and Montreal, escaped back to Iran just as the RCMP was poised to arrest him on money-laundering charges. The beneficiary of a leaky national police force, evidently.

A senior U.S. enforcement source told The Bureau that during Project Collecteur, the RCMP stumbled onto an even bigger Chinese money launderer while probing Iranian networks, but the agency ignored the file — reportedly unable to shift its original investigation focus onto new enterprise targets.

These kinds of policing failures and decisions are part of the reason President Donald Trump has said senior U.S. investigators told him that Canada lacks the resources and capacity to confront fentanyl trafficking gangs.

In Washington, there is frustration — and at times a lack of understanding — that Stinchcombe either bars or effectively scares the Mounties out of cooperating with U.S. agencies or sharing intelligence.

Derek Maltz, former DEA chief under President Trump, pointed to the Falkland fentanyl super-lab case — part of a U.S.-led probe into Chinese precursor suppliers — as the latest example of “historical issues with the RCMP not sharing properly,” calling it a “major disaster that happened on that big lab in British Columbia.”

“It goes down to the basic information sharing, the antiquated laws,” Maltz said. After meeting with current Canadian police leadership, he concluded: “They’re so far behind and the laws are so antiquated and so archaic.”

The cost is staggering. Officers walk away from enterprise files, knowing they cannot meet disclosure or trial deadlines. Prosecutors refuse to take high-risk cases. U.S. agencies stop sharing intelligence that could be exposed in open court. Canada defaults to “low-hanging fruit” prosecutions while the upper echelons of global networks operate with near impunity.

Meanwhile, at the border, permissive Non-Resident Importer rules allow foreign entities to move chemical precursors through Canadian ports under layers of corporate opacity. Chinese logistics hubs repackage bulk fentanyl shipments bound for Vancouver, obscuring Canada’s visibility into their true origin. Once in Canada, packages can be collected by foreign nationals who further conceal their identities. To visualize the scheme, think of an “end-to-end encryption” app — Chinese trafficking networks enjoy the same kind of seamless concealment when shipping narcotics into Canada.

At the same time, Vancouver’s port — stripped of federal police under Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government — has container inspection rates below one percent, according to a British Columbia study.

It doesn’t seem that Bill C-2 will do anything to address these core vulnerabilities. It gives Ottawa broad powers to expand online surveillance, which may help with the drug networks that now brazenly advertise street sales on social platforms. But it would do so by subjecting all Canadians to invasive cyber surveillance. The bill does not target the transnational criminals who are already easy to identify and well known to law enforcement. These networks continue to operate openly in Canada, confident that the Charter shields them from real prosecution.

Meanwhile, experts warn that parts of C-2 resemble Ottawa’s wish list of new powers tossed into a grab bag. The effect is the opposite of inspiring public confidence or addressing the real enforcement crisis. As written, Bill C-2 could do more harm than good. Mark Carney’s government should shelve it and start again with the reforms Canada actually needs.