Our ports have become a pipeline for toxic drugs, foreign interference and lost investment

Canadians spent much of this past year debating sovereignty. The conversation was overdue. But sovereignty is not only about resisting American pressure at the negotiating table. It also requires controlling what crosses our borders. Right now, Canada does not.

Every day, thousands of shipping containers move through Vancouver and Prince Rupert. They carry lumber, canola, potash, and consumer goods. They also carry methamphetamine, fentanyl precursors, and contraband bound for overseas markets, because Canada has left its ports dangerously easy to exploit.

A new City of Delta-commissioned report by Scott McGregor for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy that fewer than two per cent of containers arriving in Metro Vancouver are X-rayed and fewer than one per cent are physically opened and searched. Radiation scanning detects radiological material but not narcotics, weapons, or prohibited goods. At those rates, traffickers are not deterred. They calculate the odds and ship anyway.

McGregor, a former intelligence adviser to law enforcement and co-author of The Mosaic Effect, which documented Chinese Communist Party interference operations in North America, argues Canada’s Pacific gateway has become too predictable, too fragmented and too under-resourced for the threat it faces.

The threat is not hypothetical. In 2023, the Canada Border Services Agency seized more than 6,330 kilograms of methamphetamine in four export shipments from B.C. ports, all headed for Australia. That is the weight of a small car, one drug type, one year, going out. The agency’s own internal audit confirms it does not systematically target outbound cargo, vessels or crew. Canada screens a fraction of what arrives. It barely glances at what leaves.

Meanwhile, 1,826 British Columbians died from toxic drugs in 2025. Nationally, Canada lost more than 6,100 people to substance-related deaths in a single 12-month period. The supply chain enabling those deaths runs, in significant part, through ports Ottawa has chronically under-policed.

No single federal body owns the problem. Responsibility is scattered across port authorities, border services, federal police and transport regulators. The Vancouver Fraser Port Authority ended its financial contribution to the RCMP-led waterfront enforcement unit in 2015. The Union of B.C. Municipalities has pressed Ottawa for dedicated funding for port policing ever since. Ottawa has not delivered.

The same gaps that allow drug traffickers to move contraband also offer hostile governments opportunities to gather intelligence, evade sanctions and interfere with supply chains. Nearly one quarter of Canada’s merchandise imports arrive by sea. A Pacific gateway that criminal networks treat as predictable is one that foreign adversaries will exploit as well.

Western Canada’s economy depends on exports reaching global markets. When confidence in Canadian ports erodes, investment follows more secure gateways. The message already has a price tag. Last year, Nutrien, the world’s largest potash producer, chose Longview, Washington, for a new export terminal worth up to $1 billion, passing over every Canadian West Coast option. A port system that cannot secure itself will not win that business back.

The remedies are not revolutionary. Canada already knows what to do. Target outbound cargo. Expand inspection capacity. Put one agency clearly in charge. Vet port workers more rigorously. Publish the results so Canadians can measure progress. Other countries have done versions of all of it. What has been missing is the political will to treat port security as the economic and national security priority it plainly is.

Canada’s Pacific gateway is too important to leave unguarded. The report is out. The evidence is public. Ottawa should act.

Dr. Marco Navarro-Génie is the Vice-President of Research and Policy at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. An expert on radical revolutionary movements and political identity, he is a recipient of the King Charles III Coronation Medal for exemplary public service. He is the author of three books, including the 2023 release Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic, co-authored with Barry Cooper.