It’s been one week since U.S. president-elect Donald Trump’s threat to put tariffs on Canadian imports unless Canada addresses border security concerns, and questions are mounting on exactly what the government will — or should — do.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre on Sunday called for a border security plan that includes increased border patrols and technology to cut down on illegal drug trafficking, as well as partnerships between provincial law enforcement and the RCMP and Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA).
His call came after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made an unscheduled trip to Florida to meet with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate Friday evening.
A senior government source told Global News that Trudeau was ready to beef up border security by buying new helicopters to patrol the skies, which the source said the RCMP has sought for years.
That, the prime minister reportedly told Trump on Friday, was a done deal and a meeting will take place next week to put the plan into action, according to national security sources.
Premiers have called for additional policing resources, and Alberta has floated the idea of their own border patrol force. Federal officials have said they’re committed to spending more to “reassure Canadians” that the border is secure, Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc said last week.
Poilievre on Sunday said that Conservatives “will make accommodations to quickly pass a border plan if it goes towards fixing Trudeau’s broken border” amid gridlock in Parliament.
The RCMP said Friday it was looking to redeploy up to one-quarter of its eastern region workforce to areas considered an operational priority, including to the U.S. border.
Dennis Miller, vice-president of the National Police Federation, the union that represents over 20,000 RCMP members across Canada, said conversations are ongoing on how to quickly boost RCMP border resources until a long-term plan is put in place.
While he wouldn’t go into specifics, Miller pointed to the surge of resources in Ottawa after the 2014 Parliament shooting as an example of the police force responding quickly when needed.
In that instance, Miller said resources were pulled from other RCMP detachments across Canada. The force also drafted in cadets to provide a short-term security solution in the capital until the creation of the Parliamentary Protective Service in 2015.
“There’s definitely ways that we can put a Band-Aid on it temporarily until we can get the right amount of people trained up and prepared and then deployed to that capacity,” he said in an interview.
In the meantime, Kelly Sundberg, a Mount Royal University criminology professor and former CBSA officer, told Global News provincial and small-town municipal police services could “immediately” surge resources to assist CBSA and RCMP at the border.
Miller said any additional funding to the RCMP must be kept consistent so that it can last through future policing mandates, which are set by the public safety minister and can change between and within governments.
The NPF has asked Ottawa for $300 million over four years to hire 1,000 more RCMP officers and bolster overall resources.
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The Customs and Immigration Union has said 3,000 more CBSA officers are needed just to meet the agency’s current operation needs.
LeBlanc said last week his office has been working with finance officials, the RCMP and the Canada Border Services Agency “for months” to see what is needed and feasible. He said drones, helicopters and additional personnel were some of the resources being considered.
Chief border patrol agent Robert Garcia said last month on X that agents in the Swanton Sector, which covers Vermont’s border with Quebec, apprehended more than 19,000 people from 97 countries in the last year — more than the last 17 years combined.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection data shows its officers recorded nearly 200,000 encounters at the northern border between October 2023 and September 2024. The same period in 2022 saw more than 109,000 encounters and there were around 32,000 in 2020.
Calls to enhance port policing
A call growing out of British Columbia is to bolster policing at Canada’s ports, or re-establish a federal port policing agency or unit of the RCMP to combat global fentanyl trafficking.
B.C. Premier David Eby told the B.C. Federation of Labour this week that he’s been pushing Ottawa to bring back the Ports Canada Police, which was disbanded in 1997.
“We have called repeatedly, for example, for port police to ensure what comes into British Columbia is not contraband, is not illicit drugs or precursor chemicals,” Eby said in his speech.
The B.C. Conservatives have called on the NDP to immediately reconvene the legislature — which is not due back until February — to address port policing following Trump’s tariff threat, and send Ottawa funding request after passing legislation.
The party has also pushed for the return of the RCMP’s Waterfront Joint Forces Operation team, which folded in 2015 when the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority pulled its funding.
The RCMP’s Border Integrity program includes marine security units that work with other federal agencies to combat organized crime at ports of entry.
Miller said setting up a new waterfront force or unit will take time and resources, pointing to the protracted establishment of the Surrey Police Force to replace the B.C. city’s RCMP force.
“The logical approach is to fund the current system properly to ensure that it would be able to… enhance the current service that we have at Border Integrity,” he said.
Since the national force was dissolved, Canadian ports have been policed by a combination of private security companies and local police forces.
A 2023 report for the city of Delta, B.C., by Peter German — who authored damning reports on money laundering in B.C. casinos and real estate — equated Canadian ports to the Marlon Brando movie On the Waterfront, where organized criminals rule the docks and corruption is rampant.
The report said it’s believed less than two per cent of all containers moving through ports are imaged or scanned by CBSA, and less than one per cent are searched. Delta police released similar findings in 2019 just about containers moving through Deltaport, the busiest port in Canada.
Speaking to Mercedes Stephenson in an interview that aired Sunday on The West Block, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said many fentanyl products found in Alberta originated from B.C., and suggested the lack of port inspections as a factor.
“We’ve got a lot of product coming in from British Columbia,” Smith said. “Maybe one thing they could do is that they could monitor every single container that is coming into the port as opposed to just one per cent of them. If that’s the nature of the problem, then why don’t we demonstrate that we’re doing things to address it?”
Delta Mayor George Harvie told The Canadian Press last year that in conversations between city officials, the FBI and Seattle Port Police, it was “shocking” to the U.S. officials that there was no dedicated port police in Canada.
Enhanced screening was one of the tools recently deployed by the CBSA to counter international shipments of stolen vehicles.
An expansion of those tools, along with a boost to port policing, could show Trump that Canada is serious about countering fentanyl and precursor drugs, Miller said.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it seized more than 5,000 kilograms of illegal drugs at the Canadian border between October 2023 and September 2024. That included 19.5 kilograms of fentanyl — a more than 200 per cent increase from two years prior.
According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, two milligrams of fentanyl is a potentially fatal dose.
Multiple high-profile drug lab busts in recent months by RCMP and CBSA, in collaboration with U.S. partners, has shown Canada is taking the issue seriously, LeBlanc said Wednesday.
He said to expect more of those types of announcements to come in the months ahead.
—With files from the Canadian Press
