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Canada’s authorities is to bolster its funding in border safety after Donald Trump threatened to impose steep tariffs over unlawful immigration and drug smuggling throughout the US-Canada frontier.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met Canada’s provincial leaders late on Wednesday to agree a united response to the US president-elect’s pledge this week to impose 25 per cent tariffs on all merchandise from Mexico and Canada, which he stated would stay in place “until such time as drugs, in particular fentanyl, and all illegal aliens stop this invasion of our country”.
After the assembly with Trudeau, Canada’s public security minister Dominic LeBlanc stated: “We believe that there is a circumstance where we can make additional investments to reassure Canadians that all of the measures necessary are in place and will continue to be in place”, though he declined to say how a lot more money the federal authorities would make out there.
The US-Canada border is the longest on this planet, stretching practically 9,000km throughout land and water. Safety on land is mild; there are few partitions or fences and in locations it’s marked by easy stone markers alongside residential streets. Whereas main highway crossing factors have checkpoints, the boundary is basically managed by cellular patrols, leaving it weak to smugglers of migrants, medicine and weapons.
Washington’s incoming border tsar, Tom Homan, stated in a tv interview earlier this month that “Canada . . . can’t be a gateway to terrorists coming to the United States”. “It’s an extreme national security vulnerability on the northern border, and it’s one of the things I’ll tackle,” he added.
The variety of migrants caught attempting to cross from Canada into the US jumped from 27,180 in 2021 to 198,929 in 2024 — an increase of just about 600 per cent — in line with US Customs and Border Safety information.
Canada’s provincial leaders have criticised what they are saying is a failure by the federal government in Ottawa to prioritise border safety. Ontario premier Doug Ford on Wednesday stated he hoped the assembly with Trudeau can be “the start of a more proactive approach from the federal government” and would present that it “takes the security of our border seriously . . . or risk the economic chaos of Trump tariffs”.
About 8,500 frontline Canada Border Companies Company employees monitor the Canadian facet of the border and the just about C$3.6bn (US$2.6bn) value of products and providers and about 400,000 individuals who cross every day. However their union says 2,000 to three,000 extra border officers are wanted. “The union has been vocal about the lack of staff at the border for years,” stated Customs and Immigration Union president Mark Weber.
Regardless of the criticism, Trump’s issues about medicine coming into the US from Canada usually are not backed up by official information.
Canadian officers admit Mexican drug gangs have shifted their operations north because the US has tightened its southern border controls. However US border safety figures present brokers seized a mean of simply 800 grammes of fentanyl a month on the Canadian border between January 2022 to October 2024, in contrast with about 821kg of fentanyl a month on the Mexico border over the identical interval.
Canada has its personal fears over border safety. Trump has pledged to hold out mass deportations of undocumented migrants as soon as he takes workplace early subsequent yr and Canadian officers worry many may head north to keep away from being caught by US immigration officers.
Quebec’s premier, François Legault, who has been an outspoken critic of border safety, late on Wednesday stated: “It is important to secure the borders in both directions. We don’t want to have a new wave of immigrants, but it’s also important that Mr Trudeau tables a plan to reassure Mr Trump.”
This story has been amended to indicate that 400,000 individuals cross the US-Canada border every day
