Unlock the White Home Watch e-newsletter without spending a dime
Your information to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
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 mentioned 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 mentioned: “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 obtainable.
The US-Canada border is the longest on the planet, stretching almost 9,000km throughout land and water. Safety on land is gentle; 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 essentially managed by cell patrols, leaving it susceptible to smugglers of migrants, medicine and weapons.
Washington’s incoming border tsar, Tom Homan, mentioned 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 making an attempt to cross from Canada into the US jumped from 27,180 in 2021 to 198,929 in 2024 — an increase of virtually 600 per cent — in accordance 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 mentioned he hoped the assembly with Trudeau could 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 Providers Company employees monitor the Canadian aspect of the border and the virtually C$3.6bn (US$2.6bn) value of products and companies 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,” mentioned Customs and Immigration Union president Mark Weber.
Regardless of the criticism, Trump’s issues about medicine getting into the US from Canada aren’t 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 12 months and Canadian officers worry many might 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 mentioned: “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 point out that 400,000 folks cross the US-Canada border day by day
