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Canada’s government is to bolster its investment in border security after Donald Trump threatened to impose steep tariffs over illegal immigration and drug smuggling across 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 products from Mexico and Canada, which he said would remain in place “until such time as drugs, in particular fentanyl, and all illegal aliens stop this invasion of our country”.
After the meeting with Trudeau, Canada’s public safety minister Dominic LeBlanc said: “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”, although he declined to say how much extra money the federal government would make available.
The US-Canada border is the longest in the world, stretching nearly 9,000km across land and water. Security on land is light; there are few walls or fences and in places it is marked by simple stone markers along residential streets. While major road crossing points have checkpoints, the boundary is largely controlled by mobile patrols, leaving it vulnerable to smugglers of migrants, drugs and weapons.
Washington’s incoming border tsar, Tom Homan, said in a television 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 number of migrants caught trying to cross from Canada into the US jumped from 27,180 in 2021 to 198,929 in 2024 — a rise of almost 600 per cent — according to US Customs and Border Protection data.
Canada’s provincial leaders have criticised what they say is a failure by the government in Ottawa to prioritise border security. Ontario premier Doug Ford on Wednesday said he hoped the meeting with Trudeau would be “the start of a more proactive approach from the federal government” and would show it “takes the security of our border seriously . . . or risk the economic chaos of Trump tariffs”.
Some 8,500 frontline Canada Border Services Agency staff man the Canadian side of the border and monitor the nearly C$3.6bn (US$2.6bn) worth of goods and services and about 400,000 people who cross each year. But their union says 2,000-3,000 more border officers are needed. “The union has been vocal about the lack of staff at the border for years,” said Customs and Immigration Union president Mark Weber.
Despite the criticism, Trump’s concerns about drugs entering the US from Canada are not backed up by official data.
Canadian officials admit Mexican drug gangs have shifted their operations north as the US has tightened its southern border controls. But US border protection figures show agents seized an average of just 800 grammes of fentanyl a month on the Canadian border between January 2022 to October 2024, compared to about 821kg of fentanyl a month at the Mexico border over the same period.
Canada has its own fears over border security. Trump has pledged to carry out mass deportations of undocumented migrants once he takes office early next year and Canadian officials fear many could head north to avoid being caught by US immigration officials.
Quebec’s premier, François Legault, who has been an outspoken critic of border security, late on Wednesday said: “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.”
