Donald Trump has said it over and over again: Canada isn't doing enough to combat the trafficking of fentanyl, a drug 30 times more potent than heroin. The northern neighbor is even letting it into the United States without resistance, he says. "The fentanyl coming through Canada is massive," Trump said on January 21. This was one of the reasons he had put forward for imposing 25% tariffs on Canadian exports, before backtracking.

On February 4, in an attempt to appease Trump, Canada announced the appointment of a "fentanyl czar" to deal with the issue. Ottawa is also creating a joint team with the US to combat drug trafficking, organized crime and money laundering. Although the crisis is slowing, over 200 Americans still die every day from fentanyl-related overdoses.

In fact, the amount of fentanyl seized at the Canada-US border is hardly impressive: 19.5 kilograms were seized by US border agents between October 2023 and September 2024, compared with nearly 9,600 kilograms at the borders with Mexico. In 2022, moreover, a report from the US Congress estimated that Canada was not a major country for fentanyl. How much of Canada's production goes to the US? "It's very difficult to know, and it's not necessarily Canada's primary market, which exports as far away as Oceania," said Yvon Dandurand, professor emeritus of criminology at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia.

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