U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats of annexationism and global tariff chaos have upended Canada’s federal election, turning Canadians’ attention away from the country’s failed domestic policies and towards international affairs. Yet, protecting Canadian sovereignty requires a strong society, which includes fixing the national addiction crisis and restoring order to our streets. Given that the Liberals have abjectly failed in this respect, it would be understandable for voters to be looking elsewhere for a fresh direction.
Overdoses have exploded since the Liberals took power a decade ago, causing over 50,000 opioid-related deaths since 2016, while the violent crime reductions achieved during the Harper era have been largely reversed. Violent behaviour and open drug use, previously quarantined to a few distressed neighbourhoods, are now endemic throughout many Canadian downtowns.
Not all of this can be blamed on the federal government, but reckless policies have exacerbated what might have otherwise been a more manageable crisis.
A problem of complacency
Soaring drug-related deaths, for example, can be attributed to the mid-2010s proliferation of Chinese-made fentanyl, an opioid that is roughly 50 times more potent than heroin, and commensurately more lethal. China criminalized fentanyl in 2019, after being accused of intentionally flooding North American streets with it, but then used tax breaks to incentivize the export of the drug’s chemical “precursors” (constituent ingredients) instead. This gave Canadian gangs the means to expand into fentanyl manufacturing, which they have been prolifically successful at.
There is almost nothing that the Liberals could have done to change China’s drug laws and export policies—only pressure from the United States ultimately proved effective. However, they should have made a far greater effort to combat illicit imports from abroad.
Take the Port of Vancouver as a case study. Despite being a major waypoint for smuggled drugs and precursors, it has not had a dedicated police force since 1997 (for comparison: the Port of Seattle, which sees comparable shipping volumes, has over 100 officers and 50 support staff). As such, less than 1 percent of incoming cargo is checked, and, even when smuggling is identified, cases often languish with no officers to attend to them. Local mayors have spent years begging for more policing, with one telling the CBC in 2023 that there is “literally no downside” for organized criminals to set up shop in his city’s port.
Canadian ports fall under federal jurisdiction, so this problem is unambiguously a product of Liberal complacency. They should have hired new RCMP officers years ago to fill these gaps, especially since the associated costs would’ve been relatively modest—perhaps $15-30 million per year, if one extrapolates from typical RCMP salaries and assumes some overhead. For context, Canada’s new border security plan budgets $1.3 billion over six years, atop existing expenditures.
It appears that a hiring spree will not be forthcoming, though. Instead, the federal government recently expanded security clearance requirements for employees of Vancouver’s ports, and announced that modern scanners will be purchased to better detect illegal cargo. While these belated solutions are better than nothing, they seem more symbolic than substantive: only significantly bolstering port policing, as Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has promised to do, will begin to make a dent in the problem.
Canada’s continuing crisis
As with international trafficking, the federal government cannot be held fully responsible for Canada’s turbocharged drug crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic was profoundly destabilizing for the country and unavoidably compounded poverty, homelessness, and poor mental health—all of which increase drug consumption and crime.
Yet these harms were aggravated by Liberal policies that hollowed out the criminal justice system and fostered a culture of impunity among organized gangs. Notably, the Liberals passed Bill C-75 in 2019, which greatly loosened bail conditions and mandated that arrested individuals be released as soon as possible. Not to mention Bill C-5 in 2022, which removed mandatory minimum sentences for drug trafficking and imposed greater use of conditional sentencing for traffickers and drug importers.
These reforms, in conjunction with a bleeding-heart judiciary, mean that fentanyl traffickers often now receive scandalously light sentences and easy access to bail. First-time street-level fentanyl dealers in B.C., for example, are typically given only 18-36 months in jail, which Pivot Legal Society, a drug user advocacy group, claims is among the harshest sentencing for such offenders in the country.
In this context, it is entirely unsurprising that Canada has been flooded with drugs and that fentanyl “superlabs” are germinating throughout the west coast—without adequate punishment, there is no deterrence.
The Liberals have shown no interest in reestablishing mandatory minimums, and have made only perfunctory efforts at tightening bail, so there is little reason to believe they can fix the status quo. In contrast, the Conservatives have vowed comprehensive bail reform that will keep criminals off the streets, even if that means bypassing judicial opposition through the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms’ notwithstanding clause. Poilievre has similarly promised harsh mandatory minimums for fentanyl dealers, ranging from 15 years to life in prison.
The Conservatives have also vowed to stamp out “safer supply,” an experimental program that distributes free addictive drugs, including fentanyl and other opioids, to dissuade use of riskier street substances. The Liberals recklessly championed this experiment for years, only to quietly drop their support and cut federal funding after it became undeniable that a significant portion of these drugs, which do not need to be consumed under medical supervision, are just resold on the black market.
Yet “safer supply” is still available throughout Canada, especially in Ontario, thanks to provincial inaction and ineptitude. This is something that the Liberals don’t seem keen on proactively changing, which gives yet another reason for political change: by criminalizing most safer supply prescribing, a strong new federal government can take leadership where the premiers have failed.
Finally, longstanding regulatory failures have turned Canada into an international hub of money laundering for transnational crime networks. Just last year, the U.S. government fined TD Bank $3 billion USD in a historic money-laundering case and chastised the Canadian institution for enabling drug trafficking and willfully failing to monitor suspicious transactions affiliated with Mexican cartels and the global fentanyl trade. While Trump’s tariff threats prompted the Liberals to announce increased penalties on financial crime last December, critics have dismissed the new fines as comically low and “PR hay.”
It is unpopular right now to say that Canada is broken, which is understandable, because no one wants to seem weak when facing a foreign threat. But our national dysfunction is a reality we have to live with, whether we look at it or not. Ending a decade of Liberal governance would help us tackle our addiction and crime epidemics, enabling our country to be sturdy in an uncertain world.
