Last week, world leaders in politics and tech convened in Paris for the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit.

Co-hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the summit also played host to vice president JD Vance on his first international mission.

A bust at the Port of Vancouver siezed 85 tons of fentanyl and methamphetamine, as well as ingredients to manufacture both.

Vance’s presence signaled the importance of the topics under discussion, which included the current arms race with China to achieve AI supremacy.

Despite the recent announcement of his plans to resign, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was also on hand to dispense the usual bromides about the need for clean energy to fuel our future robot overlords without offending the sky.

“With our G7 partners, we will be working to make sure the innovators have access to clean, reliable energy to power AI without hindering the fight against climate change,” Trudeau told the roundtable, which included Canadian and French officials, plus representatives from tech companies like Amazon, Dell, and IBM.

Faulty 'fact-check'

Bubbling under the surface at the summit was another issue: the current tensions between Canada and the United States over the 25% tariff President Trump just slapped on Canadian steel and aluminum.

The Canadian media’s reaction has been to circle the wagons to defend Dear Leader — unsurprising behavior from an industry on which Trudeau has lavished over $700 million in subsidies since 2019.

CTV News’ recent "fact-check" of Trump’s claims is representative. Only 0.2% of all fentanyl seized at the United States borders comes from Canada, the article proudly tells us. Never mentioned is another figure, much harder to calculate — the amount of Canadian fentanyl that customs fails to sieze.

While the mainstream Canadian media’s power is waning, it remains effective at shaping the narrative. Which is why most Canadians and Americans may not be aware of those reporters actually working to investigate this issue.

One such reporter is Sam Cooper, who has been digging deep into narcotics trafficking in Canada on his Substack, the Bureau.

Canada's drug hub

In a piece from last November, Cooper cites RAND Corporation defense researcher David Luckey, who traces the global supply chain of illegal fentanyl to China. Cooper than identifies Canada’s crucial role in this “ecosystem”:

“Reporting by The Bureau has found that British Columbia, and specifically Vancouver’s port, are critical transshipment and production hubs for Triad fentanyl producers and money launderers working in alignment with Mexican cartels and Iranian-state-linked criminals.”

In a recent viral YouTube interview, Cooper emphasizes that none of this is new, mentioning that a bust at the Port of Vancouver siezed 85 tons of fentanyl and methamphetamine, as well as ingredients to manufacture both.

In the same interview, Cooper points out that only .005% of shipping containers that move through the port are ever inspected.

Stories such as this incline one to doubt the mainstream media’s assertion that hardly any of the fentanyl destroying lives in America enters from the north.

So, too, does last October's bust of the largest Canadian fentanyl lab yet, deep in the British Columbia interior. Enough fentanyl was seized to kill everyone in Canada twice over.

This squares with a recent report from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Organized Crime Unit that at least 235 gangs in Canada are involved in the production and distribution of fentanyl.

Is it any wonder that Trump and American authorities have lost faith in the ability of the Canadian government to deal with the problem?

Border control 'a joke'

In another article, Cooper quotes a Canadian policing expert as saying that Homeland Security has “no respect” for the Canadian Border Services Agency. The expert continues.

“It was a long-standing joke that they were basically collecting taxes [from] a mom and dad driving back with two packs of cigarettes and too many six-packs of beer, while behind it, there’s a truck coming with 200, 300, 500 kilos of cocaine. It was just ridiculous.”

While the expert avers that there are some competent officers in the organization, the overall picture he presents is dire.

“It’s just run so poorly. The level of incompetence within Canadian law enforcement is staggering. I don’t think people understand — if they did, they’d probably be too scared to know how bad it actually is.”

The image of those trucks full of cocaine raises a question: Just who is transporting all of this fentanyl across the border?

Drug mule pipeline

In my own investigations, I found that one group of culprits keeps recurring in drug busts involving truckers at the border or within the United States: Punjabi immigrants.

Over the last few years, Canada’s trucking industry has absorbed a high number of Punjabi drivers, to the extent that they now account for 50% of the Toronto and Vancouver trucking markets.

Unfortunately, some of these new operators have been caught using immigration scams to bring their fellow countrymen to Canada as indentured servants, as reported in a 2019 investigation by Canada’s largest newspaper, the Globe and Mail.

Six years later, the government has done little to address this practice, which now seems to have a more sinister purpose than cost-cutting: the creation of an India-to-Canada pipeline for unwitting drug mules.

Then there are the more than $3 billion in U.S. fines recently levied against Toronto-Dominion Bank for fentanyl-connected money laundering. To appease his allies south of the border, Trudeau ordered increased helicopter patrols; how this measure is supposed to deter Triad drug traffickers and the corrupt bankers who help them remains to explained.

Head in the sand

Perhaps the strategy is simply to ignore what’s going on. That at least is the sense given by the recent sham inquiry into Chinese interference in Canadian politics. The justice handpicked by Trudeau somehow found nothing wrong, and no one was held to account.

Then again, Trudeau’s government was tied up with more pressing legal matters: namely, appealing last year’s Federal Court ruling that the use of the Emergencies Act to crack down on the truckers of the Freedom Convoy was a breach of Canadians' charter rights and “unjustified and unreasonable.”

“Unreasonable” is also a good word to describe Trudeau’s expenditure of scant enforcement resources and court time on chasing members of the Freedom Convoy to the ends of the Earth, rather than dealing with Canada’s growing and dangerous position as a global leader in fentanyl production and distribution.

At least, that’s how one imagines Trump might see the erstwhile leader of what he’s jokingly threatened to make 51st state: a man who’s wasted the last three years punishing the wrong group of truckers.