The Canada Cartel Connection

How Mexican mobsters mixed in with Canadian criminals

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By Katarina Szulc

Sitting in a residential apartment in southern British Columbia, Carlos was relaxed, displaying his chilled Sinaloan swagger, despite the baggies of cocaine, crystal meth and fentanyl dotted around and the AR-15 leaning up against a chair. In his late twenties, Carlos had been in Canada several years but spoke limited English and we talked in Spanish about his life, his beliefs - and the drug operation he was involved in. Carlos was moving dope in Canada as part of a network of traffickers linked to the Sinaloa Cartel, who see British Columbia as a strategic hub for the Canadian drug market and for shifting product into the northwest United States.

“They sent people from Sinaloa to Canada close to the American states [the cartel] is trying to reach. It makes trafficking easier and closer,” Carlos said. “The Asians are getting the chemicals, they have the contacts, mostly in China and they bring it here for us.”

I talked with Carlos last June in what could be the first journalistic interview with a Mexican cartel affiliate in Canada, the country where I was born and raised. But the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have been following the rise of cartels in the “Great White North” with alarm for several years.

“Their presence is more significant than most people realize,” a senior RCMP officer says. “These organizations don’t just ship drugs here. They have people on the ground, financial networks in place, and alliances with Canadian criminal groups that go back over a decade.”

The Canadian drug connection sprung into the headlines this year as President Donald Trump has attacked Canada over the trafficking of fentanyl south to Americans. After taking power on Jan. 20, Trump has used this issue to justify putting tariffs on Canadian goods, pushing North America to the brink of trade war.

Canadian officials have responded that fentanyl being seized from their side pales in comparison to that coming from Mexico. In fiscal year 2024, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents seized 43 pounds of fentanyl at the Canadian border, compared with 21,000 pounds on the southern border.

Yet the Canadian frontier is very different, and a lot bigger and less fortified, than the Rio Grande. Smugglers could be shifting much more fentanyl over the Rocky Mountains into the United States that is not being picked up by U.S. agents.

Carlos said they smuggle a lot of dope from…

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