The Decibel - Despite what Trump says, barely any fentanyl comes from Canada

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

Last week, the U.S. Senate vote to pass Senator Tim Kaine’s resolution to end the state of emergency that allows U.S. President Donald Trump to issue tariffs on Canadian goods. President Trump’s stated reason for the tariffs is that the fentanyl flowing into the United States from Canada “constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat.” The number he’s been citing is 43 pounds for the fiscal year 2024.Globe reporters Kathryn Blaze Baum, Colin Freeze and Andrea Woo looked into that number and found that the White House has been using misleading data to justify tariffs on Canada. Today, Kathryn is on the show to explain what their investigation found, how much fentanyl seized in the U.S. last year can actually be attributed to Canada, and what kind of impact the Senate resolution could have on the trade war.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Last week, on the same day that U.S. President Donald Trump issued tariffs on dozens of countries, the U.S. Senate voted to pass a resolution. It would end the state of emergency that allows Trump to issue tariffs on Canadian goods. The resolution was put forward by Democratic Senator Tim Kaine. …belief that Canada is not an adversary, they're an ally. Canada is not the 51st state, they're a sovereign nation. Trump has said his reason for declaring a state of emergency is that Canada is contributing to America's fentanyl crisis.

He said that 43 pounds of fentanyl came into the US from the northern border in 2024. The White House called that a, quote, massive 2050 percent increase, end quote, over the year before. Now that does sound like it would be a huge increase, but the Globe wanted to look into where those numbers came from. So Globe reporters Catherine Blaisbaum, Colin Fries, and Andrea Wu dug into this. And their reporting was cited last week in the U.S. Senate. The Toronto Globe and Mail is doing an assessment of the 43 pounds and here's what they found.

That 43 pounds is an overstatement. So today, Catherine's here to explain what they found in their investigation, how much fentanyl actually went from Canada to the U.S., and what kind of impact this Senate resolution could have on the trade war. I'm Manika Raman-Wilms and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Catherine, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. So before we get into the data, let's just clarify, why would Trump need to declare a national emergency at the northern border?

Like in order to issue these tariffs against Canadian goods, why did that need to happen? Well, if he wanted to do it swiftly and without friction from Congress, this was the best and only way to do it really was to effectively declare an emergency that would unlock his ability to introduce import taxes without congressional approval. Okay, so this is a way to bypass Congress essentially then. Exactly. And where does this, I guess, legal framework come from that links like a state of emergency to economic measures? So it basically goes back to this 1977 statute called the International Emergency Economic

Powers Act, or you might hear it referred to as AIPA, and it evolved out of kind of a First World War era act called the Training with the Enemies Act. So it gives you a sense for the instances in which it was intended to be used. And the statute basically allows the president this broad latitude to respond to what is deemed in the statute as a quote unquote unusual and extraordinary threat from outside the US that places at risk the country's quote national security, foreign policy or economy. Okay. All right.

So this does sound kind of like high stakes there. Do we know when this measure has been used in the past before? So it has been wielded by, you know, administrations in the past. This isn't the first time that AIPAA has been invoked in order to sort of bypass Congress to do things quickly. Instances include during the Iranian hostage crisis, Jimmy Carter used powers under the act to freeze Iranian government assets. And also after the September 11th attacks, George W. Bush used the act to freeze Iranian government assets. And also after the September 11 attacks, George W. Bush used the act to freeze assets belonging to terrorist groups. But notably, IEPA has never been used to impose tariffs.

Okay. So this seems to be a unique situation so far then? Entirely. All right. So Catherine, you along with our colleagues, Colin and Andrea, you actually looked into the numbers that the White House has been citing when it comes to fentanyl that crosses from Canada to the US The White House said that 43 pounds of fentanyl came from Canada because that's how much was seized in the northern border region in 2024 but let's actually get into this. So what does that mean than the northern border region?

That's a great question and that strikes at the heart of this whole thing which is the conflation of northern border with Canada. And it's entirely crucial to this discussion that we parse what is the northern border. And so, you know, you might think that the northern border would be the actual physical US-Canada border, the boundary between the two countries. That would be a logical conclusion for anyone to come to. Instead, the US border agency defines the northern border region as this massive swath of US territory. It's 34 states all the way down to Oklahoma. It includes Alaska.

And it's more than 5 million square kilometers, which is accounting for somewhere in the order of like 63% of the country's land area. Okay, so that's the northern border region. That's a huge region. That's over half the country. It's a huge region. That's over half the country. It's a huge region. Okay. Okay, so this extends as far down as Oklahoma. So this is all part of this northern border region.

Right. So if the northern border region encompasses so much of the U.S., I guess how can they tell where the fentanyl in that area is coming from? First of all, I just want to be super clear that what the implication is there is that anything that is seized in the northern border region is kind of currently getting blamed on Canada to some degree even though it may have literally nothing to do with Canada. The seizure may have nothing to do with Canada and so the big problem is that no one seems to have parsed the language there or parsed the data at least not at

the White House level and at least not publicly. And so if you're going to be citing northern border figures, and we learned that that is such a big area, how much of it is actually of Canadian origin? And we had no idea what we would find. Okay. So when you actually started looking into the data, then what did you find? Where was this fentanyl in this region actually coming from? It was really interesting. I remember Colin Fries, who worked on the initial story

with me. We were sitting in one of the rooms here in the newsroom. And we were looking through the data, and we saw this 43-pound figure. And we start looking at it sort of month over month, and we see there's this big spike in the summer of 2024. And so we think, hmm, let's dig into that. What is this seizure that contributed massively

to this 43-pound total? And so we started digging into it. And long story short, through extensive interviews with law enforcement, through data analysis, and by poring over court records, we were able to determine that there was a massive seizure, well, massive by Northern border standards, roughly 15 pounds that had been seized in Spokane, Washington, you know, over 100 kilometers from the border with Canada. And not only that, it had no known connection to Canada whatsoever. And in fact, US authorities had traced that fentanyl to Mexican cartels. Wow. Okay. So you found out that this massive seizure really nothing to do with Canada.

Tell me more about like, why is there such a massive seizure in Spokane, Washington? Is this a hub? I don't know for this kind of trafficking. Yeah, it was a really interesting question that sort of came up through the reporting. And basically, law enforcement sources explained to us that Spokane and this area that it sort of the region that it sits in is kind of a hub for trafficking. And that's because of a couple of reasons, most of them

geographical. One is that Interstate 90 runs through it, and that connects the port city of Seattle to the west. It also connects it to a lucrative drug market inland to the east. And so when we started to see that this particular sector, this particular region was responsible for sort of an outsized portion of the fentanyl, Andrea Wu, our reporter in Vancouver, went down to Spokane and she started talking to people. And, you know, just the on-the-ground reporting was... it corroborated what Colin and I were getting through talking to law enforcement sources, you know, DEA agents, things like that, over the phone.

But Andrea managed to track down a former drug dealer who basically laughed in her face at the suggestion that there was any Canadian fentanyl in that area. And he said he was exclusively dealing with Mexican nationals operating in the area. Wow okay so she seemed to get kind of direct confirmation from someone involved in this that really it's not really coming from Canada from what he knows at least. Yes exactly it corroborated everything we were hearing from everybody. This is really interesting okay so so after this initial part of the investigation then Catherine you kept looking into this with our colleague I know Mahima Singh who was also working on this with you.

Katherine, do you have a sense of how much fentanyl seized in the US actually did come from Canada last year? So we can tell you what the US border agency has positively attributed to Canada. And that number is tiny. So in fiscal year 2024, we determined through the data that was released to us that 0.74 pounds or 335 grams.

So sorry, it's less than a pound. Less than a pound. And this is the figure, this is the weight of fentanyl that the US border agency has been able to determine has originated from Canada and it has been intercepted in the northern border region. Less than a pound. I mean, I'm thinking that's like what, a can of beans or something? Yeah. I was looking at it and looking it up and it was a can of beans or a can of pop.

And this is by no means to minimize the deadliness of that amount. I mean, the teensiest bit of fentanyl can be lethal. But what we're talking about here is a state of emergency declared over figures that don't tell the story that the White House says they do. Wow. And if that's the total amount, less than a pound, I mean, I imagine that's a bunch of smaller seizures. So this is, do we know like the size of what those actual seizures were? Yeah.

I mean, in one, I was looking through the data and there's a little bit of color you can sort of see on this like spreadsheet. This one was by mail. This one was in an automobile. And you know, for example, I remember seeing one that was from last summer, and it was a commercial air passenger. Seems to have been caught with six green fentanyl pills. And then in several other instances,

the opioid had been trafficked through the international mail system, in which case authorities were able to check manifest documentation for information about the shipper. Just for context, based on the data that we received, which was through freedom of information laws in the United States, that meant that barely more than one-tenth of one percent of fentanyl seizures in the northern border region have been positively attributed to Canada by the United States Border Agency in fiscal year 2024.

We'll be back in a minute. Okay, so Catherine, your investigation found that less than a pound of fentanyl seized in the US last year could actually be traced back to Canada. And you mentioned this was from Freedom of Information requests from the US. You dug into this further. What else did you find about the fentanyl that was seized in this northern border region? Yeah, dealing with the data was quite challenging and it was frustrating because what I really wanted at one point was just get on the phone with somebody at the border agency who dealt

with the data to talk through some of this stuff because there were some discrepancies between what had been released to me and what had been posted publicly to their online portal. And effectively- Because that was what the White House has been citing. Exactly. 43 pounds, which is very different. Exactly. And what we're seeing is 555 pounds was seized in the northern border region in the same

fiscal year. So sorry, from a Freedom of Information request, you got that number 555 as opposed to 43 pounds, which is what they've been citing. Correct. And no one could explain to me where that discrepancy came from. We felt confident though, because the data that we were looking at, we confirmed this is what I had requested. The language was very clear, ran it back up the chain.

No one took issue with it. Just nobody could really explain it. And so basically what we found was Mexico was listed as the country of origin in 35 seizures for a total of 174 pounds or 31%. The United States was the country of origin in 66 seizures for a total of 156 pounds or 28%. So just to make super clear, things that are being seized in the northern border region are actually originating in the United States itself and yet are being attributed to the

northern border region, which people conflate with the Canada-U.S. border, which people then blame on Canada. Wow. And then taking another, just sort of another layer of the data, nearly 224 pounds of fentanyl was deemed to be of quote unquote unknown origin, and that is about 40%. And I just want to make very clear that there are some limitations in the data, the first being it's possible that some of the unknown seizures involved fentanyl with a connection to Canada.

And I should also make clear that the data released to the globe includes only closed cases, so it doesn't contain seizures of drugs that haven't been analyzed or are subject to an ongoing or active investigation. So for example, we were able to ascertain again through interviews, again through poking and prodding of the agency that there was a seizure last, I believe it was June, of 5.5 pounds in Detroit and US authorities did connect that fentanyl to Canada. Now it's possible that that is, you know, because it's an active investigation, that's why it wasn't released to us.

It wasn't included in the data released to us. It's also important to note that the RCMP sort of is pushing back at that assertion and says that Canada was merely a way station in that case. Okay, so this is really fascinating here. So from this information you're looking at, so you've got a total of 555 pounds of fentanyl, some from the US, some from Mexico, some from an unknown origin, and then less than 1% is

actually directly attributed to Canada. That's that 0.13% number then. That's what's coming from Canada. Just seeing that kind of as a pie chart is pretty compelling. Yeah, especially when this is being used as the reason to impose tariffs. This is the reason for a national emergency. Exactly, and again, no one is saying that Canada is not a problem. You know, we are. We do export fentanyl.

But the problem is that the White House is citing figures that don't say what the White House says that they say. Wow. So of course, as you mentioned there, both Canada and the US, we do have fentanyl problems, right? I guess I wonder, the fentanyl that circulates in this country, in Canada, do we know where that comes from?

China has for years been a major source of fentanyl and also the precursor chemicals that are used in manufacturing the synthetic opioid. We do know, though, that domestic production within Canada has really taken off since the flow of fentanyl from China was staunched under new Chinese legislation about five years ago and

So we know within the law enforcement community and based on intelligence reports that have been released and including through access to information requests that my colleague Colin has done it's widely believed that the excess product is being exported to lucrative international markets including You know potentially Australia, New Zealand and Europe and yes in some cases the United States excess product is being exported to lucrative international markets, including, you know, potentially Australia, New Zealand, and Europe, and yes, in some cases, the United States. Okay. So this is a really interesting part of this investigation that these, this was cited by US Senator Tim Kaine last week when he brought his motion before the Senate. What exactly was this resolution that he put forward?

So the resolution effectively sought to terminate the state of emergency at the northern border. Because if you can terminate the state of emergency at the northern border, the thinking is that you can roll back the powers that Mr. Trump sort of wrangled through the invocation of the AIIPA, that International Emergency Economic Powers Act. OK.

And you managed to actually speak to him before the vote in the Senate. What did he say about all of this and the discrepancies in the numbers? He was, he's really hearing from constituents who are, you know, worried about what they're facing economically, but also very angry about the way that the relationship between Canada and the U.S. is now deteriorating. And so, you know, he was very frustrated, you could tell, and he was talking about this quote unquote fake emergency that basically he was accusing the Trump administration of inventing in order to push forward its and impose its trade agenda.

Hmm. You said he was hearing from his constituents. He's a senator from Virginia. So what is he hearing from people? So yeah, when I was speaking with Mr. Cain, it turned out that he was on route to go speak with some craft distillers to hear about their concerns about what had been going on with their businesses and sort of the prospect going forward. And you know, there's just tremendous anxiety in general, given that Canada is the state's largest trading partner. Virginia exports $3.4 billion in goods to Canada annually and imports roughly the same

from Canada. And so, you know, his travels across the state was really here from the everyday people who are experiencing this, the business owners. And so one of them was a business owner named David Cattino, and he's the founder and CEO of the Reservoir Distillery. And I ended up speaking with him later in the day after he spoke with Senator Cain. And he told me that import taxes have already affected the business with Canadian customers. And he gave me a pretty clear example where he said his distributor in Alberta told him

by email that Canadians are quote unquote furious, and they had warned that it would be very difficult for American businesses to regain their footing with consumers north of the border. So he's super frustrated. So it sounds like this was a result of Canada's retaliatory measures against the US then. Exactly. We're not going to put American products on our shelves in our LCBO or other places that sell alcohol.

Yeah, wow. OK, let me go back to the Senate resolution that we started talking about. So 47 Democratic senators voted to pass it. Four Republican senators also broke rank and voted in favor of this as well. And this resolution did pass. So Catherine, what kind of impact can it have on this whole tariff situation?

I mean, at first, I think most people who were paying attention to this thought that this vote in the Senate was going to be largely symbolic. That first of all, it wouldn't pass. And even if it did, it would have sort of no practical implications for Congress. And the reason for that is because, despite the fact that this would be, that this was a significant rebuke to the Trump administration in his second term, that it wasn't guaranteed a vote on the House of Representatives floor. So typically, a bill goes from the Senate, it gets passed, and then it goes on to the next stage, which is the House, and then it goes on to the next stage, which is landing on the President's

desk and he can decide whether he wants to sign it or he wants to veto it. In this particular case, the House representatives, I guess, sort of sniffing out that this kind of a challenge was on its way, basically included a measure in a recent omnibus funding bill that precluded the chamber from voting on the termination of an emergency order that would kind of force the rolling back of these tariffs. So what's happening now, and it's super interesting, and as a Canadian sort of watching this unfold in sort of the political machine in DC, learning a bunch of new things about how this all works. But despite the fact that there was this measure snuck into this bill, there is a lever that can be pulled, and it's called a discharge petition. Now, a discharge petition can be filed

by a member of the House and you file it with the clerk and what you need is 218 signatures. And then if you get those signatures, it forces the vote onto the House floor. The issue here is, is that the Democrats have 213 seats. So they're gonna need to bring over five Republicans. You know, they brought over four senators. So this isn't in the realm of the impossible. And so on April 3rd, Representative

Gregory Meeks, and he's a ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, he announced plans to actually discharge this petition to try to force a vote to terminate the president's tariffs on Canada. And so now he's got to do the hard work of trying to wrangle 218 signatures. Getting the other 212, probably not going to be so hard. Getting the other five, we'll have to see. Okay, yeah. So it's those Republicans that they need to basically get to vote with them that's going

to be the challenge. Exactly. And then let's say it does make its way through the House, okay? Then it lands on the President's desk and he could veto it. And if he does veto it, it then goes back to Congress and the vote would require a two thirds majority in each of the chambers in order to succeed. So it's got a steep uphill climb,

but I think that there is some momentum here and potentially a message is being heard in the White House. Yeah. So it sounds like it's a pretty tall order to actually get this to pass. But I guess just the fact that it's gotten this far, does this, I guess, does this send a message to the president? I think that's the hope among those who are concerned that it won't go very far legislatively.

And so we'll have to see, is there an instance where there's just enough uproar in the constituencies that have elected Republicans that those Republicans are now, you know, they can't help but, you know, side with the Democrats on these tariffs or at least side with the Democrats on the idea that Canada isn't an enemy. And so, you know, does that kind of cohort get loud enough that Trump sees that he needs to pay some attention? I mean, there's also the midterms coming up in 2026. So there are some senators and some House members who are going to be, you know, looking

ahead to next year thinking, you know, if I don't handle this right, my seat could be at stake. Yeah. I think this is also kind of an interesting moment because honestly for much of this trade war, we, meaning Canada, we haven't really seen many allies in the US standing up and being quite vocal in support of Canada. Is this one of the first shows of support like this? It was really interesting speaking with Senator Kaine and then getting the statements from

different senators' offices that I had reached out to and then also hearing them on the Senate floor but for like a marathon, you know many hours in the lead up to the vote a bunch of senators took to the floor and you know they all were just effusive about their love of Canada and I think that in this moment where you know the relationship is just so strained and there's just so much uncertainty. And Canadians are just wondering why have we been hit with the same sort of punishing tariffs as countries that pose valid national security threats. I think this is a time where Canadians were looking to see like who is standing up for us in Washington.

And there are people who are standing up in Washington, including those four Republican senators who broke rank with their party. And I think, I thought it was quite interesting There are people who are standing up in Washington, including those four Republican senators who broke rank with their party. And I think, I thought it was quite interesting to see the news out of Alaska that a Republican representative there had proposed a joint resolution in a state legislature that would affirm Canada's sovereignty and recognize the enduring and centuries old ties between Alaska and Canada.

So we can take that as a warm hug from the colder north. Yeah. Okay, well, this is, you know, after all of this that we've talked about here, then it sounds like, you know, maybe this specific legislation, maybe this actually won't make such a huge impact. But I guess I do wonder about the insight that we've gained into how or if Trump might actually walk back the state of emergency around Fentanyl. Like, is there anything to indicate that there is a possible off ramp at some point? I remember when the Liberation Day tariffs were announced and the executive order came out.

My editor and I were texting and he sent me, you know, a screenshot of the executive order and he had circled and I had like looked at the exact same line that he had circled, which was basically a line to the effect of if the fentanyl emergency is terminated, tariffs will be reduced. And it felt like language that signaled that this emergency isn't going to go on forever, and it remains to be seen when that will be rolled back, but it seems as though an off-ramp has been thought about in the Trump administration. We just don't know when that could be, it sounds like. Correct, at least at the very least, he has signaled that this will and could end.

Catherine, thank you so much for your reporting and for being here today. Thanks for having me. That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramon-Welms. Our associate producer is Aja Souter. Our producers are Madeleine White, Michal Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer and Matt Frainer is

our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you tomorrow.