The Decibel - Why Canada struggles to stop the illegal wildlife trade

Episode Date: June 29, 2026

Billions of dollars of illegal wildlife parts get trafficked around the world each year. Think elephant tusks, rhino horns, polar bear pelts and even some rare plants, like wild ginseng. One of the countries caught up in these criminal networks is Canada. Jenn Thornhill Verma looked into how Canada has become such a hub in the illegal wildlife trade and why the organized crime is flying under the radar. Her reporting is part of The Globe and Mail’s Surfaced series in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network. Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

There's a very ordinary-looking building near Ottawa full of extraordinary things. Rino horns, carved elephant ivory, shark fins, corals, tropical hardwoods, elephant tusks, queen conch shells, reptile products, tiger peltz, lion peltz, a partially taxidermed made polar bear pelt, narwhal tusks, walrus tusks, black bear gallbladders, while ginsing roots. These are contraband. confiscated by the government as part of the fight against the illegal wildlife trade. And journalist Jen Thornhill Verma recently got the chance to see these items in person. Those are just a fraction of the goods that travel through criminal networks around the world. And Canada has become a nexus in these networks, which also trafficked guns and drugs. Jen has been reporting on this as part of a series on the wildlife trade,

and she's on the show today to walk us through it. She'll explain how this happens and why critics say that Canada is lagging in stopping this crime. I'm Susan Krishinsky-Robertson, filling in for Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi, Jen, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. So to start, can we get a sense of how big the illegal wildlife market is? What do we know about how much money is flowing through this black market?

There's a real hesitancy to assign dollar values to illegal wildlife trade, but we thought that that was really important. But I'll say that this figure is a floor and not a ceiling. So the estimate that's commonly cited is U.S. 20 billion annually. The reason that's considered an undercount is because it doesn't actually capture all of illegal wildlife trade and environmental crime. So it doesn't include illegal logging and fishing, for example. I think the reason why there's a hesitancy to put that figure on it is because it's most definitely an undercount. The other reason is enforcement officials have become wary of advertising just how lucrative this crime can be. and so naming a dollar figure risks becoming a recruitment pitch.

Yeah, absolutely. And yet it is quite lucrative, right? I mean, those items you listed in the intro, it sounds like each one of those must go for thousands of dollars. Yeah, the two we actually put figures on came from Environment and Climate Change Canada specifically. So we met with a senior wildlife officer, Jean-Francois, and he was holding up a rhino horn tusk, a black rhino horn tusk. He estimated it had a value of $200,000 on the black market. And he used it as an example because he said, you know, if you got caught with this on a first offense at the airport,

then you might be looking at a $20,000 to $30,000 fine. But if you got caught with the equivalent amount in cocaine or $100,000 worth of cocaine, you would go straight to jail. The other example he gave us was about black bear gallbladder. that to a poacher, it might be worth roughly $150, but it could fetch $2,000 to $10,000 in East Asian markets. So the markups rival those on illegal drugs. Wow. And so you made that drug comparison.

I mean, just like drugs, we know this is illegal. But what does the law actually say about the sale of these items? The Convention on International Trade in Endangered species of wild fauna and flora or cites, it is an international treaty, including Canada, 185 parties, and its intention is to protect endangered species from being traded into extinction. So CITES regulates the trade, including the legal trade, and international movement of animal and plant species. And that includes live species as it does dead species. So, you know, parts and pelts that we've been talking about, that are, and this is important, may become. so they are or they may become threatened with over exploitation because of trade pressures.

So that's the international law. But domestically, Canada has its own law. This too is a mouthful. Wild animal plant protection and regulation of international and interprovincial trade act, or reprita, as they call it. And that is really, Environment Canada is the management authority. The main purpose is to implement CITES by protecting Canadian. foreign species of animals and plants that may be at risk of that over-exploitation.

Got it. The other reason why this law exists is because you want to protect Canadian ecosystems. So somebody might want something as a pet that isn't native to Canada. And so, you know, that too would be a reason why something might be illegal or not able to be traded. So the law covers both live and dead animals. For the purposes of our conversation, we're going to focus on the trade, mostly in dead animals and plants here. And we've been talking a little bit about imports. But what about exporting wildlife

parts that come from Canada? Is that legal? This is such an important question. And we wanted to make sure we get this right. Because there are examples of legally harvested species. We drew on a couple of Arctic examples like polar bear, narwhal, iconic megafauna that people relate to Canada and for which indigenous communities have the right to hunt and trade. But under CITES and Canada's domestic laws, those products, Narwal Tosks, polar bear pelt, and parts, other high-value Canadian species, they can be legally exported, but each requires a permit that documents how it was acquired, you know, who hunted it where, with source and origin verified against provincial harvest records. So we gave a couple of examples of how legal harvest can enter illegal markets. One through a taxidermist who attempted to export a polar bear on false pretenses using a false export. So they acquired it legally but then tried to export it illegally.

And then another where it again was legally harvested narwhal tusk polar bear pelt, but they tried to export it to a market where those products are illegal for import. So who exactly is buying these goods, Jen? We looked at Environment and Climate Change Canada's reports to Parliament that they conduct annually, and it gives some of the reasons for this. So some of them could be medicinal, traditional medicine markets. Black Bear gallbladder is a good example of that. The bile is a prized ingredient in traditional medicines.

Another big reason is hunting trophies. There was a Mexican hunter's case where they acquired polar bear. Pelt and Narwhal Tosk legally, but tried to export it to Mexico where that import is illegal. And there's also commercial reasons. So culinary examples, you know, restaurants that were importing endangered European eel destined for your sushi plate. So, you know, there's a range of reasons why there's interest in these products. Okay. So let's trace the root then. If someone wants to buy one of these animal parts, where do they go? Who's running? Who's right? running the trade.

On the commercial side, I mean, Canada is both an exporter and importer of wildlife undercities. And Environment Canada's own reports show hundreds, even thousands of specimens that are legally traded every year, mostly with the U.S., the European Union, East and Southeast Asia. So there is a huge legitimate trade that hums in the background. The problem is when legally acquired goods are fraudulently moved through that same system. And I think that's how it commonly occurs. So the same commercial infrastructure that handles legal trade can also then handle illegal trade.

Auction houses are a good example of that. We gave a few examples of convictions that occurred in 2015 and 2016, where, you know, in one case you had quote unquote antique ivory tusks they'd sold were actually from elephants killed too recent to qualify for an antique exception. In New Market, there was another auction house that was mailing an ivory tusk to a U.S. buyer. That's an illegal market. And they had labeled the package as a gift ornament with no return address. U.S. Fish and Wildlife picked that up. And another example in Montreal where everything from narwhal tusk, elephant ivory, wallers ivory, leopard, lynx fur, coral were sent to buyers in three continents without the required permits.

So no doubt, these are auction houses that are also engaged in legal trade, but they're using the same channels for illegal trade. But there's also some criminal channels that are at play here, right? How do we know that organized crime networks are connected to all of this? I spoke to Interpol's Jose Adrian Sanchez-Ramero, and he said, wildlife crime, environmental crime in general, it's purely organized crime. That's a quote. He said, if you look at how they organize themselves, the kind of structures they use, shell companies, money laundering, transferring schemes, they're the exact same modules that organized criminal groups who are operating on drug trafficking are using. Low risk. So they're using the same trafficking flows, low penalties, which we'll get into, but high reward.

They can earn the same income from illegal wildlife trade as they can elicit drugs. So Sanchez Romero also said to me, the criminal organizations operate like. companies, they find the niche where there's a demand for a product. They know the level of enforcement is lower. The penalties are far lower. And that's a win-win for organized crime. There's also a Canadian researcher, Michelle and Agnostu, who's a postdoctoral student at Oxford University, who recently finished her PhD at the University of Waterloo and has really put out the most systematic research on illegal wildlife trade in Canada with her work. Before she published, there were single-digit research papers about this. And I think her work in particular is really going to change the scope of

what we know about illegal wildlife trade in Canada. And, you know, when I asked her, why, why is this happening? She said, if you have all of this infrastructure to move illegal commodities from point A to B, and that's drugs, firearms, people, all kinds of things, shifting in the wildlife is such a low-risk crime. And you can make so much money that it just makes good sense from a criminal perspective. We'll be right back. Okay, Jen, so that's how it happens. Let's look at how Canada might stop this. What's the current approach to enforcement here?

It starts with the people who are physically checking shipments, customs agents at ports of entry and airports doing the inspections. But once something is flagged, it goes to the specialists. And the specialist, the wildlife enforcement officers, they're actually split across departments. I mean, Environment and Climate Change Canada covers international and interprovincial trade, interrestrial wildlife, polar bears, deer falcons, wild ginseng, fisheries and oceans, Canada handles aquatic species, narwhal, elvers, sturgeon. And then you also have provinces and territories that layer their own laws and officers on top of that. So any wildlife trade that's happening within a province of Ontario, for example. So there's no single agency. I mean, Environment Canada is the management authority for the international body cites.

But there's no overarching strategy that really ties all of this together. And I think that really came out of Dr. and Agnostu's work. You know, she heard enforcement officials in Canada say that they were embarrassed to say how many staff they even had. Some described that they had fewer staff now than they did in the 90s because the priority for this issue had shifted. She described that they didn't have the tools that they need to be able to conduct these investigations. So the way that Sheldon Jordan described this, I mean, he used to be the Director General for Wildlife Enforcement and Environment and Climate Change Canada was that Canada has all of its parts, but it's not yet functioning as a system. Right. And so a system like that, it naturally leads to backlogs, right? But if this is illegal and organized crime is involved, why isn't this the job of the police? Well, sometimes the police and, you know, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, for example, are the first point of contact or the Ontario Provincial Police or the Montreal Police. I mean, one of the specimens that we saw was an elephant tusk that landed in the Environment Canada seizure room because Montreal Police had confiscated it during a drug raid.

didn't know what to do with it. It's the specialized environmental and wildlife officers who really have to then follow the trail through to conviction. It's like you have these rules without the enforcement capability to actually execute. And you do have these rules, but is this actually a crime under the criminal code? It is not. Wildlife trafficking crimes do carry criminal sanctions, right? You can get jail time, you can get penalties. But because they have their own wildlife protection, law, they fall outside of their criminal code. On paper, a first indictable offense can achieve a maximum fine of $1 million and five years in prison. None of the examples that we saw came anywhere close to that. So, Jen, do we then have a sense of how effective Canadian enforcement officers are

at catching these traffickers? I think we do. Dr. Anagnostu's research asked enforcement officials in Canada, whether they felt wildlife crime was actually prioritized. And in Canada, just six percent of those that she interviewed said yes. And it was the lowest of the three countries that she had spoken to enforcement officials. She also spoke with officials in South Africa who gave that at 23 percent and Hong Kong at 18 percent, two places that are widely recognized as hot spots for the illegal wildlife trade. So I wanted to say that because even the people doing the job don't think it's being taken seriously. And I think the numbers back that up. We looked at all of Environment Canada's reports to Parliament, and these are their performance reports against this wildlife protection law.

And between 2016 and 2024, the nine years for which we had complete data, there were over 28,000 inspections. That produced 2,000 suspected violations. That was reduced to 423. further investigations, ultimately 102 convictions. Wow. That's roughly one conviction for every 277 inspections. And just in 2024 alone, that's the most recent report, 6,600 inspections, five successful prosecutions. Wow, just five.

Just five. And I, you know, earlier I was thinking about this because a message that resonated was, well, why would criminals do this? Because they have low risk, high reward. Well, on the enforcement side, it's. the mirror image. High effort, almost no return. That is the problem. More than half the enforcement officials and experts in Dr. Anna Agnoste's research said penalties in Canada are too low. And one official told her it's actually cheaper to break the law than to comply with it. The fine would

often cost less than the license would have to do, you know, whatever that particular example was legally. I think it's also structural. There are severe backlogs. DNA ballistics testing is a good example of that, no technology to get into locked phones. So messages between traffickers will sit there on red. We heard about underpaid demoralized officers and that investigations that could actually dismantle a network, an organized crime network, not just interrupt a single shipment, takes years to build. And most agencies don't have the dedicated staff timer resources to come close to that. So, Jen, you mentioned that people who get convicted do get a fine, although there are there's some debate about whether that's a deterrent. But how much are we talking about here? Can you

give me some examples? Yeah. On paper, a first wildlife offense carries up to a million and five years. So in terms of the fine and the prison time, in practice, we found that the penalties that we looked at, we specifically looked at the enforcement notifications of convictions that Environment Canada publicized. And that's important, right? Like, this is a selection by a sample. We're aware of that. But Environment Canada told us that they selected these particular cases because these are cases for which they can show and make an example of. They're both important from a conviction standpoint and important for public awareness. And yet, you know, in practice, most penalties are below $50,000. Many are below $20,000.

We actually found only two fines since 2011 that broke the $200,000 mark. So I think that in and of itself, you know, gives us a good example. of where the fines are at. They're nowhere near the statutory maximum for first offenses. So why are the fines so low? Sheldon Jordan, a former director general of wildlife enforcement and Environment Canada. He's also an ex-interpol official. He told us that it's been since 2009, since the penalty framework had even been reviewed. It would take at least three years to even undertake a review. But given it's been, you know, 15 years more than that, and the fines will have gone through at least 20 years without revision, quietly losing value to inflation the whole time,

that that is also part of the problem. The other thing that we found was, I mean, the law says prior convictions should be treated as an aggravating factor with higher minimum fines for repeat offenders. But in the cases that we examined, there was no evidence of that happening in practice. And so how do Canada's penalties compare to other countries? I talked to Sheldon Jordan about that. He said, much like Canada, there are plenty of other countries that have statutory maximums on the books that almost never get used. Part of that is the nature of the crime itself. Most wildlife trafficking is nonviolent.

There's no direct human victim in the way that there is with, say, drugs or weapons trafficking. And he says that shapes how courts and prosecutors. prioritize it everywhere, not just here. It is true that the U.S. tends to come down harder, but that's also true across the board. The other thing that he raised was, look, having the convention, CITES, and countries signed on to that, means that countries have agreed to the same terms. And where they differ, absolutely, and I think is often talked about at their conference of parties, is on enforcement and penalties. And so I think, you know, a good question to be asking, as much as it gives us comparator cases is what Canada doing, delivering what it ought to.

And I think based on this investigation, we can say, no, it's not. Dr. Ednaugnogastri's research and the work coming out of a new network that Sheldon Jordan created on environmental crime tells us that capacity just doesn't match the scale of the problem. And in some ways, I mean, Canada is, it has its outlier factors because it has vast wilderness. three ocean basins, patrol blind spots because of its geography. So, you know, as much as it helps to sort of think about and compare against other countries, we also need solutions that consider the size and scale of our problem. So you mentioned that there were two cases with big fines. Can you tell me about one?

Yeah, Gregory Logan, a former Royal Canadian Mounted Police Officer in New Brunswick, ran a cross-border narwhal tusk smuggling operation for seven years. In 2013, he was fined $385,000. It was the highest fine ever levied under this federal act, but it's also still less than 40% of the maximum. He did get an eight-month conditional sentence. Four of those months were under house arrest. This was an operation conducted by U.S. officials in Canada

called Operation Longtooth. After he served his time in Canada, he was extradited to the U.S., where he was charged and convicted on money laundering and ended up getting five years in prison there. So, you know, it makes an interesting case because Canada treated it as a wildlife offense, of course, but the U.S. treated it as organized financial crime. And had a much bigger penalty. And had a much bigger penalty. But even in Canada, right, where it's the largest fine ever, it's still so much

much lower than the maximum. This is it. And it was meant to be a case study in wildlife enforcement. And I have to say that's the case that piqued my interest. What have we learned? You know, it certainly doesn't sound like in the period since then we see changes in the penalty system. So, Jen, Canada is really lagging behind here.

Are there any signs that the country may be taking more action to stop being such a hub for the illegal wildlife trade? There are some strong signals. Since 2017, Canada's taken part in every edition of Operation Thunder. It used to have a different name, but this is the Interpol-led crackdown wildlife crime that's orchestrated annually to seize products on import and get a global picture of illegal wildlife trade. In 2019, Canada became the first G20 country to ban shark fin imports and exports. We also saw revisions to elephant ivory and rhino horn products. have followed in 2024. There's also been from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, more Ocean Patrol cooperation, and by Thin Track, a push to trace money laundering that's tied to the illegal wildlife trade. We also saw that last week, G7 leaders named environmental crime as part of the same criminal economy as drug trafficking with a pledge for joint financial investigation.

So those are all strong, positive signals. And some of those improvements that you mentioned just there, Jen, happened during Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's tenure. Prime Minister Mark Carney is obviously under different pressures and has different priorities. So why should beefing up enforcement to fight the illegal wildlife trade be something that the government should prioritize right now? Dr. Michelle Nagnostu put it this way. She said Canada is well positioned to be a global leader on this. Canadians genuinely care about wildlife. And Canada also doesn't have the systemic corruption problems that a lot of other countries have that are dealing with the illegal wildlife trade.

But she says, look, that advantage won't last indefinitely and we need to act on it. I think the other thing is, is, look, there's a reason why these laws exist in the first place. CITES and Canada's own legislation aren't there to shut down trade. The rules are also there to make sure species, thrive and are not traded into extinction. I think the whole framework is built to facilitate legal trade and prevent the illegal kind. And I think right now that second half, preventing the illegal trade is the part that, you know, clearly isn't working. And if Canada wants to actually live up to the intention behind these laws, that's where its investment clearly needs to go.

Jen, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me. That was environmental journalist Jen Thornhill Verma. This story is part of the Globe and Mail's surfaced series in partnership with the Pulitzer Center's Ocean Reporting Network. That's it for today. I'm Susan Krishinsky-Robertsin, sitting in for Cheryl Sutherland. Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Levy McLaughlin, and Michalstein. Our editor is David Crosby.

Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks for listening.