Comment by outrun86 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by outrun86 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Canadian here, who is also not a Trump fan. It is true that Canada has extremely lax border controls and there are complex organized crime networks that exploit this inside of and through Canada.

The US security establishment is aware of this, as is the Canadian security establishment. The 1% fentanyl headline is indeed widely reported, it’s also a red herring. The simple answer is Canada doesn’t really look, so not much is seen. More info here, by one of Canada’s best investigative journalists:

https://www.thebureau.news/p/trade-based-money-laundering-is...

IMO Trump is, as the official white house press release says, trying to put pressure on Canada to address this. Are tariffs the best way to do that? A valid question, for sure. Does he have other, possibly irrational, motivations? Also an excellent question.

But I see much Canadian and US commentary that assumes there is nothing rational about this at all, and that there is no Canadian border/security issues, and I would say that’s incorrect.

> The simple answer is Canada doesn’t really look, so not much is seen

Wouldn't it be the US, on their side of the border, who is looking for what is coming into their country, not Canada looking at what is leaving their country? They seem to have a pretty good handle on how much is entering through the southern border.

I think the heart of the issue is inflow through Canadian ports, as well as complex money laundering and trafficking schemes between Canada, China and Mexico. You can check the article I posted above for more info. There’s also some info about this in the Whitehouse press release I linked below. So it’s not strictly a border crossing problem.

Explain the problem with "inflow"? Of drugs, to Canada, and not to America?

It’s in the article I linked.

"This post is for paid subscribers".

I read the article, and also a lot of the other articles on that site. I'm going to take it with a grain of salt, because that "top investigative reporter" basically seems poised to report everything in the most conspiratorial manner possible.

That said, I'll still definitely grant you the following, especially after researching the issue and seeing information from other outlets: Canada has a serious problem with Chinese money laundering. Fine, but so does the United States: https://www.propublica.org/article/china-cartels-xizhi-li-mo.... None of this feels like anything more than an after-the-fact, invented rationale for the tariffs.

Like the other poster said, the fact that so little fentanyl comes in through the US is not a "red herring" because Canada "isn't looking for it" - you don't go through Customs upon leaving a country, you go through it on entering. And again, even if your argument is that Canada is just supporting the drug trade through its money laundering operations, you could literally point to any country and come up with a host of things that happen within their borders that are somehow bad for the US. You could certainly do it in reverse (shit that the US does that's bad for other countries) 3x. None of it rises to even a teeny bit of the level needed to throwaway a deep, mutually beneficial relationship that has existed for many, many decades.

Sure, we’re all free to form opinions on who to trust.

If the claim is that Trump is simply throwing trade with Canada for no reason whatsoever, i.e. he’s simply an unhinged madman, that’s certainly a politically popular narrative. I’ve provided pointers to reasonable evidence for pressuring a neighbouring state to get its security issues under control, and based on years of hearing about that stuff it seems rational to me. You’re free to disagree, friend.

Ordinarily when there's a really big problem, a President will go to some effort to explain to the public what the problem is, and how their actions will fix it. Apparently this problem is definitely motivation Trump and is also somehow so deeply hidden that we can only find out about it from random newsletter sites.

I'm not saying that this makes it BS. But I'm also saying if this doesn't ring your BS meter, you don't have one anymore.

I follow what’s happening with Canadian drugs / money laundering pretty closely. The article I linked isn’t a random newsletter site, it’s from one of Canada’s top investigative journalists. Here’s the official white house statement from the Whitehouse website. I’ve heard Trump reference this multiple times:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/03/fact-sheet-pr...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com