Securing · Metric

The contraband crossing the border is cocaine and guns

Cross-border crime here means contraband smuggled into Canada — illicit drugs and firearms. The interdiction record since 2014 shows a real and rising problem in hard drugs, led by cocaine, alongside persistent firearms smuggling. The cross-border share of drug crime has grown even as overall drug offences fell.

Related metrics. This is one strand of the illicit-economy and border-security picture. See also:

Smuggling is, by nature, hidden: a seizure counts what enforcement caught, not the full flow across the border. Read with that caveat, two government datasets give the clearest available picture. The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) publishes what it seizes at the border by fiscal year from 2018–19. Statistics Canada's police-reported series reaches back further, and isolates the cross-border slice of drug crime — importation and exportation offences — which has climbed sharply over the decade even as the overall drug-crime rate fell. Together they describe a border under growing pressure from cocaine and firearms.

What this metric is not. It deliberately excludes fentanyl. Canada is a marginal fentanyl importer, so a border-seizure lens would wrongly imply Canada has little fentanyl problem. The real fentanyl story is domestic production and export — superlabs whose capacity dwarfs domestic demand — which seizure-at-the-border data cannot capture. That is tracked separately under Fentanyl production.
Cocaine seized at the border, FY2024–25
3,479 kg
About 2.4× the FY2018–19 level (1,429 kg); FY2025–26 was already higher in just three quarters.
Firearms seized at the border, FY2024–25
942
Plus 96 more seized inland on search warrants. Within the 548–1,203 band seen every year since FY2018–19.
Drug import/export offences, 2024
24 / 100k
Up from 3 per 100,000 in 2014 — the one drug-offence category rising while overall drug crime fell. Partly a post-2018 reporting artifact.

What Canada actually intercepts

Cocaine is the clear upward trend in CBSA seizures. After holding around 1.2–1.4 tonnes a year through 2020–21, border seizures jumped past 2.8 tonnes in FY2021–22 and set successive records in FY2023–24 and FY2024–25 (about 3.44 and 3.48 tonnes). The partial FY2025–26 figure had already passed the full prior year within three quarters. Firearms tell a different story: border seizures have moved within a band — from 548 to 1,203 a year — with no clear trend, sitting at 942 in FY2024–25 (plus 96 more seized inland on search warrants).

Cocaine and firearms seized at the Canadian border, by fiscal year (FY2018–19 to FY2024–25)
Cocaine / crack (kg, left axis) Firearms at the border (count, right axis)
Source: CBSA Enforcement Action Statistics, "Seized goods data by fiscal year" (accessed June 2026). CBSA fiscal year runs 1 April – 31 March. Pre-2024–25 firearms figures are single published totals; FY2024–25 separates 942 seized at the border from 96 seized inland on search warrants — the border figure is used for comparability. FY2025–26 (partial, three quarters) is excluded from the trend.

A smaller drug-crime pie, a bigger cross-border slice

Over the past decade police-reported drug crime overall has fallen by more than half — driven mainly by cannabis legalisation in 2018, which removed the bulk of possession offences. But the cross-border component moved the opposite way: importation and exportation offences rose from a rate of 3 per 100,000 in 2014 to 24 in 2024 (+649%), with an interim spike around 2019. Even allowing that part of that rise reflects new offence categories created with the Cannabis Act — and that StatCan cautions import/export counts swing with case-processing timing — the smuggling-related slice of drug crime has clearly grown while the rest shrank. A clean seven-country comparison is not attempted: seizure and police-reported totals are shaped by differing laws, reporting rules, and enforcement intensity, so a G7 chart would mislead rather than inform.

Police-reported drug crime, Canada, 2014–2024 — total vs the cross-border slice (rate per 100,000)
Source: Statistics Canada / Juristat, "Trends in police-reported drug crime in Canada" (75-006-X, 29 October 2025). Total drug crime (left axis) is the full annual series; it more than halved over the decade (rate 295→128 per 100,000) after the 2018 Cannabis Act removed most possession offences. Importation/exportation offences (right axis) are plotted at the years StatCan publishes — 2014 (3), 2019 (≈40), 2023 (≈16), and 2024 (24); the 2019 and 2023 points are derived from StatCan's published rate-changes, and StatCan cautions that year-over-year import/export figures partly reflect case-processing timing (RCMP/CBSA/Canada Post), so the interim points are indicative. The decade change is +649% (2014→2024), partly attributable to new offence categories added with the Cannabis Act in 2018.

Findings

Finding 1

Cocaine is the real, rising story

Border cocaine seizures roughly 2.4× between FY2018–19 (1,429 kg) and FY2024–25 (3,479 kg), with back-to-back record years in FY2023–24 and FY2024–25 and a partial FY2025–26 already above the full prior year. This is where the genuine, measurable cross-border drug pressure sits.

Finding 2

Firearms smuggling is persistent, not surging

Border firearms seizures have stayed in a 548–1,203 band since FY2018–19 (942 in FY2024–25, plus 96 inland). Canadian police services and the RCMP continue to attribute the bulk of recovered crime handguns to smuggling from the United States — a steady structural problem rather than a spike.

Finding 3

The cross-border slice of drug crime grew as the whole shrank

Overall police-reported drug crime more than halved from its 2011 peak (330 to 128 per 100,000). Yet importation/exportation offences rose from 3 to 24 per 100,000 (2014→2024) — the exception to the decline. Read with caution: part of the rise reflects new Cannabis-Act offence categories from 2018.

Finding 4

Seizures undercount, and effort confounds the trend

Every figure here is a lower bound: it reflects how much enforcement caught, not how much crossed. Rising seizures partly signal more and better interdiction. That ambiguity — plus the contained scale relative to peers — is why the verdict is Watch rather than Weak.

Sources & methodology

Primary sources
Methodology notes
  1. Definitions. "Cross-border crime" is limited to contraband smuggled across the border, inbound: illicit drugs and firearms. Fentanyl is excluded and handled as a separate production/source metric. Human trafficking, stolen-vehicle export, and contraband tobacco are also tracked as separate Securing metrics, because each is only partly (or not primarily) a border-smuggling phenomenon.
  2. Seizures are a lower bound. Seizure counts reflect both the volume smuggled and the intensity of enforcement; they cannot be read as a direct measure of the underlying flow. Year-to-year movement may reflect changes in resourcing, intelligence, and targeting as much as changes in smuggling.
  3. No cross-country chart. Cross-country seizure totals are not strictly comparable, so no G7 bar chart is attempted; this is a Canada time series. The UCR series is shown to place the cross-border slice within total drug crime.
  4. UCR import/export caveat. Police-reported drug importation/exportation offences rose from 3 to 24 per 100,000 (2014→2024), but Statistics Canada flags that much of the increase reflects new offence categories created when the Cannabis Act came into force in 2018. Only the published endpoints are used; intermediate-year values are not invented.
  5. Fiscal vs calendar year. CBSA seizures are fiscal-year (ending 31 March); the UCR series is calendar-year. They are not spliced.
  6. Companion workbook. The editable series live in Securing_Cross-Border-Crime_Data.xlsx: CBSA seizures by fiscal year and the UCR drug-crime context.
Page last reviewed June 2026 · Data current to FY2024–25 — the latest complete CBSA enforcement-statistics year