CHAD WOLF: Canada can't expect free trade while leaving our northern border vulnerable
The longest international border in the world has a security problem, and Canada is not treating it with the urgency it deserves.
Recently, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin laid out a sobering picture of how people from 78 nations have been apprehended crossing the northern border. U.S. agents are now arresting a terrorist on the watch list nearly every week at the northern border, and over the past year alone, enough fentanyl to kill 17 million Americans has been seized coming through Canada. Cartel organizations, squeezed by the intensified enforcement operations and physical infrastructure along our southern border, are pivoting north.
Federal prosecutors have unsealed a string of recent cases documenting organized smuggling networks operating directly through the northern border. They are the front edge of a corridor that cartels and transnational criminal organizations are actively developing.
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Congressional Republicans are rightly raising the alarm, holding hearings and pressing Canada for action. And the Trump administration is recognizing exactly what leverage it holds.
On July 1, the United States declined to renew the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) in its current form, opting instead for annual reviews until the agreement expires in 2036. Ottawa and Mexico City wanted the 16-year extension. Washington said no. Canada's economy is deeply woven into American markets. Roughly $900 billion in trade moves across this border every year. Canada wants predictability and a long-term framework. The Trump administration holds the pen.
Canada has long been a country that enjoys open access to American markets while keeping its own rigorously walled off. Canada’s bad trade behavior must be called out.
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Canada's dairy supply management system often functions as a government-sanctioned cartel, setting production quotas, controlling prices and throttling foreign competition behind tariff walls that can exceed 200%. U.S. dairy producers have filed repeated USMCA dispute complaints over Canada's manipulation of tariff-rate quotas, arguing that Ottawa deliberately underfills import access in ways that violate the agreement's terms.
Canada's illicit cigarette market is one of the most sophisticated contraband networks in North America, and it runs directly through the same corridors being used to move hard drugs and people. When law enforcement executed Manitoba's largest drug bust in history in May 2026, police found 1.35 million contraband cigarettes sitting in the same evidence locker.
Investigators with decades of experience tracing illicit tobacco networks have noted that contraband cigarette revenues are a consistent funding stream for the same organized crime networks moving fentanyl south. Ottawa has known for years that the illicit tobacco pipeline and the drug pipeline share infrastructure, financing and personnel. The enforcement response has not matched the scale of the problem.
In telecommunications, Canada has maintained legislative restrictions on foreign ownership for its Big Three carriers since 1993. Bell, Telus and Rogers operate in a market legally shielded from American or other foreign competition, producing some of the highest wireless prices in the developed world for Canadian consumers. American telecom companies cannot meaningfully compete in Canada. That door swings in only one direction.
The same dynamic governs Canadian aviation. Roughly 78% of domestic Canadian flights are operated by Air Canada or WestJet, with foreign carriers locked out by restrictions that prevent American airlines from serving routes within Canada. Canada's own Competition Bureau has recommended opening the market. Ottawa has not acted.
This is the pattern: Canada extracts the benefits of a rules-based trade relationship with the United States while maintaining sector-by-sector protections that no serious economic partner would defend.
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The northern border is becoming a genuine national security concern, and Canada has neither the resources nor the political urgency to treat it as one on its own. The Trump administration is direct about the trajectory. What happened on the southern border, where cartels have immense power and control nearly every crossing point, will come north unless the cooperation deepens and hardens fast.
The Trump administration has made it plain that a new USMCA framework, and the trade certainty Canada badly wants, is available. The price is serious border enforcement, real resources, closed loopholes on small-package drug shipments and accelerated passage of the legal tools Canadian law enforcement needs. Trade sectors that have operated as protected monopolies for decades should be on the table too.
Canada is a close ally and the relationship is worth protecting. But close allies do not get permanent exemptions from accountability, especially when fentanyl is flowing, cartels are scouting, and the border remains vulnerable. The United States has leverage. The question is, will Canada finally take action.