Trudeau Promises Canada “Fentanyl Czar” to Avoid Trump Tariffs

In a successful bid to stave off impending tariffs from President Donald Trump, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau resurfaced a December 2024 plan from Public Safety Canada to spend $1.3 billion increasing border security, this time with a few new additions. 

On February 3, Trudeau posted on social media that he’d “just had a good call” with Trump. In addition to implementation of the border plan, he announced the creation of a “fentanyl czar;” a ”Canada-US Joint Strike Force” with a focus on fentanyl interdiction; and a move to classify transnational drug-trafficking organizations as terrorists, as the Trump administration is doing.

While the United States has a “drug czar”—the colloquial title for director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, a position which since 2021 has been occupied by Dr. Rahul Gupta—Canada has not previously had any “czar” in its drug policy. According to Public Safety Canada, the fentanyl czar “will engage with US counterparts, and enhance operational collaboration and efficiency in combatting fentanyl, in order to enhance law enforcement tools to combat organized crime in Canada.” But most details are still unclear.

The four pillars of the Canadian Drugs and Substances Strategy are “prevention and education;” “substance use services and supports,” which encompasses harm reduction, treatment and recovery; “evidence;” and “substance controls,” which includes regulation and law enforcement, and the country’s Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.

To understand the potential impact of Trudeau’s announcement, Filter spoke with Nicholas Boyce, policy director at the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition. Boyce is also a member of the Canadian Civil Society Working Group on United Nations Drug Policy, and a consultant for the Canadian government on the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Brishti Basu: The December announcement involved allocating $1.3 billion to new canine teams, a new drug-profiling center, a Precursor Risk Management Unit and funding for Royal Canadian Mounted Police helicopters, drones and surveillance towers. Is any of this an effective method for addressing Canada’s overdose crisis and unregulated drug supply?

Nicholas Boyce: This is all supply-side intervention. It does nothing to address the demand for drugs and why people want drugs or use drugs or need drugs. 

Until we address that, there’s always going to be a market for drugs, and we have shown time and time again, over the decades, that drug suppliers and producers and traffickers find ways to innovate to meet that demand. 

We have not significantly reduced the supply of drugs because people want them. Every dollar that we are spending on so-called border security and police and law enforcement is a dollar we are not spending on addressing the housing crisis, mental health or employment programs. Those are the things that actually would reduce the demand for drugs and actually might impact the supply of drugs … this is just an incredible waste of resources.

This is a ramping up of the status quo. Right now we are ramping up the war on drugs, which is actually a war on people who use drugs. 

We are scapegoating drugs, and right now the drug of the day is fentanyl. We’re using that as a scapegoat and not talking about real issues such as housing, people’s well-being, environmental and climate justice [and the] racist, colonial and classist roots of drug policy. 

“Fentanyl is not the issue. There’s nothing inherently dangerous about fentanyl.”

BB: What exactly is a “fentanyl czar”? Do we know anything yet about the government’s plans to hire or appoint this person?

NB: I have absolutely no idea … I don’t know that they even know [those details]. I feel like this was something that was thrust on them. It probably was never part of the original $1.3 billion. 

It’s smoke and mirrors, and optics to make it look like you’re taking something seriously. But really we don’t need a “fentanyl czar.” We need a drug policy czar to actually critically appraise drug policy in Canada and internationally.

Fentanyl is not the issue. People receive prescription fentanyl every day in hospitals. There’s nothing inherently dangerous about fentanyl. 

What makes it dangerous is [when it’s] unregulated. Fentanyl in Canada [increasingly] has benzodiazepines in it; are we going to have a “benzodiazepine czar” next year? It’s just ridiculous.

“We’re seeing increasingly calls for involuntary treatment. We don’t even have access to good voluntary treatment.”

BB: Does this announcement coincide with any kind of federal expansion of harm reduction or treatment services?

NB: No … I did question Health Canada and got a response that this new announcement of $1.3 billion is on top of the [existing funding for the] Canadian Drugs and Substance Strategy. But I haven’t seen anything new in terms of major announcements on treatment and harm reduction.

We’re seeing increasingly calls for involuntary treatment. We don’t even have access to good voluntary treatment right now, so why are we even talking about involuntary treatment?

The Ontario government is replacing [safe consumption sites] with these Homeless Addiction Recovery and Treatment hubs that supposedly will provide a little bit more housing. But if you look at the number of units they are actually providing, it’s, I think, about 6 percent of what’s actually needed in the province. At the same time any program that is applying for those is prohibited from handing out sterile drug-use equipment, so we’re going to see spikes in HIV and hep C rates as a result of that.

BB: How much of the US drug supply actually comes from Canada, to warrant such a heavy response?

NB: A lot of the previous drug enforcement and interdiction efforts may have [reduced] the flow of fentanyl into Canada, but have only created domestic production. And we are now a known exporter of fentanyl. 

I wouldn’t be surprised that once you stop the flow from Canada and Mexico, you’re going to see [increased] domestic production in the States, if it’s not already happening.

We’re always playing a game of Whack-a-Mole with the supply side … It’s not working, and it’s actually causing many of the problems.”

BB: What does the current street supply of fentanyl look like in Canada, and what impact can we expect these measures will have?

NB: We’re just going to continue seeing an evolution. We had opium, and then we cracked down on that … heroin, and we cracked down on that. We remember the days of oxycodone, and then we cracked down on that.

Then you see the shift to synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl. And then [we started seeing] different types of fentanyl, like carfentanil. For a few years now, we’ve seen benzodiazepines added to the fentanyl supply. Now we’re starting to see veterinary tranquilizers and nitazenes.

We’re always playing a game of Whack-a-mole with the supply-side piece of the puzzle. It’s not working, and it’s actually causing many of the problems. Now you’re not only withdrawing from opioids, but you’re withdrawing from benzodiazepines, [which can be] actually even more dangerous. 

Methadone isn’t going to work with benzos. Also, people’s tolerances on fentanyl have become so high that … we’ve made treatment harder, we’ve made withdrawal harder, we’ve made overdose prevention harder.

We actually had this whole experience in the 1920s with alcohol prohibition, where we prohibited alcohol and instead of drinking beer, we moved to more toxic and concentrated moonshine. This is just history repeating itself.

Photograph of Donald Trump and Justin Trudeau, 2017, via Trump White House Archive/Flickr