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The blank page leaves at least one acknowledged expert cautiously optimistic.

“Greater effort and co-ordination won’t magically make the problem disappear,” Jonathan Caulkins of Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh said in an email. “But fentanyl isn’t a problem that has any one silver-bullet solution, so working harder along these lines could be constructive.”

Certainly, fentanyl presents a deadly problem in both Canada and the U.S. In Canada, there were 49,105 apparent opioid deaths between January 2016 and June 2024, with most blamed on fentanyl and fentanyl analogues. In the U.S., there were an estimated 81,083 opioid overdose deaths in 2023 alone. Most of those deaths were from synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl.

Trump agreed to a one-month pause on 25 per cent tariffs on Canada after Trudeau announced the appointment of the “fentanyl czar” on Monday. 

Canada also agreed this week to place drug cartels on a list of terrorist groups.

That makes them the only organized crime group in that category, alongside almost seven dozen other organizations, including al-Qaida, Hizballah, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the Proud Boys, the Taliban and the Aryan Strikeforce.

Despite Trump’s insistence that Canada has to stem the flow of fentanyl into the U.S., available data suggests only a relative trickle of Canadian-made fentanyl is crossing the border into the U.S.

“To the best of my knowledge, Canada is a trivial source of fentanyl to the United States,” Peter Reuter of the University of Maryland said in an interview, adding: “There are no established pipelines bringing Canadian-produced fentanyl to the United States.”

According to the U.S. customs data, the Canadian border accounts for less than 0.1 per cent of annual fentanyl seizures — 43 pounds’ worth in 2024, compared to 21,100 pounds intercepted at the Mexican border over the same period. 

Trump on Saturday nevertheless referred to “Canada’s heightened domestic production of fentanyl, largely from British Columbia, and its growing footprint within international narcotics distribution.”

This was apparently an allusion to a B.C. superlab that was busted in October in the interior of British Columbia in the tiny hamlet of Falkland in what police called Canada’s largest fentanyl seizure ever.

At the time, the RCMP said it had “delivered a decisive blow to a major transnational organized crime group” and scooped up fentanyl and precursors that could have amounted to more than 95 million doses of fentanyl. (In 2024, U.S. seizures at the Mexican border amounted to more than 900 million doses.)

Caulkins says there’s no way of knowing how much of any illegal drug is successfully smuggled across a border.

“But the expert community generally believes that the amount entering the U.S. across its southwest border with Mexico greatly exceeds the amount entering across its northern border with Canada,” Caulkins said.

Last month, RCMP spokesperson Charlotte Hibbard told the Star that Canadian-made fentanyl destined for the U.S. is largely being exported in “micro shipments, most often through the mail.”

Meanwhile, experts argue that massive border security won’t do much to halt the supply of fentanyl anyway.

Authorities would better spend their time fighting crime, violence and corruption, Reuter and Caulkins say.

“The demands that we seal the borders against fentanyl are completely understandable,” they jointly write in a 2023 Scientific American article. “But also completely unrealistic.”

They acknowledge that authorities can have massive hauls, such as one in March 2023 dubbed Blue Lotus Operation, that nabbed more than 900 pounds of drugs containing fentanyl at the Mexican border.

“But traffickers can easily replace what is seized,” they write.

Fentanyl is easily produced at room temperature without sophisticated equipment, “with no natural limits on its production,” they write.

“It is absurdly cheap for high-level traffickers to replace seizures.”

In the mid-2000s, American law enforcement was able to clamp down on fentanyl when its production was focused in one lab in Toluca, Mexico, but those days are long gone, they note.

“Now, fentanyl production is distributed, with no single critical lab,” they write.

Chemicals used to make fentanyl are originally produced mostly in China and India, and fentanyl consumed in Canada is mostly produced in Canada, too, Reuter said.

That said, there are things that can be done to cut the flow of fentanyl, Caulkins and Reuter write.

Caulkins said that Canada could “renew and invest further in intelligence sharing and joint law enforcement operations against our common challenges.”

“Generally, co-operation between US and Canadian law enforcement and border control agencies has been good, but given the scale of death in both countries, greater efforts could be justified and be mutually beneficial,” Caulkins said.