B.C. moves to seize property where country’s largest meth, fentanyl lab was discovered
British Columbia’s Civil Forfeiture Office is targeting a rural Okanagan property that the RCMP say housed the largest and most sophisticated methamphetamine and fentanyl lab in the country when they raided the premises last fall.
A notice of civil claim recently filed in B.C. Supreme Court alleges that the property in the small town of Falkland was used in the production, possession, storage and trafficking of illicit drugs, including fentanyl, meth and MDMA, and names its owners as Vancouver-area men Michael Driehuyzen and Gaganpreet Randhawa. Mr. Randhawa is the lone person facing charges in relation to the Oct. 25 bust.
Mounties also said they found $500,000 in cash at the lab, as well as 54 kilograms of fentanyl, 390 kgs of methamphetamine, and smaller amounts of cocaine, MDMA and cannabis. They also found a total of 89 firearms, including handguns, AR-15-style rifles and submachine guns, as well as small explosive devices, ammunition, silencers, high-capacity magazines and body armour. All of these items have been seized criminally.
The RCMP have linked the lab to another property they raided last September in Enderby, B.C., which housed 30 tonnes of precursor chemicals allegedly used by the lab. RCMP officials said they were particularly concerned to discover, for the first time in Western Canada, a particular methamphetamine precursor that has been made for years by cartels in Mexico.
The raid reinforced a report released last month by the Criminal Intelligence Service Canada that highlighted how organized-crime groups are increasingly exporting fentanyl, meth and other drugs abroad.
The trafficking of fentanyl is killing an estimated 80,000 people a year in North America, according to the Financial Action Task Force, an intergovernmental body that sets standards to combat money laundering and terrorist financing.
U.S. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has said his threats to impose sweeping tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods are his bid to stop what he describes as a “massive” quantity of fentanyl entering the United States from those two countries and resulting in these deaths.
The Civil Forfeiture Office, which can seize assets from people without charging them criminally, is also seeking to seize a spectrometer and chromatograph, both worth tens of thousands of dollars. The office, in its filing dated Jan. 31, alleges that Mr. Driehuyzen bought the property in 2007. Eight years later, police twice raided illegal cannabis grow operations there. The office alleges that the lab had been producing these other illicit drugs from at least the beginning of last year until the police raid in October.
None of the allegations have been proven in court. Mr. Driehuyzen, an Abbotsford, B.C., man, could not be reached for comment.
Mr. Randhawa appeared before a judge in Surrey Provincial Court in the related criminal matter Monday. The Surrey, B.C., man is scheduled to have a bail hearing starting Tuesday on seven charges related to his arrest last October, including carrying illegal guns while possessing meth, cocaine and fentanyl, and attempting to export meth out of the country.
Corporal Arash Seyed, a spokesperson for the RCMP’s federal policing program in the Pacific Region, said the public can expect more charges in this case.
Former RCMP deputy commissioner Peter German, whose twin reports for the NDP government on West Coast money laundering precipitated the three-year Cullen Commission, said it is unclear where the drugs in the Falkland lab were headed, but they were likely being exported to Australia or Asia.
Still, Mr. German said, the Falkland lab clearly shows that Canada is a source country for dangerous drugs.
Falkland resident Luke Vischer said there were clues gangsters may have been doing business in his quiet town, namely the heavy traffic headed toward the lab property on the dead-end road.
“Who needs to go back and forth 10 times a day?” he remarked to The Globe and Mail Monday.