While Canada-U.S. ties fray, co-operation is essential in fight against gun smuggling
In an era when Donald Trump is steering the United States into an increasingly hostile brand of isolationism, one of the most important agencies in Canada’s fight against gun smuggling remains, in fact, 100 per cent American.
Between 2017 and 2023, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives traced more than 35,000 guns at the request of Canadian police forces, and has helped break up gun smuggling networks that stretch from Texas to the northern border. Law enforcement in both countries say sharing information on gun purchasing records remains critical, even as our political leaders seek less collaboration.
During his election campaign, Prime Minister Mark Carney put it plainly: “The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military co-operation is over.”
Border and crime issues were critical to the recent election, which brought Mark Carney to this campaign stop at the crossing in Niagara Falls, Ont.Carlos Osorio/Reuters
While it’s unclear how this new political reality will play out with gun smuggling, given the U.S.’s loose gun laws and the high demand for banned firearms in Canada, police agencies say they can’t slow the northward flow of American weapons without working closely with their cross-border counterparts. “Up until January, no one even questioned it, because everybody saw how logical it was. If you don’t identify the person in Florida, how are you going to stop that guy from smuggling guns?” said Chris Taylor, the ATF attaché who was assigned to Canada in 2019 by former ATF director Regina Lombardo with a mission improve gun tracing rates in Canada.
The ATF has long preached the importance of firearms tracing, and how that can help combat the illegal movement of guns globally. They work with the RCMP and other Canadian police forces on investigations that touch both countries, and investigators here depend on the ATF in their fight against smuggling.
For more than three decades, the ATF has assigned an officer to work in Canada, out of the U.S. embassy in Ottawa, and spent millions running training workshops for police across this country. The ATF first sent a liaison to Canada in 1991, when George H. W. Bush was in the White House and Reagan-era director Stephen Higgins was running the bureau. In the past five years alone, the ATF has helped train almost 13,000 Canadian police, prosecutors, soldiers and forensic experts in everything from firearms trafficking and tracing, postblast investigations, ballistic imaging and serial number restoration.
The Mounties, meanwhile, say they want more, not less, intelligence sharing with the Americans and consider the ATF an important partner, according to RCMP spokesperson Robin Percival. In 2023, the RCMP and Canada Border Services Agency agreed to exchange more data with U.S. authorities under a rebooted Canada-U.S. Cross-Border Crime Forum, as Canadian seizures showed a rising American gun smuggling problem.
That agreement came after a high-profile gun smuggling case involving Quebec’s Inti Sebastian Falero-Delgado, who was arrested after receiving 53 handguns, six machine guns and 80 high-capacity magazines from Texas, delivered across the U.S. border by boat outside Cornwall, Ont., in November, 2021.
Mr. Falero-Delgado was sentenced in March, 2024, to 11 years in federal prison for his role in the botched scheme, which was caught on a boathouse security camera. The judge said she’d never seen so many guns moved in one smuggling run. The firearms, while banned in Canada, were legally bought in Texas under some of the loosest gun laws in the U.S. As part of the cross-border investigation that followed, 11 people were indicted in the Dallas area for their role in supplying the guns.
Working closely with the ATF on the case in Texas was an RCMP liaison stationed in Dallas, who was “uniquely positioned to observe and understand developments abroad in order to inform our decision-making at home,” Ms. Percival said. This kind of close co-operation with American agencies is critical for Canadian law enforcement interests, she added. “With a strong and co-ordinated international presence through these deployments, we can combat transnational organized crime more effectively,” she said.
Jeenah Moon/Reuters; Leandro Lozada/AFP via Getty Images; Alyssa Pointer/Reuters
Co-operation has never been more important as Canada contends with a growing problem of legally-bought American handguns and assault rifles being smuggled into this country.
With its unregulated gun shows, rampant online sales and thousands of gun dealers, states like Texas are supplying Canada with guns that are showing up at crime scenes on a nearly daily basis.
In Ontario, 91 per cent of illegal handguns traced by police last year, or 1,703 firearms, came from the U.S. That’s up from 1,279 handguns traced to the U.S. just two years earlier, according to the Criminal Intelligence Service Ontario, a partnership between the Ontario government and the province’s police forces.
Seizures of American guns at the Canada-U.S. border are also on the rise: there were 839 last year, up from 581 in 2022, according to the Canadian Border Services Agency. Police forces across the country are increasingly finding the guns they’re seizing lead back to pro-gun states such as Texas.
With easy access to this abundance of guns in the U.S., and an eager black market in Canada willing to pay tenfold the retail value of those guns, officials acknowledge stopping the northward flow of guns has become extremely difficult.
“Knowing that this border is 8,000 kilometres long and mostly trees? I don’t know how you stop it,” Mr. Taylor said, while adding he’s still committed to making progress and is not doing this work “so I get a nice wrist watch when I retire. This is done to stop those guns from coming to Canada.”
Tracing, or tracking ownership records for guns, offers police on both sides of the border their best chance at identifying smuggling schemes and people buying unusually large amounts of guns. But in states like Texas, it can be difficult to tell avid collectors from would-be smugglers. And there are many ways for Texans to buy guns privately, such as weekend guns shows or through websites that post classified ads for firearms.
The guns most coveted by smugglers looking to sell in Canada are those banned by the federal government, including more than 2,000 models and variants of assault-style firearms prohibited in the wake of the Nova Scotia mass shooting in 2020. Glock handguns, the firearm of choice for police, can’t be imported, sold or purchased in Canada since Oct. 21, 2022.
But despite the changes in legislation, police say there are more guns on the street now than there were five years ago. If Canada really wants to make a dent in gun smuggling, it needs to increase the penalties for those caught selling, moving or using banned firearms, Mr. Taylor said.
The Falero-Delgado case helped pull back the curtain on an international firearms trafficking cell based in Texas, a state that has long supplied weapons to Mexican cartels. As investigators probed the Canadian case, they too were surprised at how many guns were heading north.
“If you would have told me 24 years ago that there would be guns going from North Texas to Canada, I would have laughed at you,” says Jeff Boshek, Special Agent-in-Charge for the ATF in Dallas, which operates inside an unmarked industrial building north of the city.
“When the guys first came in to brief me on the case, I just about fell out of my chair when I heard the level of trafficking that was going on to Canada. It was shocking.”
Jeff Boshek, who works for the ATF from Dallas, says it shocked him to learn how widespread gun trafficking is between his state and Canada.Greg Mercer/The Globe and Mail
While Texas is far from the border with Canada, the state’s rampant gun culture and fervent gun rights lobby have created a perfect environment for Canadian smugglers to exploit. More northern states such as Illinois, Minnesota and Washington, far closer to Canada, require gun buyers have multiple licences and wait for multiday cool-down periods before obtaining a gun.
In Texas, anyone with a state driver‘s licence can walk into a gun shop and walk out with multiple guns. While purchases of two or more handguns within a five-day period generates a federal report, the ATF acknowledges policing multiple purchasers is a politically sensitive issue in a state where gun rights are vigorously defended.
“How do you walk up on some rich guy’s house, who’s spending a lot of money on guns and say, ‘Hey, we’re your friendly neighbourhood ATF agents. We want to see these guns that you spend all this money on.’ That doesn’t go over very well,” Mr. Boshek said.
“You’ll be on YouTube the next day.”
Authorities here say Canadian smugglers typically use straw buyers – often strangers they meet at bars or strip clubs – offering them cash to buy guns. The activity is illegal, and the ATF has launched campaigns telling Texans that it’s not worth going to jail for a few hundred dollars.
“Some people that you wouldn’t expect get caught up in the game of firearms trafficking because they’re just desperate for money,” Mr. Boshek said. “If someone comes to you and offers you money to buy a gun, that’s a clue, right? There’s a reason. Either they can’t personally own it, or that gun is going somewhere where it shouldn’t be going, and they know it, and they’re just using you as a tool.”
Koji Kraft, who builds guns at Freedom Firearms & Outfitters in Dallas, sees a big role for reputable dealers to play in preventing trafficking.Greg Mercer/The Globe and Mail
Koji Kraft, a former professional BMX racer who now builds guns at a shop in Dallas, said most reputable dealers see themselves as “the first line of defence” against gun trafficking. The problem is the few sellers who are willing to ignore red flags for money, he said.
But while the U.S has increased penalties for people who buy guns legally and resell them to smugglers, police say the cash involved is too tempting for some. If Mr. Falero-Delgado had managed to sell the guns he picked up on the river, they would have been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars more in Canada than what they cost in Texas.
Guns are so embedded in Texan culture that the ATF’s efforts to regulate their sale are sometimes met with harsh pushback, particularly among groups like the National Rifle Association (NRA). Licensed gun sellers complain private sales and gun shows are like the Wild West, while registered dealers have to follow the rules and fill out forms on most transactions.
“You don’t have to have a bill of sale. You don’t have to have anything. You can just hand over cash,” explained Brandon Mankin, director of operations for Freedom Firearms & Outfitters, a gun shop in north Dallas popular with hunters and ex-military alike. A large moose head with a MAGA hat hangs on the wall as he speaks.
He says it’s hard to regulate because the NRA lobbies hard “every time they try to put a law into effect.”
In 2021, Texas changed its gun laws to allow “permitless carry,” which gives anyone over the age of 21 the right to carry a gun in public without a licence. As part of that change, licenced gun owners no longer required a background check to buy more firearms.
At the State House in Austin, legislators have in recent years made it much easier for Texans to carry firearms without licences.Eric Gay/The Associated Press
While U.S. law prohibits people from dealing in firearms without a license, groups such as at the NRA have long defended Americans’ right to sell guns privately without recording those sales – something they view as a bedrock principle of their Constitutional right to bear arms.
Into that free-for-all stepped traffickers such as Demontre Antwon Hackworth, who shortly after the Texas law changed resold at least 92 guns he’d legally bought from federally licensed firearms dealers in the state. At least 75 of those guns were bought in the span of six months from just one dealer – a retired Navy vet and Christian counsellor who sold guns out of his home in a rural suburb of Dallas. Four of those guns ended up being used in crimes in Canada, according to U.S. court records.
The owner of that suburban gun shop, called Triggernometry Arms, later surrendered his licence as a gun dealer but faced no penalties for selling Mr. Hackworth the guns. He did not respond to interview requests for this story.
Mr. Hackworth was sentenced to 21 months in prison in 2023 for reselling the guns. Then-U.S. attorney-general Merrick Garland said the case was an example of America’s efforts to crack down on “the criminal gun-trafficking pipelines that flood our communities with illegal guns.” The penalties for gun smuggling have since been increased to a maximum of 15 years.
Without effective tracing, investigating the people bringing guns from America’s most gun-loving state to neighbouring countries is nearly impossible, said Mr. Boshek. Yet in both Canada and the U.S., there are still too many police departments that fail to regularly trace the guns they seize, he said, often because of a lack of resources.
“There’s no higher priority in the ATF than stopping the sources of illegal firearms. As soon as we get recoveries in places like Canada or Mexico, and we look to see who the purchaser was,” he said. “But we need to know about it. We don’t want to be the source of guns for anybody.”
