Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) officers intercepted contraband in just five rail cars last year out of nearly two million that entered the country, raising new concerns about border security and enforcement gaps.Blacklock's Reporter says the numbers were disclosed in an Inquiry of Ministry tabled in the House of Commons at the request of Conservative MP Frank Caputo, who asked how many rail cars were physically inspected. The CBSA refused to say how many cars were checked overall, citing the Privacy Act, but confirmed that five cars were found to contain illegal goods — discoveries made only after police tips.Contraband seized included 11 million doses of amphetamine and more than 65,000 kilograms of tobacco.The revelation follows repeated warnings from the Customs and Immigration Union that smugglers using trains face “almost a zero percent chance” of being caught. Union president Mark Weber told MPs that the CBSA’s rail inspection capabilities are “virtually non-existent.”.“There is almost a zero precent chance that any illegal weapons entering the country via rail will ever be found,” Weber testified before the Commons public safety committee in 2022. He said railways are granted far more leeway than trucking or air transport and are not required to provide inspection facilities at border entry points, despite CBSA’s authority to demand them.Weber said inspections that once occurred at border towns like Fort Frances, Ontario, now happen hundreds of kilometres inland, often without the equipment or staff to conduct proper searches. “Even there we don’t really have facilities to do a full search and we usually don’t do the search anyway,” he said..A 2024 CBSA report admitted that the agency cannot measure how effective its anti-smuggling programs actually are. “There is currently no way to measure the extent to which this takes place nor its impact,” the evaluation concluded.Critics say the lack of inspections leaves the border wide open to smugglers, with only a handful of seizures standing out against millions of unchecked rail shipments each year.
