Canada’s Pacific Ports ‘Under-Secured,’ Vulnerable to National Security Threats: Report

The paddle wheeler Constitution passes the container ship GSL Lydia docked at port, while sailing on the harbour as wildfire smoke hangs in the air, in Vancouver, on Aug. 28, 2025. The Canadian Press/Darryl Dyck

A number of Canada’s Pacific ports are “under-secured” and have inspection gaps that can be exploited by criminals and foreign threats, according to a report by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

The recently released report describes specific security concerns at the Vancouver and Prince Rupert ports as well as the waters and remote landing areas off western Vancouver Island, and urges Ottawa to boost enforcement.

In particular, Frontier centre senior fellow and report author Scott McGregor, a former Canadian Armed Forces intelligence operator and intelligence adviser to the RCMP,  said that Canada’s Pacific port system has a broad outbound cargo inspection gap, citing audit findings that say exports, outbound vessels, and outbound crews are not systematically inspected.

He said this leaves these areas highly vulnerable to organized crime, drug trafficking, sanctions evasion, and security threats such as cyberattacks or foreign interference.

“Outbound cargo is virtually unmonitored,” writes McGregor, who also serves as managing partner of Close Hold Intelligence Consulting.

“Traffickers do not need to defeat port controls; they need to integrate into legitimate trade flows,” he adds.

Insiders with access to the ports can be used by criminal groups, including for what McGregor describes as “rip-on/rip-off” smuggling, where insiders help traffickers stow contraband into legitimate shipping containers and then recover it before it can be found.

These practices require that Canadian authorities be given more investigatory power and authority to crack down, according to McGregor.

The report notes that cargo can become even harder to track once it leaves the port and is rapidly sent inland, making it easier for criminals to take advantage of gaps on inland routes as well.

‘Structural Problems’

Noting that B.C.’s Pacific ports are “economic lifelines” for the West of Canada, McGregor says that security measures have not kept up to date with the increasing amount and complexity of trade taking place.

The report cites federal audit data and statistics from local policing work in port areas to show that under 2 percent of containers are imaged and under 1 percent are searched physically in Metro Vancouver.

McGregor writes that this isn’t just due to a lack of equipment but is a problem with how security responsibility is apportioned among port authorities, private terminal operators, the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), the RCMP, Transport Canada, and coastal enforcement agencies.

In particular, it notes that Vancouver and Prince Rupert ports have such low inspection rates of outbound cargo that traffickers and bad actors are able to count on “predictable gaps” and are not seriously deterred from carrying out illegal activity.

“The problem is structural,” McGregor writes. “When resources are limited, those seams become predictable gaps.”

McGregor, who co-authored the 2023 book “The Mosaic Effect: How the Chinese Communist Party Started a Hybrid War in America’s Backyard” about Chinese hybrid warfare, writes that Canada’s Pacific trade strategy far outpaces how much security and enforcement it has in place.

“Canada has underinvested in the security and enforcement capacity behind its Pacific trade strategy,” the report reads.

In terms of concern over outbound cargo, the report says Canada does much more screening of what comes into the country than what leaves, citing a CBSA audit which says that the National Targeting Centre does not target exports, outbound shipments, outbound vessels, or outbound crews.

As proof of the magnitude of what can be missed if outbound inspections aren’t performed, the report cites a 2023 CBSA case in which more than 6,330 kilograms of methamphetamine was seized in four export-bound shipments in B.C. destined for Australia, including about 2,900 kilograms intercepted at Tsawwassen in the Lower Mainland.

Fentanyl and Foreign Threats

The report states that Canada’s Pacific ports lie at the intersection of two significant threats: organized criminal networks trafficking fentanyl, methamphetamine, and other illegal goods, and a geopolitical climate in which hostile foreign states can use cyber operations, sanctions evasion, commercial intelligence gathering, and economic pressure to gain leverage without direct military action.

McGregor writes that ports make especially soft targets for hybrid pressure due to having many valuable targets in the same location.

“Ports concentrate exactly the assets such campaigns target: supply-chain chokepoints, commercial data, industrial control systems and a workforce with privileged physical access,” the report notes.

On the toxic drug crisis, McGregor notes that B.C. recorded 1,826 deaths linked to drug toxicity in 2025, and Canada listed 6,161 substance-use-linked deaths between July 2024 and June of last year.

The report says this level of drug deaths is still far above levels before the pandemic and demonstrates the high human cost of synthetic drugs being able to travel through Canadian trade routes.

Report Recommendations

To address the problems listed in the report, McGregor lists 10 recommendations.

These include setting up a permanent port security joint task force in B.C., targeting exports for inspection, boosting the capacity of ports when it comes to container imaging, upgrading underwater hull inspection capabilities, carrying out more extensive vetting of port insiders, making better use of inland logistics, and having more transparency on the efficacy of measures available to the public.

A realistic goal that would boost Canada’s Pacific port security would be to “make Canada’s Pacific gateway unpredictable” for criminals and adversaries, according to McGregor.

He adds that Ottawa should consider port security coequal with economic security since any safety issues at ports also have the potential to cause real economic disruption.

McGregor concludes that Canada ultimately must decide if it is serious about having an effective Pacific trade strategy and significantly boosting port security measures, or leaving things as the current “under-secured” and unstable status quo, and argues that only one of the two is possible.

“Canada can have a Pacific trade strategy, or it can have a thin-security Pacific gateway,“ McGregor writes. ”It cannot credibly have both.”