Partly disagreed. We didn’t actually concede much at all.
We threatened equal reciprocal counter tariffs. We’ve pledged “10,000 front line border personnel”- not new personnel, just personnel, CBSA has 17,000 employees. Not sure how many RCMP IBET employ, but RCMP and provincial/municipal police are already augmenting border work in their respective jurisdictions. 10,000 will likely not be a hard figure to creatively achieve for the necessary amount of time until this simmers down. Many police will probably be able to be truthfully double-counted as working Fentanyl in some capacity and also being part of border security.
A ‘Fentanyl czar’ is meaningless; probably some RCMP Org Crime Superintendent will get his or her bump to Chief Superintendent and 90% of their job will already exist. Or someone in Public Safety will get a new ADM spot while another closely related one goes quietly unfilled. We already committed $1.3 billion, are already procuring new kit… An intelligence priorities declaration is simply that; some criminal and security intelligence focus will shift but that was happening already, and the December border announcement already threw CSE in the game. Another $200 mil is not a huge spend.
A ‘strike force’ for money laundering and countering Fentanyl… Ok, sounds like joint force operations. So RCMP, FINTRAC, and CBSA will share some projects with FBI, FINCEN, and HSI. Nothing really new there, if they want to build some kind of FentaNORAD, they can go nuts. It won’t add much capability.
Listing cartels as terrorist entities won’t really do anything new, save for potentially shift which parts of the RCMP bureaucracy oversee investigations. The stuff they’re doing is criminal anyway, and adding the ability to tack a few section 83 offences likely won’t add anything. Prosecutors will probably eschew the added complications of terrorism offences. The risk of charges failing on the ‘ideology’ prong of 83.01 is high, so why complicate things? It may not out much additional burden on RCMP national security as I first speculated if Public Prosecution Service of Canada don’t see a need to go the terrorism route.
This isn’t a full nothingburger, but it ain’t a big beef patty now that I’ve had time to reflect. Trump wanted to be theatrical, we’ve given him theatre. We have made relatively modest additional commitments, many of them sort of a shell game, to provide him with an off-ramp from what was going to be some significant self-inflicted economic damage. We also kept the concessions entirely within the scope of the demands relevant to the executive order and not any of the new bullshit he was throwing at the wall. Not to say he won’t be back with that in a few months, but we have a heads up now of the strategic and economic risks we need to work to mitigate.
globalnews.ca
