Canada’s ‘fentanyl czar’ will be appointed before Trump’s tariff pause ends: public safety minister
Public Safety Minister David McGuinty says Canada’s new “fentanyl czar” will be appointed before U.S. President Donald Trump’s next deadline for imposing sweeping tariffs on Canadian goods.
“We intend to be way more proactive than that,” McGuinty told reporters on Thursday. “We’re moving forward now.”
The fentanyl czar position was part of a last-minute deal between Canadian and American officials to avert a major trade war. Trump issued an executive order on Saturday to impose 25 per cent tariffs on almost all Canadian goods, prompting Canada to declare retaliatory tariffs hours later.
On Monday, both sides agreed to stand down — for now. Trump issued another executive order delaying the tariffs until March 4.
Canada promised to appoint a fentanyl czar, list Mexican cartels as terrorists and kick in $200 million to launch a Canada-U.S. Joint Strike Force tasked with combatting organized crime and money laundering.
The federal government is expected to appoint a ‘fentanyl czar’ as part of a deal to stave off U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs for at least 30 days. The public safety minister says the role will likely be a liaison with police, the justice system and other countries.
McGuinty said the fentanyl czar would “absolutely” be on the job by March 4.
The minister also said the scope of the new job would be finalized “by the end of this week.”
McGuinty said the czar would “help us integrate what is a whole-of-society challenge. Fentanyl is a foreign affairs issue. It’s a law enforcement issue. It’s an intelligence issue. It’s a public health issue.”
According to a senior government source, the fentanyl czar job was put on the table by the Canadians.
The source, who was not authorized to speak on the record, said the government is looking for a serving or former police officer for the role — and to fill it as soon as possible.
The aim, the source said, is to have better information-sharing with the U.S.
Top Mountie: Czar can be a ‘conduit’
RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme said he sees the fentanyl czar as a “conduit where everything that’s being done from a federal government perspective flows up to this person who then is in a better position to brief the prime minister or cabinet.”
“There’s so many government departments involved in the fight against fentanyl,” Duheme said in an interview on Rosemary Barton Live airing Sunday, adding that he also sees the czar building relationships with officials in the United States and Mexico.
Duheme said the new position won’t interfere with the RCMP’s work “because we have police independence and that’s going to maintain.”
Supt. Marc Cochlin, CEO of the Alberta Law Enforcement Response Teams, whose members are drawn from various law enforcement agencies, equated the position to football where “everybody needs a good quarterback and a good captain to win.”
“I think a spokesperson for the strategy would be great,” Cochlin said.
He said law enforcement is already hard at work on the issue.
Solving Canada’s fentanyl crisis takes more than just enforcement, Cochlin said. It also requires looking at mental health and addictions “because we will not be able to arrest [ourselves] out of this problem.”
“If we can turn the knob or the flow of demand down.… We should be able to curtail some of that supply, or the supply will shift — it will go somewhere else,” Cochlin said.
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