Canada's border agency has intercepted a large volume of cocaine along its busiest southwestern corridor, underscoring the scale of the drug trade moving across the border with the United States. According to the Canada Border Services Agency, more than 82 million dollars worth of cocaine was seized during the first six months of this year at the seven border crossings in southwestern Ontario, a group of ports that includes Windsor, Sarnia, Niagara Falls and Walpole Island.
The figure fits a broader pattern at those crossings. In each of the previous two years, more than 150 million dollars of cocaine was seized there, the most of any single drug intercepted at those same ports. The concentration of cocaine among all the substances stopped by officers points to how central the drug has become to smuggling activity along that stretch of the border.
Officials say the direction of the flow is notable. The bulk of the business at the Ambassador Bridge involves narcotics arriving from the United States that officers intercept on the Canadian side, and most of the cocaine seized in southwestern Ontario is on its way into Canada rather than crossing the other way. For inbound traffic, officers said, cocaine is the dominant concern, while much of what they catch heading outbound is other material.
On the American side, the numbers have been climbing and shifting. Data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection showed more than 900,000 grams of cocaine seized in 2024, spiking to nearly 2.1 million grams in 2025. This year has brought a change in the mix, with CBP seizing nearly 1.8 million grams of marijuana, compared with less than a quarter million grams of cocaine over the same period.
Even sizeable hauls, experts caution, represent only a sliver of the trade. Researcher Benoit Gomes said it is very rare to see countries able to seize more than 10 to 20 percent of the overall illegal market, meaning the amounts stopped at the border are a fraction of what actually moves. Seizure totals, by that measure, offer only a partial picture of the flow of drugs.
Gomes said criminal networks favour cocaine for practical reasons. There is a stable supply from places such as Colombia and Peru, where the plant is grown, with the product moving up through the United States and into Canada. Demand has been steady, the substance is easy to smuggle because it is compact, and the distribution networks are well established, all of which help explain why cocaine has remained a constant presence in the market.
The agency uses several methods to find the drugs, from a detector dog named Nova sniffing vehicles at the Ambassador Bridge to law enforcement intelligence that flags a specific truck for automatic inspection, along with officers trained to read verbal and nonverbal cues and to spot problems in paperwork. With the 6.4 billion dollar Gordie Howe International Bridge now open between Windsor and Detroit, officials say they are watching for shifts in traffic patterns and seizure data, noting the new crossing offers more examination space and additional technology to detect illegal drugs.