Violence in border towns…eh?
“It’s a combination of our geography, a somewhat more laid-back approach to drugs and drug use, and the proximity to the border, easy export routes primarily to the United States…”
So says Rob Gordon, director of the criminology school at Simon Fraser University about Vancouver, British Colombia. Apparently Vancouver is having a spate of “drug related murders”, and shootouts (in a country where it’s hard to obtain personal firearms), but when the usual methods employed in illegal business disputes are applied to retailers in the United States, for some reason I don’t think we’re going to see headlines like “Canadian Drug Cartel Violence Spills Over, Alarming U.S” for the simple reason that Canadian organized criminal groups are called “gangs” and not “cartels”.
Canada, and British Colombia in particular, is a major supplier of marijuana and a transit point for cocaine to the United States.
In Eastern Canada, where there is a river border and rugged county mostly inhabited by indigenous people, smugging and cartels are also operating...
Last year, 13 billion illegal cigarettes were sold in Canada, according to Imperial Tobacco, which is losing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of sales to the native cigarettes and pushing Ottawa to clamp down.
In 2006, illegal smokes had 16.5 per cent of the market, 22 per cent in 2007 and 32.7 per cent in 2008. Imperial says that amounts to $2.5 billion in federal and provincial taxes evaded in 2008.
Imperial says 95 per cent of the smokes come from clandestine factories on reserves, mostly from the New York State side of Akwesasne, the centre of a massive spiderweb of smuggling operations. The riverside Mohawk community of Akwesasne straddles three borders, Ontario, Quebec and New York State, and it is a smugglers’ paradise.
Smugglers there, both Mohawks and non-native, pick up easy money smuggling the smokes across the St. Lawrence River to Cornwall Island in faster boats than the Mounties have.
mexfiles.net 
Coupla points:
1. Guns are only slightly harder to get here than in the US, mainly because we don’t have a thriving firearms industry lobby up here. Harder, yes, but hard, no. Our last big school shooting was carried out with a legally owned weapon, and apparently Kimveer Gill’s psychopathy wasn’t an issue (although it should have been). It’s rare up here for anyone without a criminal record to be denied a legal gun. As Michael Moore pointed out, we actually have more guns per capita up here, but fewer gun crimes. I suspect industry, not legislation, is the real reason behind that. Illegal firearms, the kind most often used in murders here, come from the US, trafficked by transnational gangs. Who are, also, the #1 consumer for such weaponry up here.
2. Since the only drug exported from here to Gringolandia is pot, it stands to reason that the gangs aren’t called “cartels”. They easily could be, though; the Hell’s Angels probably own assets in the billions of dollars. They are easily every bit as prosperous as the Medellín cartel.
Cocaine-related violence is also little known up here, because we’re not located between Colombia and you-know-where. Pot may be hugely profitable, but whether it brings about social disintegration, even when its sale is under control of drug gangs, is doubtful. Nobody murders or mugs for pot; the nature of the dope itself makes such things ludicrous. It mellows people out and makes ’em giggly. The only time there’s a loss of life due to pot is when someone is sold an adulterated spliff (usually dusted with something hard by an ambitious pusher hoping for a steady, addicted clientele), or a grow-op house catches fire. And that would never happen if pot were legal and everyone who wanted it could just buy seeds or clones and grow their own. The profitability of pot, due to its illegality, is the root of all evils rising from it; there is no “reefer madness”.