From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

The Canadian federal gov’t will take over the Vaccine Injury Support Program from Oxaro by March 2026 following reports of misallocated funds, unresolved claims, and unprofessional conduct.

The federal government is taking over Canada’s vaccine injury program after reports have discovered mismanagement.

The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) is expected to take control of the Vaccine Injury Support Program (VISP) beginning on March 31, 2026, after a Global News report exposed the program for misallocating taxpayer funds and disregarding many vaccine-injured Canadians.

“We will publicly share further details on how the program will be delivered under PHAC when they become available,” Guillaume Bertrand, director of communications for Health Minister Marjorie Michel, told Global News.

Bertrand revealed that the government contract with Oxaro, the company tasked with running the VISP, will end in March, after which the federal government will take control.

“This is also part of our commitment to significantly reducing reliance on external consultants, while improving the capacity of the public service to hire expertise in-house,” Bertrand said.

Canada’s VISP was launched in December 2020 after the Canadian government gave vaccine makers a shield from liability regarding COVID-19 jab-related injuries; however, mismanagement within the program has led to many injured Canadians still waiting to receive compensation, while government contractors grow richer.

In July, Conservatives penned a letter calling for an investigation into the failing program, saying, “Despite the $50 million contract, over 1,700 of the 3,100 claims remain unresolved. Families dealing with life-altering injuries have been left waiting years for answers and support they were promised.”

Furthermore, the claims do not represent the total number of Canadians injured by the allegedly “safe and effective” COVID shots, as inside memos have revealed that Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) officials neglected to report all adverse effects from COVID shots and even went as far as telling staff not to report all events.

The PHAC’s downplaying of vaccine injuries is of little surprise to Canadians, as a 2023 secret memo revealed that the federal government purposefully hid adverse event reports so as not to alarm Canadians.

Of the $50.6 million that Oxaro Inc., has received, $33.7 million has been spent on administrative costs, compared to only $16.9 million going to vaccine-injured Canadians.

The letter further documented former VISP employees’ concerns that the program lacked professionalism and outlining what Conservatives described as “a fraternity house rather than a professional organization responsible for administering health-related claims.”

“Reports of constant workplace drinking, ping pong, and Netflix are a slap in the face to taxpayers and the thousands of Canadians waiting for support for life altering injuries,” the letter continued.

The federal government has ordered an audit into VISP. In late July, PHAC revealed that it is expediting its audit in light of reports of mismanagement within Oxaro.

Washington Moves Against El Mayo’s Cartel Network, Accusing It of Bribery, Political Capture, and Cross-Border Fentanyl Trade

The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has announced sweeping sanctions on the Los Mayos faction of the Sinaloa Cartel, a move that highlights the group’s violent war with El Chapo Guzmán’s heirs for control of a multibillion-dollar fentanyl empire entrenched in more than 40 nations including Canada. The sanctions also pointed to deep corruption of political and security offices on Mexico’s northwest border.

“The Sinaloa Cartel is a foreign terrorist organization that continues to traffic narcotics, launder its proceeds, and corrupt local officials,” said John K. Hurley, Treasury’s under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. “Today’s actions cut at the heart of the political and commercial infrastructure that Los Mayos relies upon to poison Americans with fentanyl and maintain control of territory in Baja California.”

Once a monolithic enterprise spanning cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, marijuana, and now fentanyl routes across the Americas, the Sinaloa Cartel has fractured since the imprisonment of co-founders Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada García. Their successors — Guzmán’s sons, collectively called Los Chapitos, and the Zambada loyalists known as Los Mayos — have plunged northwest Mexico into open war.

A sign of the Mayo faction’s foreign reach emerged in British Columbia months ago, when court filings revealed that a fortified compound in Surrey, south of Vancouver, housed a trafficking syndicate tied directly to El Mayo’s network. According to the government’s civil-forfeiture suit, the group negotiated cocaine shipments with Zambada’s emissaries and stockpiled a cache of weapons, opioids, and counterfeit pharmaceuticals. When the RCMP raided the mansion, they found Hikvision surveillance systems, encrypted phones, and nearly a kilogram of Ecstasy alongside fentanyl pills and counterfeit Xanax. The property — minutes from the Peace Arch border crossing — is now the subject of a multimillion-dollar forfeiture case.

After years of tense coexistence, hostilities between the Chapo and Mayo factions erupted last year, and the human toll has been staggering. Reuters and the Associated Press reported that homicides in Sinaloa surged to 883 in the first half of 2025, up from 224 a year earlier. Entire towns have been emptied and convoys of gunmen have left highways strewn with burned-out vehicles.

OFAC, in its designation notice, confirmed: “Turf wars between Los Mayos and Los Chapitos have resulted in the deaths of over a thousand people in the Mexican state of Sinaloa.”

At the center of today’s sanctions is Juan José Ponce Félix, better known as El Ruso. OFAC identified him as “the founder and leader of the primary armed wing of Los Mayos,” controlling routes in Baja California and extending the faction’s fentanyl operations north. A 2015 indictment from the Southern District of California described El Ruso as the commander of “a fleet of soldiers” responsible for kidnappings, hostage-taking, torture, and murder in furtherance of Sinaloa Cartel interests. Now, OFAC says, his dominance in Baja has become a key pillar of Los Mayos’ trafficking empire. Earlier this week, the State Department offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest.

The designations go beyond gunmen. OFAC spotlighted Rosarito, a coastal town just 15 miles south of San Diego, as a laboratory of cartel political capture. Los Mayos, it said, operated through the Arzate brothers — Alfonso and René — and their financial lieutenant, Jesús González Lomelí, who owned bars, restaurants, and resorts across Mexico, used to launder millions in cartel proceeds.

These commercial fronts were paired with direct political influence. Candelario Arcega Aguirre, a cartel operative with close ties to Rosarito’s then-mayor, Hilda Araceli Brown Figueredo, leveraged his relationship to place allies in the municipal Department of Public Security. According to OFAC, Arcega, González, and Brown “collected extortion payments for the Arzates, assisted in managing the Arzate brothers’ operations, and ensured protection for the Arzates’ criminal activities by the Department of Public Security in Rosarito.”

The network extended to a transportation company, Transporte Urbano y Suburbano del V Municipio S.A. de C.V., which OFAC identified as a laundering vehicle for Arcega. All told, the sanctions designated not just traffickers but a matrix of businessmen and public officials accused of entwining Rosarito’s government with cartel command.

U.S. officials describe the cartel as a global enterprise, with distribution and laundering nodes in more than 40 countries and thousands of operatives and facilitators. Canada has been deeply saturated in that network, a surge that accelerated after former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau eased immigration requirements for Mexican citizens.

Court filings in the British Columbia case alleged that the Surrey-based network had the clout to negotiate supply terms directly with El Mayo until his arrest by U.S. law enforcement in July 2024. That capture “disrupted the DTO’s efforts to import and distribute cocaine in Canada,” the documents said, forcing the group to seek new contacts in Mexico. The cache discovered at the mansion included 400 grams of counterfeit Xanax, 810 oxycodone pills, 5.5 grams of fentanyl, and sophisticated video surveillance equipment designed to fortify the property against raids.

The Canadian government formally listed the Sinaloa Cartel as a terrorist entity in February 2025, following the State Department’s U.S. designation. By June, OFAC had moved to sanction the Chapitos wing of the cartel. With today’s action, both sides of the cartel’s civil war are now under U.S. financial blockade.