“Project Panda,” a major Ontario gang taskforce takedown in May targeting a counterfeit tobacco factory on the Six Nations Reserve near Hamilton and Buffalo, exposes a long-ignored reality: Mexican cartel networks have deeply embedded themselves in Canadian territory near the U.S. border—and are expanding in tandem with Chinese state-linked crime partners, using Indigenous land for counterfeit production and cross-border smuggling.
This is no longer just a policing matter. It is a national security crisis—one that exploits Indigenous communities, land, and jurisdictional protections that have inadvertently shielded criminal networks now designated as terrorist threats. Worse still, the threat has long been known to Canadian, American, and Mexican authorities. Yet Ottawa has failed to act.
Stunningly, an explosive intelligence report released last year labeled Canada a “safe zone” for Chinese and Mexican cartel networks to traffic weapons, drugs, and counterfeit tobacco through Six Nations land. “Mexican authorities have also stated that Canada is responsible for 12% of all the lost tax revenue for the Mexican Government from illicit cigarettes,” the report says, and alleges that “companies established in Six Nations have introduced up to 500 million cigarettes a year illegally into Mexico.”
That same report says more than 73 illicit factories have operated over the past 20 years, linked to 173 organized crime groups, including Mexican and Chinese networks.
Heavily armed Ontario Provincial Police units, supported by multiple agencies, raided the factory and associated sites on May 1 and 7. The targets spanned Six Nations, Brantford, and Ancaster—territories sitting between Hamilton, Niagara Falls, and Buffalo. What they found was staggering: 1,360 pounds of illegal cannabis, 3.16 kilograms of psilocybin, 15 firearms, and large skids of counterfeit tobacco packaging, valued at over $3 million. The factory is surrounded by barbed fences and trailer trucks. One of the raids intercepted two vehicles leaving the site with 11.1 million contraband cigarettes worth another $2.8 million.
While Project Panda hasn’t, at least yet, addressed fentanyl on Six Nations land, a related investigation—Project Roll the Dice—carried out by Six Nations Police on May 2, 2025, did target fentanyl trafficking. Search warrants were executed at a Mississauga Road residence and vehicle on the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. Police seized 58 grams of fentanyl, 17 grams of cocaine, Canadian currency, drug packaging materials, digital scales, and multiple cellphones.
Project Panda drew scant attention from Canadian media, with coverage limited to local outlets. But The Bureau’s document analysis and interviews with law enforcement sources reveal a deeper crisis: Canada’s national security vulnerability runs through southern Ontario and Quebec—stretching from the Six Nations of the Grand River, into Brantford, along the St. Lawrence, and directly to the U.S. border. This corridor has become a protected staging ground for Chinese organized crime, long embedded with the Hells Angels, now operating in concert with Mexican cartels.
Though the factories operate on Indigenous land, Ontario police have made clear they are controlled by non-Indigenous organized crime syndicates.
“This investigation involved a tobacco manufacturing facility operated by members of a non-Indigenous criminal network who do not reside on the territory,” Project Panda investigators stated, adding that tobacco sales directly fund organized crime networks. The profits do not benefit local communities.
Confidential sources told The Bureau that Mexican cartel operatives are behind the factories and reserve-based casinos. Their presence is enabled by jurisdictional grey zones, preferential tobacco tax exemptions, and a persistent political unwillingness in Ottawa to confront the threat.
Behind the Mexican cartels, as in Canada’s fentanyl superlab economy, loom Chinese Triads. Canadian intelligence has long warned of this dual-threat structure. Sources close to Project Panda confirm the violence is intensifying, with shootings and firebombings linked to cartel enforcement groups. Seizure evidence shows high-powered firearms and growing operational sophistication.
This isn’t a new threat. As early as 1997, the suppressed Sidewinder intelligence report—later believed by its authors to have been buried by political actors in Ottawa—warned that Triads linked to the People’s Republic of China were trafficking weapons through reserves such as Six Nations. The report cited connections to Chinese military-run companies and descendants of top Communist Party leaders. “Several large quantities of arms manufactured by Norinco have been confiscated on Indian reserves, especially those of the Mohawks,” it stated.
In 2008, Parliamentary testimony from Imperial Tobacco Canada echoed similar concerns. MPs heard that approximately 150 criminal groups were exploiting Six Nations people and land. At the time, illegal cigarettes made up 22% of Canada’s tobacco market—over 30% in Ontario and Quebec. Of those, 93% were traced to First Nations reserves.
Conservative MP Dave MacKenzie noted: “I do not see the aboriginal community as being the big villains in this whole picture. What we’re hearing now is that they’ve been used by organized crime. The Americans are saying terrorist organizations are using it to fund terrorist activity; I don’t think we have that evidence, but the Americans are saying that.”
A legitimate Six Nations tobacco plant owner—whose Grand River factory is located just hundreds of meters from the cartel-linked plant raided in 2025—described the surrounding area as infiltrated. “If you come to some reserves—for example, Six Nations—it looks like a war zone right now,” the man testified in 2008. “It truly does not look like the Canada that we all want our First Nations kids growing up in.”
“It’s not a normal environment for a young person to grow up in, and if they have to work in a tobacco factory that’s unregulated, how does anybody know whether there are firearms and other things and activities in there? Nobody will be able to answer that.”
These warnings ignored for decades are now being validated by probes like Project Panda and new intelligence. In a recent interview, a senior U.S. government source said concerns over Mexican cartel expansion into Canada intensified after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau lifted visa requirements for Mexican nationals in 2016. The source said U.S. officials repeatedly raised cartel threats in high-level bilateral meetings, but Canadian officials downplayed the risks, frustrating joint law enforcement efforts and compounding intelligence blind spots.
This assessment aligns with a 2023 report from former U.S. State Department official David Luna which described Canada as a “safe zone” for Chinese Triads and Mexican cartels.
According to the Criminal Intelligence Service of Canada, illegal tobacco costs governments over $12 billion in lost revenue. More than 83 contraband brands are distributed worldwide from Canada, with 73 illicit factories documented in the past two decades. Some estimates suggest illicit product accounts for 24% of Canada’s tobacco market. The agency confirms that cartel actors are smuggling drugs and weapons into Canada in exchange for cigarettes.
“Chinese criminals are involved in producing cigarettes on Indigenous reserves, saving money and benefiting from tax exemptions,” Luna’s report states.
Research from the Mackinac Center shows that in New York—a high-tax state—53% of cigarettes are illicit. Many are sourced from Canada. U.S. DEA and ICE officials have traced duty-free cigarette flows to reserves in Ontario and Quebec, through smuggling chains that extend to Panama, Korea, and free trade zones in China.
Chinese Triads are also implicated in counterfeit production, exploiting Section 87 of the Indian Act, which exempts on-reserve goods from taxation. These groups arbitrage that legal gap, distributing low-cost cigarettes across Canada and into foreign markets.
This cross-border trade, concealed behind legal protections and legitimate Indigenous businesses, has become a central artery for cartel financing, narcotics, and arms.
There is no longer any plausible denial: the use of Canadian Indigenous lands by Mexican cartels and Chinese Triads is directly connected to North America’s fentanyl and trafficking crisis. Ottawa’s continued refusal to acknowledge and confront this system is indefensible.
Canada’s security and sovereignty depend on it—now more than ever.
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Minister Gary Anandasangaree said his priorities are getting a new border bill passed and tackling illegal immigration.
Canada’s Public Safety Minister admitted that he has yet to meet with anyone from 123 Christian, mostly Catholic, churches that have been either reduced to ashes or seriously vandalized over the past four years.
Speaking recently before a committee to discuss upcoming fall bills, Minister Gary Anandasangaree was grilled by opposition Conservative MPs on a host of issues from public safety and illegal migrants to church arsons.
He said his priorities are getting a new border Bill C-12 passed while tackling illegal immigration but made no specific mention of tackling the rise of Christian hate in Canada.
Asked by Conservative MP Dane Lloyd about whether he met with any of the 123 and counting church congregations, he replied that he has not, but he claimed he has met with “many members of different church and faith groups.”
“You said you met with synagogues and mosques, which I do appreciate,” noted Lloyd, adding, “Those communities need your support, Minister, but Christian communities also need your support.”
“Why have you not met with any of those communities?” he asked.
Anandasangaree said he was “concerned (about) every incidence of hate at any place, including churches,” but stopped short of promising anything.
He was also asked about allegations that a government employee who works on a local military base near Montreal was the one responsible for throwing smoke bombs into a church service this summer.
Anandasangaree said he is “concerned” about these allegations but did not add any other context.
Canadian Conservative pro-life and pro-family MP Leslyn Lewis called out the hypocrisy of a new Liberal “hate” speech bill recently for being silent regarding rising “Christian hate,” because it does not even mention church arson.
Hate-motivated attacks against Christians are on the rise in Canada. In 2021 and 2022, the mainstream media ran with inflammatory and dubious claims that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some Canadian residential schools. The reality is, after four years, there have been no mass graves discovered at residential schools.
However, as the claims went unfounded, since the spring of 2021, over 120 churches, most of them Catholic, many of them on indigenous lands that serve the local population, have been burned to the ground, vandalized, or defiled in Canada.
The Canadian media has been rather silent on the church burnings.
The government-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) went as far as blaming the fact that it has not covered the arson attacks much on “staffing shortage.
Indeed, the absence of reports about church burnings was uncovered by former CRTC chair Peter Menzies, who could not find any information on the recent arson attack against All Saints Ukrainian Orthodox in Bellis, Alberta.
Two teenage boys in Florida are being called heroes for their response to a five-second TikTok video last month that may well have averted disaster all the way across the country.
The video, which has since been taken down, reportedly showed plans for a mass school shooting at Kamiakin High School in Kennewick, Wash.
“The contents of the TikTok were a map of a high school, and it had classrooms that were identified and labeled as targets,” said Kennewick School Board member Brittany Gledhill in a Thursday interview with The Center Square. “It had other classrooms that were labeled as potential targets. It had labeled exits, and it had the security department of the school listed as a potential threat.”
The map in the video did not indicate the location or name of the school.
“But this young man who lives in Florida decided to show it to a brother, and then together they decided that they needed to tell the authorities,” Gledhill said.
She explained that local authorities in Florida contacted the FBI, and within hours, the investigation was underway to determine the TikTok poster’s location.
That was September 19, a Friday.
“We got involved on Sunday, so that we were able to sweep the campus and provide a secure and safe environment for our students and staff, and that was in conjunction with KPD, or Kennewick police department,” said Kennewick School District Superintendent Lance Hansen.
At that point, the suspect, a 14-year-old Kamiakin High School freshman, was already in custody.
According to the Tri-City Herald, the FBI was able to match the layout and room numbers shown in the TikTok video to Kamiakin High School, and at that point, the FBI contacted the internet provider about the IP address linked to the account.
Officials were able to narrow down the location to a few dozen potential residences in Kennewick, and according to the Herald, law enforcement further narrowed the list based on the times the TikTok account was active.
The address was further narrowed to the boy’s home, where he reportedly lived with his grandparents, and more than two dozen firearms were located.
Hansen told The Center Square that officials believe the young man was most likely to carry out his plan had the boys in Florida not done the right thing.
“It was smart and courageous at the same time, and I think that they can be an example or model for others who may see something and think it’s not a big deal. Just the thought that they would recognize this isn’t right and have the courage to speak up … that’s really where I believe the story is,” Hansen said.
Gledhill said the school board, administration and staff members from Kamiakin High School are putting together a gift basket and thank-you notes for the boys in Florida who reported the TikTok post to authorities.
“We averted a terrible tragedy because of these two young men,” she said. “This is my home high school, and I have two of my own children [who] go to that school.”
Hansen said the school community is still reeling from what could have happened, but is also trying to find a lesson in it.
“In times where information can flow so quickly and there’s some level of anonymity that is created in ways that we communicate, like with social media, it sometimes creates some boldness in youth, which I think is a false positive,” he said. “I mean, there are benefits to the way that we communicate, and there [are] some unintended consequences of that. Having said that, as I reminded our parents, every person who’s on a campus is responsible for the safety of the campus. That’s students, staff, whoever is there. So that model … needs to be applied for everything.”
Given that the accused is 14, he is being charged as a juvenile. Assuming he pleads guilty or is convicted, he could only be confined until he turns 21.
