Between mid-December and the end of March, police inspected about 400 shipping containers at the Port of Montreal and found nearly 600 stolen vehicles, most of them from the Greater Toronto Area.

The operation showed how Canada’s second-largest port has become a major transit hub for stolen vehicle exports, with police saying it’s due to the port’s strategic location and the large volume of containers, while authorities say they are doing what they can to stop the car theft epidemic, experts say judicial constraints, staffing shortages, and organized crime stand in the way.

Bryan Giest, vice president of investigative services at Equite Association, an anti-crime organization consisting of insurance companies, stated, "It’s a very large port," noting that due to the rail lines and roads leading to the Greater Toronto Area – where many vehicles are stolen – the Port of Montreal is a "prime location" for criminals.

Giest, an investigator with the Ontario Provincial Police for over 20 years, explained that stolen vehicles are packed into shipping containers in the Toronto area, using forged documents, including customs declarations indicating the shipment is legitimate, and then shipped to the port by rail or truck.

Giest's organization participated in Project Vector, the operation led by the Ontario Provincial Police at the port that recovered 598 stolen vehicles between December and March.

Aside from its location, the vast amount of goods moving through the port is exploited by criminals. Last year, about 1.7 million containers passed through the Port of Montreal, including 70 percent of Canada's legal vehicle exports, according to port authorities. This is approximately one million containers more than the combined second largest ports on Canada’s East Coast.

Giest stated that car thieves "can mix their containers with these stolen vehicles among the trade that is flowing legally out of Canada."

Montreal Port spokesperson Renée Laroche said they work closely with police and border services, but port officials can only open containers to save a life or prevent environmental damage.

Laroche added that over 800 police officers from a variety of agencies have cards to enter the port, and if they have a warrant, they can open the containers. However, in the customs-controlled areas of the port, only border officers can open containers without a court order.

Three-quarters of the vehicles recovered during Project Vector were from Ontario, including 125 from the Peel region, which has become the car theft capital of the province, according to local police.

Patrick Brown, mayor of Brampton in Peel, said the failure to inspect containers at the Port of Montreal has made exporting stolen vehicles a lucrative and low-risk endeavor.

He noted that auto theft is a more serious issue in Canada than in the United States because U.S. authorities use scanning equipment on a much larger percentage of shipping containers.

He added in a recent interview: “Organized crime doesn’t take this risk in the U.S., and in Canada, we scan less than one percent of containers.”

Brown continued that the recently announced federal funding of $28 million for the Canada Border Services Agency should be immediately used to purchase scanners for the Port of Montreal and shipping centers in the Greater Toronto Area where containers move from trucks to trains.

He also stated that police should be able to access customs-controlled areas in those facilities without a warrant or special permission from the Canada Border Services Agency.

He emphasized that even though people have tracking devices in their cars, they will track them to the multimodal center, or trace them to the port, but local police cannot keep up and do anything about it.

During Project Vector, Peel Police said their access to the containers at the port was restricted due to "very limited resources" at the CBSA.

The Canada Border Services Agency did not specify the percentage of containers that are inspected each year, but Annie Beauséjour, the agency's regional director general in Quebec, stated that all containers flagged by police are inspected by border officers.

She said in an interview: "We would like to be able to inspect all containers leaving the country; unfortunately, that's not a realistic thing," adding that the border agency is not allowed to slow down the flow of trade.

So far this year, the Canada Border Services Agency has seized 300 stolen vehicles from rail yards in the Greater Toronto Area, and in 2023, it recovered 1,200 stolen vehicles at the Port of Montreal.

She added that port interceptions are the "last resort," stating that it is important to recover stolen vehicles before they reach shipping docks.

This is because once a container full of stolen cars reaches the Port of Montreal, there are not enough border guards to inspect it, according to the union representing border officers. In fact, last February, there were only eight border officers working at the port, and the agency lacked the capacity to accommodate more than six recovered stolen vehicles at a time, according to union president Marc Weber's recent testimony before a parliamentary committee.

Anna Sergi, a criminology professor at the University of Essex in the UK who studies organized crime, stated in a recent interview that the lack of resources in Montreal is typical of port cities around the world.

She noted that customs agencies "focus on importation, and no one focuses on exportation. Exporting is not a sustainable thing to invest in because it's a problem for another party. The only country that does a little bit, and only a little, in investigating exports is the United States."

Sergi, who wrote about stolen vehicle exports from Montreal in a 2020 report on corruption and crime in seaports, stated that only 2 or 3% of incoming containers are inspected, and the percentage is lower for those leaving the country.

She stated that organized crime has long been present on the waterfront in Montreal. The West End gang, known as the "Irish mafia" in Montreal, as well as the Italian mafia, have been involved in drug imports using corrupt customs agents and dockworkers.

Inspector Dominique Côté from Montreal Police stated, "We have no information leading us to believe that organized crime has infiltrated the Port of Montreal, or that this is why these vehicles are found in Montreal."

Meanwhile, Brown said he questions the claims that border agents cannot do more – or that organized crime is not part of the reason for Montreal's notoriety among criminals.

He added: "When I see the Canada Border Services Agency and the Port of Montreal say why they can’t do this, it makes me deeply suspicious of why they are defending the status quo that has been the most profitable gift to organized crime in Canadian history."