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 Toronto area.
...
Aside from its location, the sheer volume of merchandise moving through the port is exploited by criminals. Last year, around 1.7 million containers transited through the Port of Montreal, including 70 per cent of Canada’s legal vehicle exports, according to port authorities. That’s around a million more containers than Canada’s next two largest East Coast ports combined.
...
Three-quarters of the vehicles recovered during Project Vector were from Ontario, including 125 from the Peel Region, which has become the province’s car theft capital, according to local police.
Patrick Brown, the mayor of the Peel Region city of Brampton, said a lack of container screening at the Montreal port has made exporting stolen vehicles a lucrative, low-risk endeavour.
He said car theft is a more serious problem in Canada than in the United States because American authorities use scanning equipment on a much larger percentage of shipping containers.
...
Brown said the recently announced $28 million in federal funding for the Canada Border Services Agency should be used immediately to buy scanners for the Montreal port and the two Toronto-area shipping hubs where containers move from trucks to trains. As well, he said, police should be able to enter customs-controlled areas of those facilities without a warrant or special permission from the CBSA.
“People will have tracking devices in their cars, they’ll track them to the intermodal hub, or track them to the port and local police can’t even go on and do anything about it,” he said.
From the article:
...
...
...