Canada’s ‘smuggler’s paradise’ under renewed scrutiny amid Trump threats

On a frigid Tuesday this month, police in Cornwall, Ont., stopped a van trying to cross a bridge over the St. Lawrence River headed toward Mohawk territory. The driver and passenger, two men in their 50s, said they were going home to Akwesasne, the First Nations reserve on the other side of the water.Thousands of cars and trucks pass through this corridor everyday, in a blue-collar industrial town where the shuttered pulp and paper plant used to belch a rotten egg smell into the air. But police, acting on a tip, focused on this vehicle and its unusual cargo – eight people hidden in the back who had paid thousands each to be smuggled across the border into the United States.