Chris Selley: The chilling airport bag-switching scandal suggests Canada still lacks adult supervision

A worker checks tags on yet-to-be claimed luggage in its baggage claim area at O'Hare International Airport December 28, 2004 in Chicago, Illinois. Photo by Tim Boyle /Getty Images

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Never let it be said drug smugglers aren’t ingenious, especially if no one is trying very hard to stop them. CTV’s astonishing-but-also-kind-of-not-astonishing reporting about organized crime groups operating behind the nominal security barrier at Toronto’s Pearson Airport lays bare a truly expert gaming of what is apparently a mostly unguarded system.

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The story as it stands is about drugs, incoming and outgoing. But it could easily be about something far worse. This scam is alarmingly reminiscent of the sort of security lassitude that led directly to the Air India bombing in 1986, at a cost of 268 Canadian lives and 39 others.

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What’s most astonishing about it, perhaps — but also not that astonishing in 2026, when much of Canada seems to be operating without adult supervision — is how easy the scam was to detect.

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On the departures level of the scam, airport workers — six of whom have been arrested over the past year, according to CTV — have allegedly brought in a suitcase full of drugs, stolen the label off an unsuspecting passenger’s suitcase to stick on the drug bag, and left the unsuspecting passenger’s suitcase behind at Pearson. The passenger’s bag would then have to be sent to the owner on a later flight. Multiple red flags.

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Needless to say, the victims of this scam have had, at the very least, the scare of their lives. One Ontario couple was arrested in the Dominican Republic and not allowed to come home for months. As CTV pointed out, some of the countries these bags were destined for impose the death penalty for drug-related crimes.

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You might hope it would be easy to prove your innocence. The shock and confusion on your face would be obviously genuine, to a well-trained officer. A quick check of video footage from the originating airport should confirm the passenger checked no such bag. And presumably someone with hotel reservations in, say, Singapore — even if their primary purpose was to smuggle drugs — would bring something along with them other than a suitcase full of drugs. Clean underwear, perhaps. Clean socks.

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But I sure wouldn’t want to have to make that case to a Singaporean border guard. This is Third World garbage happening at Canada’s busiest airport.

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People are smuggling drugs into Pearson as well as out of it, reportedly. On the arrivals level of the scam, things are no less brazen.

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Even if you somehow snuck into the international baggage claim at Pearson and tried to walk out with a bag, you would in theory be in trouble because you wouldn’t have your little sheet from customs and immigration to hand in on your way out. (That procedure always seemed utterly pointless to me. I have since reconsidered.)