Not Just the Men: Women Are Deep in Canada’s Drug Trade Too

When British Columbia Supreme Court Justice John Gibb-Carsley sentenced Sukhvinder Kaur Sangha to five-and-a-half years in prison on April 10, 2026, he delivered more than a jail term. He delivered a reality check. The 47-year-old Punjabi-language radio and television producer—once a familiar voice interviewing ministers, celebrities and police officers—pleaded guilty to unlawfully importing 108 kilograms of methamphetamine worth between $1 million and $10 million. Hidden in four duffel bags inside a rental car with Florida plates, the drugs were meant to flood British Columbia’s streets. Instead, Sangha fled a secondary inspection at Surrey’s Pacific Border Crossing, sparking a high-speed chase before she was caught.

Her defence? Coercion. Threats against her family. The judge called it “untruthful testimony.” Court documents revealed text messages showing Sangha had made multiple prior cross-border trips that year. The language she used with her handlers was calm, professional, even businesslike—not the voice of a terrified victim. She was, the court found, a “trusted and willing participant.”

For years, Canada’s public conversation about the drug crisis in British Columbia has fixated on young Punjabi-Canadian men—often Khalistani-linked gangsters—running fentanyl and methamphetamine networks, fuelling gang shootings and laundering money through the Lower Mainland. Police and intelligence reports have repeatedly flagged overlaps between certain pro-Khalistan networks, cross-border smuggling and the synthetic-drug boom. But this narrow focus has quietly erased half the picture.

Women are not bystanders. They are operators.

Sangha is no outlier. Across the Lower Mainland, police have watched girls and young women shift from “girlfriends” in flashy cars to active couriers, money launderers and even enforcers. A 2019 analysis by B.C.’s anti-gang unit found women increasingly carrying drugs and firearms, lending their names to stash houses and vehicles, and dying in gang violence—seventeen killed between 2006 and 2017 alone. In Punjab itself, authorities report a surge in women acting as drug mules, driven by economic pressure or family ties. The same patterns have crossed the ocean.

Why women? Because they draw less suspicion at borders. Because community stereotypes still cast them as homemakers or media personalities rather than kingpins. Because criminal networks are pragmatic: they use whoever can move product. Sangha’s public profile—her credibility in Punjabi media—may have been precisely why she was trusted with million-dollar loads.

Canada’s drug crisis has never respected gender. Methamphetamine and fentanyl kill indiscriminately. Overdose deaths continue to climb. Yet too often the conversation treats female involvement as either victimhood or footnote. Sangha’s case proves the opposite: women can be ambitious, calculating and deeply embedded in the same networks that produce the gangland headlines.

Law enforcement already knows this. Border agents, RCMP and local police have long seen female couriers on the I-5 corridor. It is time the rest of us stopped pretending otherwise. The drug trade is not a men’s club with a few tragic wives dragged along. It is a family business, a community business—and in 2026, it is a gender-neutral business.

Shattering the “just the men” myth does not diminish the very real problem of male-dominated gang violence in the Punjabi-Canadian community. It simply demands honesty. Until we acknowledge that mothers, aunts, broadcasters and daughters are choosing to traffic poison for profit, we will keep underestimating the enemy. And the body count will keep rising.

Canada’s drug crisis has no gender limit. Neither should the response.