CANADIANS TO INCREASE BORDER SCRUTINY THIS SUMMER

Security: Team Will Watch For Smuggling Of Drugs And Guns.

WHITEHORSE (AP)-- While RVers, campers and outdoor enthusiasts pour across
the Yukon-Alaska border this summer, a special unit of Royal Canadian
Mounted Police will be searching among them for drug dealers, gun smugglers
and border runners.

Last August, the Yukon became one of the Mounties' jurisdictions to be
assigned an Integrated Border Enforcement Team, one of 19 created after
2001 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

After the attacks, the Canadian government put more than half a billion
dollars into the Mounties to improve national security.

After a winter of accumulating officers and undergoing training, the unit
is looking to its first summer in action and its first summer to determine
just how much contraband goes across the border each year.

The biggest change, along with the increased focus on border security in
the Yukon, is how this unit will work with other law enforcement agencies
on both sides of the border.

The groups have always shared information before, but now it's happening
weekly and even daily.

Mounties and U.S. agencies like Alaska State Troopers will work together on
investigations and will meet occasionally to compare notes. The enforcement
team will also work with Canadian and American immigration and customs
officers, the U.S. Border Patrol and city police departments in Alaska.

"It's really enhanced the investigations and sped them up to some degree,"
said Cpl. Charmaine Bulger, who heads the M-Division unit in the Yukon.
"There's always been a good rapport with each other. Now it's a daily
business."

Bulger is one of two Mounties officers on the team, the other being dog
handler Constable Wayne Smith. Constable Jag Soin is expected to join the
group from Whitehorse detachment's general duty section in late June.

Smith and his four-legged partner Luke, a yellow Labrador retriever, will
be at a border point or the Whitehorse International Airport virtually
every week. When they're not working, the two will be training.

The biggest issues at the Yukon-Alaska border are drug and firearms
smuggling, Bulger said.

Relatively inexpensive in the United States, guns are brought into Canada
and sold for considerably more. Going the other way are Canadian drugs,
particularly marijuana from British Columbia, which sells well in the
United States.

While law enforcers who have worked the borders until now know it goes on,
the extent of the problem isn't clear and when busts happen, it's not often
publicized, Bulger said.

She expects this summer to be their first real look at the illicit border
trade.