trade . Beyond the string of slayings and shootings that have taken place over the last two years are the new modes in which the violence is carried out . `` It 's the type of murders , the more brazen public shootings , the shootings in front of the grocery store with automatic weapons , '' said superintendent Pat Fogarty of the Royal Mounted Police , who oversees a special multi-jurisdictional unit that is taking on the gangs and larger criminal organizations behind them . `` It 's common now for gangsters to carry body armor and wear it , to have bulletproof cars , '' Fogarty said . `` What that does is when one gang is shooting up another gang , their .40 - calibers are n't able to pierce the body armor of the vehicle or the body armor of the vests . So what we 've seen is an elevation in firepower , which is a scary process . '' Watch how authorities are fighting the gangs '' Some of the incidents have already become legend : the car radio repairman killed while fixing a gangster 's stereo , thugs shooting up the parking garage
VANCOUVER , British Columbia -LRB- CNN -RRB- -- When Canadian cocaine smuggler Charles Lai was being sentenced in a Seattle federal courtroom last month , the judge sending him to prison for 13 years offered a small item of good news . A suspected gang member in Vancouver is taken out of a bar in handcuffs . At least behind bars , Judge James Robart said , drug smuggler Lai would not become another fatality in Vancouver 's gang wars . Authorities in Vancouver , just 30 miles from the border , are struggling to deal with the boom in the drug trade between the United States and Canada , along with the violence that has come with it . Cocaine from Mexico -- and many of the guns that fuel the violence -- come north via the United States . Canadian smugglers then bring south high-quality marijuana known as `` BC Bud '' and synthetic drugs like methamphetamine . A recent U.N. drug report named Canada as the `` primary '' supplier of Ecstasy to the United States . The gang killings are blamed in part over who will control which areas of this estimated $ 6 billion-a-year narcotics