TORONTO -- The battle exploded onto the placid streets of suburban North York when metropolitan police here tried to question a 23-year-old man near an after-hours nightclub.
The suspect pointed a pistol out of his car window and emptied it at pursuing officers. Then he pulled a second gun and fired again.
None of the officers was hurt. But the incident illustrates the escalating level of criminal violence in Canada's cities -- and the growing role of guns smuggled in from the United States.
Police determined that at least one of the guns used in that shooting had come from south of the border.
A few weeks later, three men carrying 9 mm semiautomatic pistols and a .25-caliber handgun entered an upscale jewelry store in Vancouver, British Columbia, and escaped with more than $300,000 in merchandise. Their guns, too, had been smuggled.
With these incidents and others contributing to spreading alarm about the level of violent crime in Canadian cities, law enforcement officials across this country and the government in Ottawa are, among other things, focusing more on gun trafficking from the United States.
"There's a very, very strong network for smuggling handguns from the United States," said Julian Fantino, police chief in London, Ontario, a city of 331,000 on the popular smuggling route between Detroit and Toronto. "There's a lot of money to be made."
The number of guns entering Canada illegally is impossible to determine -- smuggling by definition avoids detection. And there are skeptics about the scope of this problem.
Still, the handful of smuggling operations penetrated by authorities in the past two years suggest the number of smuggled firearms easily could run to the thousands.
Canada Justice Minister Allan Rock already has announced that tougher penalties for weapons trafficking will be included in a new gun-control law scheduled to be introduced in Parliament this month.
The new law would tighten what already are some of the most restrictive gun regulations in the world and would extend mandatory registration from handguns to all firearms.
Bill LeDrew, director general of enforcement for Canada Customs, is reluctant to draw conclusions about the scope of the problem, but acknowledges that a smart gunrunner has the odds on his side.
"The greatest difficulty we have is the individual who appears to be a legitimate traveler, gets in his car and drives to Buffalo or Detroit and loads up on three, four or five weapons," said Mr. LeDrew.
"The reality is, we are not intercepting too many of them."
From pre-Civil War abolitionists bringing runaway slaves to freedom in Canada to Prohibition-era rumrunners looking to slake Americans' thirst, smuggling long has been a byproduct of the long, demilitarized border between Canada and the United States.
Cigarette smuggling from the United States into Canada became so pervasive that last February Ottawa slashed tobacco taxes to take the profit out of the black market.
It worked -- and many smugglers, in a reversal of the Prohibition trade, turned to liquor, which remains heavily taxed in Canada and can retail for as much as 2 1/2 times the U.S. price. Now they appear to be moving into handguns.
"If you're a smuggler, the kind of commodity is irrelevant; it's whatever you can make money with," said Greg Connolly, a constable with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's customs and excise unit in Windsor, just across the border from Detroit.
Last December, the unit arrested two Canadian auto workers and a U.S. mortgage loan broker in what appeared to be a routine liquor smuggling case. One of the Canadians, however, had cached 21 illegal firearms, and admitted to officers that at least eight had been smuggled in from the United States.
Comparative numbers demonstrate the ready-made market in Canada for smuggled firearms. According to the Canada Justice Department, of the 7 million firearms in private hands in Canada, only about 950,000 are handguns, which are very tightly regulated.
Juxtapose this with the United States, home to an estimated 200 million guns, including 67 million handguns, and relatively lax controls. Then divide by a wide-open, 5,500-mile border.
Police say profit margins on smuggled weapons begin at 100 percent and go up from there.
It is high enough to have lured into the trade at least one university student from Toronto. The second-year business major told a Canadian Broadcasting Co. television interviewer last year that he arranged a single gunrunning trip, intending to finance a $600 installment payment on his tuition.
His "buyer" turned out to be an undercover police officer.