OTTAWA — The federal Conservatives are promising to crack down on “fentanyl kingpins” by bringing in mandatory life sentences for those convicted of trafficking, producing or exporting more than 40 mg of the drug.

“Let’s call fentanyl trafficking what it is: mass murder,” Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre told a news conference in Vancouver on Wednesday.

He compared selling the drug to “spraying bullets into a crowd.”

The party says that under a Conservative government, traffickers caught with between 20 mg and 40 mg of pure fentanyl would be sentenced to a mandatory 15 years in prison.

To do that, Poilievre said he would repeal changes made to the Criminal Code and the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act in 2022 that ended some mandatory minimum sentences and allowed for conditional sentences or diversion programs for simple possession convictions.