A three-month joint investigation by two Ontario police services has resulted in the largest stolen vehicle recovery in either agency’s history. By the time the operation, known as Project Starter, was finished, investigators had located 40 stolen vehicles. The list of where they ended up includes Canada, the Bahamas, Spain and Ghana.
Barrie Police Service and South Simcoe Police Service announced the results on Thursday at the Barrie Simcoe Emergency Services Campus. They were joined by the Canada Border Services Agency and the Équité Association, both of which played central roles. The total estimated value of the recovered vehicles is more than $3 million.
Half of the vehicles that were recovered were intercepted before they ever left Canada. They were found inside shipping containers scattered around the Toronto and Montreal areas. The other half were tracked down after they had crossed the ocean. The Bahamas, Spain and Ghana are the three foreign ports where they were ultimately located.
Officials announcing the results said this kind of operation may become harder to sustain. The $1.8 million Ontario grant that funded the joint Prevent Auto Thefts unit ran out at the start of April. The province has said it will not be renewed.
What Investigators Found
According to Barrie Police, Project Starter was a complex, three-month investigation conducted with the Canada Border Services Agency and the Équité Association — the latter a national investigative organization that works with Canadian property and casualty insurers on auto-theft cases. Of the 40 vehicles recovered, the CBSA identified shipping containers in the Greater Toronto Area and Montreal that held 19 of them.
CBSA intelligence then helped locate another 21 stolen vehicles already in overseas ports in the Bahamas, Spain and Ghana. The vehicles included Honda CR-Vs, Toyota Tundras, Toyota Highlanders, Lexus RXs, Ford F-150s and a Lamborghini, and had originally been stolen from communities across Ontario, including Simcoe County, York Region, Toronto, Peel, Halton and Niagara.
The Prevent Auto Thefts unit, the joint Barrie and South Simcoe team that ran the investigation, made an arrest in Brampton, Ontario, on Friday, April 24, 2026, according to the Barrie Police account. The Barrie release did not publicly identify the person arrested.
The Joint Auto Theft Unit’s Track Record
Project Starter is the joint unit’s largest single recovery, but not its first. Since 2024, Barrie and South Simcoe officers working under the Prevent Auto Thefts banner have investigated 814 stolen vehicle cases, laid 401 criminal charges and recovered 102 stolen vehicles in total, according to figures the services released at the announcement.
Barrie Police Chief Rich Johnston credited the investigation to a $1.8 million provincial grant the services received in May 2024. Johnston advised that it had paid for the extensive resources required to run the operation, including a dedicated crime analyst who was central to the case.
South Simcoe Police Chief John Van Dyke added that the money did not erase the stress and financial harm that vehicle theft causes the people whose vehicles are taken, and described the trade as having shifted from joyriding to organized, for-profit crime.
Ontario’s associate solicitor general for auto theft and bail reform, Zee Hamid as Barrie-Innisfil MPP Andrea Khanjin. Both chiefs said the provincial grant funding expired April 1, 2026 and will not be renewed, and warned that future investigations on the scale of Project Starter would be harder to sustain.