Investigative Journalism. Anti-Corruption. Counter-Disinformation. Whistleblowers. Sunlight. Connecting the dots on The Bureau's big stories with Sam Cooper and guests.
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With British Columbia Headed to a Snap Election, Chinese Interference Belongs in Any Serious Reading of the Province’s Political Turmoil
Thursday, October 8, 2026 • Duration 01:09:36
OTTAWA — As British Columbia heads toward an October 24 snap election, I spoke with Jason James about something I believe is missing from much of the political analysis: the documented history of Chinese foreign interference in the province, and the unanswered questions surrounding Premier David Eby.
My reporting at The Bureau has repeatedly examined intelligence concerning Beijing’s efforts to influence political contests in British Columbia—from Vancouver municipal elections to federal and provincial politics.
One particularly sensitive Canadian Security Intelligence Service document I obtained, classified Canadian Eyes Only, describes a Chinese consular contact arranging a discreet meeting in a Canada-based consulate, with a candidate seeking the leadership of a provincial political party in 2022. The candidate, identified only as “CA3,” was expected to enter through a side entrance.
In November 2023, I wrote:
The report’s chief allegation – Chinese officials arranged in June 2022 to surreptitiously meet an elected provincial official only identified as “CA3” — suggests CSIS monitored a particular candidate in Alberta or British Columbia.
This is because the B.C. NDP and Alberta United Conservatives were the only provincial parties reportedly selecting leaders in the June to October 2022 timeframe described by the Intelligence Assessment. Canada hosts four Chinese Consulates, in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal.
The document does not name Eby, who won the BC NDP leadership that year. When I put its contents to his office, it strongly denied any involvement in such a meeting or anything untoward. I have not established CA3’s identity, and the intelligence does not prove Eby was involved. But for me, the question remains unresolved—and it hangs over his decision to call a snap election.
The same intelligence document describes three community organizations acting as proxies to support a candidate in a 2022 mayoral election, as well as efforts to influence the federal Conservative leadership contest that year.
In this podcast, I tell James that all three alleged operations could have been run through networks connected to the Chinese consulate in Vancouver. While this has not been proven, and CSIS has never publicly confirmed such a connection, I explain why I consider it plausible. The intensity of Beijing’s influence networks in British Columbia, together with other documented CSIS concerns—including those involving the current municipal contest in Richmond, as I have previously reported—strengthens that assessment, in my view.
And there are other questions surrounding Eby’s government.
In recent reporting, The Bureau examined heavily redacted Public Safety Canada records identifying national security concerns involving BC Ferries’ plans to purchase new vessels from a Chinese shipyard, backed by $1 billion in federal financing. The records flag the vessels’ proximity to sensitive Canadian military and signals intelligence facilities, as well as their importance to British Columbia’s supply chains.
In my conversation with James, I explained why these previously documented cases matter as British Columbians prepare to vote—and why any serious examination of the province’s political upheaval should consider the established record of foreign interference without assuming that every political controversy is evidence of Beijing’s involvement.
In my November 2023 story, I also interviewed former Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart about intelligence pointing to municipal politics in the city.
I wrote:
Under the heading “Community Networks” the October 2022 Intelligence Assessment explains Beijing’s interference is woven throughout Canadian democracy in hidden social webs consisting of Consular officials, “leaders of local Chinese Canadian community groups,” political staffers and targeted “political candidates/officials themselves.”
This system “enables an adaptable, resilient approach to extending and enabling PRC covert influence,” the document says, adding “the role played by each component varies by location and campaign.”
It continues, saying “CSIS intelligence from November 2021 and late April/early May 2022,” found a People’s Republic Consulate was “clandestinely supporting a particular mayoral candidate” in an upcoming municipal election.
“The Consulate has mobilized the leadership of three co-opted Chinese Canadian community groups to provide material and financial support for this candidate,” the Intelligence Assessment says.
“It is noteworthy that the PRC Consulate supported this same mayoral candidate in the 2018 municipal election, and used the same community groups to clandestinely channel this support.”
“I don’t know if this interference, which I am now almost certain occurred, was enough to tip the balance in 2022,” Kennedy Stewart responded, in 2023. “But it looks like it almost worked in 2018 too, which is shocking.”
More recently, as The Bureau has reported, Stewart has disclosed he received further information from federal lawyers about alleged Chinese interference against his campaigns in Vancouver. Stewart asserts that he also confirmed with governmental sources that Premier David Eby is aware of an investigation into one of Eby’s cabinet members, in connection with allegations of Chinese interference.
“It’s come to my attention and I’ve reported it and in fact was interviewed for about four hours by lawyers working for the federal government about a B.C. cabinet minister under investigation for collaborating with the Chinese government,” Stewart told Global News anchor Jas Johal, a former Beijing-based reporter for the network.
Stewart has not disclosed the identity of the elected official, citing his concern about lawsuits. Stewart told podcaster Aarron Pete that he isn’t convinced by Eby’s response to questions about the alleged case.
Pete told Stewart he had put the allegation directly to Eby when the premier appeared on the program. “He says neither CSIS nor the RCMP have raised concerns with him about his cabinet or his caucus,” Pete said. “How do you interact with that claim? Do you think that that’s true? What’s going on here?”
Stewart’s answer was that Eby is a lawyer, and should be read like one.
“I would listen very carefully to what lawyers say to you,” Stewart said, “because they’re going to phrase it in a way that’s not confirm or deny without saying anything.” He continued: “when you say, ‘I have not been briefed by CSIS or the RCMP about this,’ full stop, it doesn’t mean [Eby] doesn’t know.”
In my discussion with Jason James, for American listeners, I offered a comparison: the political stakes in British Columbia are comparable to those in California, given the province’s strategic geography, Pacific trade routes and national security significance.
And this conversation came just days before an explosive new alleged Chinese intelligence case emerged in California, where the FBI arrested Irvine real estate agent Wanying “Heather” Zhang, accusing her of secretly working for Beijing to surveil the U.S.-based son of Taiwan’s president and his family. Federal investigators allege Zhang collected photographs, video and vehicle information for Chinese government officials. The case raises further questions about the reach of Beijing’s intelligence operations across North America.
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If China Attacks Taiwan, How Will Canada’s Army Respond?
Wednesday, September 16, 2026 • Duration 01:03:30
OTTAWA — In this episode with Jason James, we discuss how fast Mark Carney’s government is pivoting toward China: Dominic Barton’s return, Canada’s newly disclosed military talks with the People’s Liberation Army, the RCMP’s partnership with China’s Ministry of Public Security, and what all of it means for Canada’s standing with the United States as the world edges toward a collision over Taiwan.
We start with the mood in the country. Jason puts it well.
Canadians are sitting in the eye of the hurricane, unable to feel how fast things are spinning around them. I call it living in the middle of something akin to cognitive warfare.
Conflicts from Ukraine to Iran are now playing out in Canadian cities. Cyber operations, criminal networks, weapons procurement, transnational repression, text-message scams, money laundering and hostile statecraft all point back to Beijing, Moscow and Tehran, yet most Canadians never see how they connect. Security experts do.
People looking in from outside, including senior national security and finance figures I speak with in other governments, can see it plainly.
I explain why the noise coming out of Washington, from renaming lakes to redrawing maps, feeds a Beijing narrative and a Liberal Party narrative at the same time, and why that leaves many Canadians confused about who the real adversary is. I also walk through how I reached my own assessment of Mark Carney. It took about a year of watching whether he would break from the Canada China Business Council and the Quebec business elites who have dealt with Beijing for decades. He didn’t.
Then we turn to Dominic Barton, the former global managing partner of McKinsey and former ambassador to China, now appointed chair of Invest in Canada, the federal agency responsible for foreign direct investment. Barton appeared on the network map I published during the 2025 campaign, before the new government took shape. We revisit his record as reported by Michael Forsythe of The New York Times, his past testimony before House of Commons committees, and his well-known advice that business leaders should follow the Chinese Communist Party’s five-year plans.
We also dig into the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s memorandum of understanding with China’s Ministry of Public Security, the same ministry that United States prosecutors have tied to secret Chinese police stations in New York. I explain why diaspora communities are alarmed, and why my upcoming reporting on scam compounds and the Sam Gor triad makes this partnership even harder to justify.
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China’s Shadow War for America’s Pacific Front Line — And Unanswered Questions Surrounding Sudden Death of a U.S. Territory Governor Fighting Corruption
Saturday, August 22, 2026 • Duration 01:13:26
OTTAWA — In this episode, I sit down with Indo-Pacific researcher Cleo Paskal and frequent Bureau guest Chris Meyer to investigate a part of the world that rarely commands sustained Western attention — but could determine the outcome of the next global conflict.
Paskal has testified repeatedly before the United States Congress and the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. A former journalist, she has spent years travelling through the Pacific’s smallest and most strategically important states. The path that drew her into this subject resembles my own in Vancouver.
As a travel journalist, she watched patterns of Chinese investment advance rapidly across smaller states, year after year, until they formed the unmistakable outline of a larger strategic objective. Her research examines how Beijing combines political influence, commercial activity, organized crime and intelligence-linked networks to alter conditions on the ground without firing a shot.
Paskal explains that maritime geography is leverage in this contest of great powers.
Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands — including Saipan and Tinian — are U.S. territories. Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands are independent nations linked to Washington through Compacts of Free Association. Together, they form an American-controlled corridor between Hawaii and the first island chain encompassing Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines.
If war erupts over Taiwan, those islands become the logistical spine for moving American forces west. Paskal argues that Beijing understands their importance far better than Washington often appears to.
Meyer, a former U.S. official and veteran China analyst, connects what he has found in Saipan to the casino-based money laundering, underground banking and political influence networks I documented in Wilful Blindness. His assessment is blunt: Beijing sends its “A team” into Micronesia, while Washington too often treats the region as an afterthought.
Their investigation focuses in part on Imperial Pacific International, the spectacularly troubled Saipan casino venture. Paskal and Meyer examine its reported financial volumes, its Chinese state-connected construction contractor and allegations involving illegal labour, human trafficking, money laundering and public corruption. In congressional testimony, Governor Arnold Palacios described the casino era as being marked by precisely those problems.
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Ottawa Opens Probe Into NATO Intern Vetting, And Global Affairs Question Can’t Be Avoided
Wednesday, August 19, 2026 • Duration 01:04:15
OTTAWA — This week, MPs on the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security unanimously agreed to hold hearings this fall into Canada’s national-security clearance and vetting system.
The probe follows the arrest of a Canadian intern who worked at NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe in Belgium. Belgian prosecutors have charged her with espionage on behalf of a third country and participation in a criminal organization. Reuters has reported, citing a security source, that she is accused of spying for China.
Last week—before Parliament agreed to investigate—I conducted my own examination of the case with Jason James. We broke down the known knowns, the known unknowns and the probabilities behind the competing explanations.
Was this simply an extraordinary series of bureaucratic failures? Or could a political-access network have helped move this woman through Canadian institutions despite warning signs?
I also explained what a former senior CSIS officer told me about the likely vetting process—and why my source believes investigators should look closely at Global Affairs Canada.
So, what happened here?
We have a young woman who came to Canada from China, moved through universities and Canadian government institutions, and was ultimately sponsored by Global Affairs Canada for a sensitive position at NATO.
Yet before that placement, she had submitted applications to the Canada Border Services Agency using different names and different universities. The Public Service Commission found that she committed fraud during that appointment process, and the Federal Court later dismissed her attempt to overturn that finding. To me, the young woman’s persistence in attempting to overturn the negative finding, in itself, seems interesting.
Her case information wasn’t in some hidden intelligence intercept. It is sitting in the public record.
So how did she get through?
A former CSIS officer told me that CSIS would have conducted security vetting—and, in this officer’s assessment, it is likely the service produced a concerning red-flag report.
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The CCP Wants a Say in Who Leads Canadian Parties—and Has Worked Against O’Toole and Poilievre
Tuesday, August 11, 2026 • Duration 39:51
OTTAWA – I joined Brian Lilley for a wide-ranging conversation that started with the machinery of Beijing’s foreign influence in Canada and Conservative leadership politics, then moved into MP Larry Brock’s departure and Brian’s explosive scoop: Brock disclosed to his party leaders that Mark Carney’s party had dangled a judicial appointment before him amid Carney’s floor-crossing campaign.
Drawing on Jamestown Foundation research into Chinese Communist Party influence operations in Canada, I explained how these United Front organizations are tasked with targeting local politicians and community leaders, mobilizing voters behind candidates viewed as supportive of Beijing, and applying pressure to political parties and institutions.
This isn’t about one political party, and it doesn’t require us to assume that any individual politician understands or acquiesces to Beijing’s community networks.
The broader picture is roughly 575 organizations, or 576, counting the organization led by a Canadian senator and now confirmed to The Bureau as having Beijing links, operating in Canada within systems that Beijing can mobilize to surround politicians, shape political narratives and, ultimately, try to influence elections and leadership contests.
Brian then gave a striking example from his own experience.
The morning after Erin O’Toole lost the 2021 election, Brian received a cold call from a man he had never heard of—and who, Brian said, had no obvious reason to have his number. The message was simple.
O’Toole had to go.
Brian’s interpretation was equally clear. O’Toole had been hawkish on China from the beginning. Beijing disliked him and, in Brian’s view, wanted him removed.
I added what Canadian intelligence reporting has shown. In my reporting, I described intelligence intercepts involving Chinese consular officials discussing the need to push a message through diaspora communities that electing a leader like O’Toole would be
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A Trucker and an Investigative Reporter, One Week Before the Punjabi Narco-Trucker Indictments Came Down
Thursday, July 23, 2026 • Duration 53:36
OTTAWA — When Gord Magill asked me onto his podcast on July 1, I said yes for a reason I don't often get to act on. Magill is not commenting from a distance. He is a third-generation trucker who has driven the ice roads of northern Canada, the Australian outback and the American interstate system, and who wrote End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers.
When a practitioner who has spent thirty years in the cab wants to talk about how North American workers are getting squeezed out of a critical industry by immigration scams, or as I explain, how transnational organized crime has exploited our borders and vulnerable migrants to capture an essential economic tie between the U.S. and Canada, threaten our national security and sovereignty, and move cartel loads through the freight system, that is a conversation worth having, and worth sharing with readers of The Bureau.
I asked him for the recording so I could post it here.
What made the discussion unusual is that we came at the same machinery from opposite ends. I have spent years tracing how Chinese organized crime, the Mexican cartels and Canadian-based trafficking networks use commercial transportation corridors to move cocaine, methamphetamine, fentanyl precursors and laundered proceeds between China, Mexico, the United States and Canada — including the alleged use of Canada-based long-haul trucking companies in the Ryan Wedding investigation.
Magill has watched the same corridors fill up from the driver’s seat: the exploitation of migrant drivers, the fraudulent licensing and recruitment pipelines, the unsafe carriers that vanish into a new limited liability company the moment enforcement catches up, and the economic pressure that makes a legitimate freight network easy for criminal groups to infiltrate.
One exchange is worth marking now, in hindsight. Magill asked me why one community keeps surfacing in the border seizures, and I told him this was not a matter of “profiling” or tracking Punjabi origin names across a few Blue Water Bridge seizure news cycles.
As I put it to him: “this is state level criminal intelligence I’m talking about.”
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Are Taxpayers Being Asked to Launder Canada’s 'Vancouver Model' Housing Bubble?
Monday, July 20, 2026 • Duration 01:06:39
In this episode with Jason James, we revisit the Vancouver Model — the Chinese transnational money-laundering system that helped make Vancouver infamous around the world — and we connect that history to a live political question in Canada today.
Because this is not just a story about casinos, luxury homes, or offshore capital. It is a story about how dirty money, political weakness, and a captured real estate economy can combine to distort an entire country.
For years, I have reported on how money from China moved through underground banking networks, casinos, numbered companies, law offices, developers, and Canadian banks. In the simplest version of the Vancouver Model, corrupt officials, wealthy insiders, and organized crime figures used underground money brokers to move value out of China while avoiding capital controls. In Vancouver, that money could arrive as bags of cash, casino chips, bank drafts, real estate purchases, or mortgage-backed transactions that made little sense against local Canadian incomes.
And over time, that money helped drive Vancouver and Toronto real estate into a fantasy economy.
Jason and I talk through the Vancouver Model, the Toronto Model, mortgage fraud, underground banking, and the way Chinese money brokers became central players in global laundering systems used by cartels, traffickers, and corrupt elites. We also talk about what this has done to ordinary Canadians — especially in Vancouver — where an entire generation watched home ownership disappear while governments looked away, explained it away, or called legitimate questions divisive.
And that brings us to Mark Carney’s condo bailout plan.
Because now, after years of speculative building, offshore-driven pricing, and developers profiting from a market inflated far beyond local incomes, thousands of condo units are sitting unsold in Vancouver and Toronto. The official language is affordability. The promise is that governments can buy or support these unsold units and convert them into homes Canadians can afford.
But my concern is much darker.
If taxpayers are used to rescue developers from a market inflated by murky offshore money, then Canadians may not simply be funding housing policy. They may, in effect, be helping launder the consequences of that money. They may be taking assets whose values were boosted by capital flight, speculation, and questionable financial flows — and using public money to keep those values from falling back to earth.
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America Isn’t the Enemy: The Wrongful Dismissal Case Shaking Ottawa’s China Strategy
Wednesday, July 15, 2026 • Duration 01:03:51
I’m back with Jason James to discuss an explosive wrongful dismissal claim that I believe may get to the heart of Mark Carney’s pivot to Beijing — and to a larger question now facing Canada.
Who is this government really listening to?
The case involves Raquel Garbers, a senior Canadian defence policy specialist and military figure who, according to reporting on her legal claim, helped shape Canada’s Arctic and NORAD defence policy — the very architecture that binds Canadian and American security together against the real strategic threats facing North America.
Those threats are easy to identify. They are China and Russia.
But in Ottawa today, that obvious reality has become politically inconvenient.
Garbers published an op-ed in The Hill Times warning that anti-American rhetoric from Canada was not strategic, not mature, and not in the national interest. In substance, she argued that Washington’s push to rebuild its industrial base, harden its alliances, and prepare for conflict in the Indo-Pacific or Arctic should not be treated as a hostile act against Canada. It should be understood as part of a larger Western response to authoritarian powers — especially China — that have spent years undermining democracies through trade, technology, espionage, political warfare, and economic leverage.
Her warning was simple: Canada should stop shooting itself in the foot by treating America as the enemy.
A few months later, she was out of her job.
Garbers is now suing the Government of Canada, alleging wrongful dismissal. Her legal team argues she was punished for expressing a legitimate national security view — one that, in any serious Western democracy, should be part of open debate. If her claim is proven, the implications are enormous.
Because this is not just a workplace dispute.
It goes directly to the question Jason and I have been examining for months: why is the Carney government moving away from Washington while reopening the door to Beijing?
During the election, Mark Carney rode the “elbows up” message, portraying himself as the leader who could stand up to Donald Trump and defend Canada from American pressure. But since taking office, that rhetoric has started to look less like patriotic realism and more like strategic misdirection. While Ottawa talks tough about Washington, it has also moved toward “re-engagement” with China — even as China remains the central hostile-state threat identified by Western intelligence agencies, allies, and dissidents.
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Follow the Money: I Break Down Carney, the "Condo King," and the Fundraiser Behind the Bailout With Brian Lilley
Tuesday, July 7, 2026 • Duration 34:08
OTTAWA – I joined Canadian columnist Brian Lilley this week to walk through three developing Bureau investigations — the Carney government’s Vancouver condo bailout, a record fentanyl-precursor seizure in British Columbia, and a corruption case emerging from Toronto’s Project South investigation.
On the condo bailout, Lilley asked me to explain the connections behind Vancouver marketer Bob Rennie, the man dubbed the industry’s “condo king.” I traced the story back to my own history covering Vancouver city hall for the Province, and to the city’s 2010 Olympic Village crisis, when a developer went under and the city — under then-mayor Gregor Robertson, now Carney’s federal housing minister — was left backstopping roughly $700 million in high-end condos. Robertson’s council, I said, brought in Rennie to market those units; Rennie was also “a major backer of Gregor Robertson at the city hall” and a fundraiser for the provincial Liberal government of Christy Clark. My reporting for the Province in 2014 documented a $25,000-a-plate fundraiser Rennie organized for Robertson’s Vision Vancouver.
On the second story, I detailed a seizure of 6,765 kilograms of fentanyl precursor chemicals in the Vancouver region. This is the epicenter of Canadian narco production and trans-shipment that FBI and DEA leaders recently testified they are watching with growing concern.
I told Lilley the volume could theoretically produce doses in the hundreds of millions to billions, and that the seizures traced to Richmond, B.C., which I called the center of Chinese transnational crime in North America.
I said I had separately reported, in December, based on unnamed senior American intelligence sources, that shipping containers of fentanyl precursors were rerouted from China through Mazatlán, Mexico, to Vancouver’s port, with finished pills moving through bonded warehouses into the western United States. I also told Lilley that, per a source I could not identify, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had reportedly contacted Carney on Canada’s fentanyl vulnerabilities, and that Carney was “dismissive” in response.
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'Moral Hazard on Steroids': The Investor Who Called the Big Short Says Carney's Condo Bailout Is Worse Than 2008 Subprime Fiasco
Monday, June 22, 2026 • Duration 01:11:00
VANCOUVER — Marc Cohodes built his name and his fortune betting against frauds, from small public companies to the American subprime-mortgage machine that collapsed in 2008. This week, he returned to The Bureau with a blunt verdict on Prime Minister Mark Carney’s plan to spend up to $3.2 billion absorbing Vancouver’s unsold condominiums: he has seen this movie before, and this version is worse.
“This Carney buying back Vancouver condos is just really rich,” Cohodes said, “especially on the backdrop of him cutting a deal with China.” What makes it worse than 2008, Cohodes says, is not the size of the losses but the refusal to let them happen at all.
In the United States, Cohodes notes, the government let housing fall — “everything went down 40 to 50 percent” — and only then stepped in to keep the banks and brokerages from failing, once the leveraged players had taken their hits. Painful, but the market cleared and prices found a level. Canada, he argues, is doing the opposite: propping up prices before anyone is allowed to lose.
“Here, the Canadian government won’t even let the prices clear,” he said. The result, in his words, is “a moral hazard on steroids, which encourages these developers then to go and do this again, and do it again on probably a greater scale.”
Moral hazard is the concept Carney, a former central banker, knows intimately, and Cohodes defines it the way a short-seller does: “people doing bad things and taking exceptional risk to benefit themselves. And the risk eventually gets subsidized by the federal government, aka the taxpayer.” Reward the people who built and bought at unsustainable prices, he argues, and you have taught the next cohort that the downside is socialized.
His prescription is the mirror image of the bailout, and it is the same argument he has made for more than a decade. Let the towers sell for what the market will bear — but let that “market” consist of Canadian income earners and taxpayers, not foreign investors propped up by underground-banking flows.
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Jason brings in Unrestricted Warfare, the 1999 book by two People’s Liberation Army colonels, and its idea of “military operations other than war.” We use it to connect stories that seem unrelated: the espionage case in Brussels involving a former Canadian public servant, the scam networks harvesting data from Canadian phones, and Iranian procurement networks that move American technology through Canadian and Chinese front companies. I explain how underground banking tied to the oil trade between China and Iran runs through Canada, and why that matters when China is sustaining the wars of both Russia and Iran.
We close on Taiwan. I’m heading there this fall on a reporting trip. We talk about its democracy, its dominance in microchips, and why its fall would change everything for Japan, the Philippines and the West. Then Jason asks the hardest question of the episode: if the United States and China went to war tomorrow, whose side would Canada be on? I tell him that in Mark Carney’s Canada, I don’t know.
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The episode also scrutinizes a special, CNMI-only immigration pathway that currently permits eligible, pre-screened Chinese visitors to enter the islands without a conventional visa for stays of up to 14 days. Critics fear that such access, combined with direct flights and uneven enforcement, creates vulnerabilities close to Guam’s military installations.
The most sensitive part of our discussion concerns Palacios himself.
After taking office in 2023, Palacios pressed federal agencies to examine public corruption and the handling of enormous amounts of American funding. In April 2025, he reportedly asked the territory’s congressional delegate to carry a request directly to FBI Director Kash Patel for “intensive investigations of public corruption,” saying his administration possessed considerable evidence.
Three months later, Palacios collapsed in his office. He was flown to Guam and died that night at 69.
Paskal says some people in the Northern Marianas remain deeply suspicious about the circumstances, including questions surrounding the medical response and whether his transfer was delayed. She does not claim to possess proof that Palacios was killed. But she argues that this uncertainty produces its own strategic effect: If an official challenges entrenched interests, dies suddenly, and the unanswered questions are never resolved, other officials may decide that speaking out is too dangerous.
That, she says, is cognitive warfare — the shaping of behaviour through fear, doubt and the appearance that democratic institutions cannot protect those who defend them.
The conversation then moves to the Marshall Islands, home to the critical U.S. missile-testing facility at Kwajalein and one of Taiwan’s remaining diplomatic partners. There, Cary Yan and Gina Zhou pleaded guilty in a U.S. federal case to conspiring to bribe Marshallese officials. Prosecutors said they sought legislation establishing a semi-autonomous zone on Rongelap Atoll, with relaxed tax and immigration rules that could benefit their commercial interests.
Paskal sees that case as a warning. Corruption in a remote island legislature can become a matter of global security when the territory involved sits beside indispensable American military infrastructure.
This is not a story about a conventional warfare.
It is about strategic terrain being softened through money, access, intimidation and elite capture. From Saipan to the Marshall Islands, Paskal and Meyer argue that the laws already exist to confront much of this activity. What is missing is consistent enforcement — and the political recognition that defending these islands may be inseparable from preventing China’s aggression against Taiwan, and the West.
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CSIS is a capable intelligence agency. It works with the CIA and other top allied services. As I tell Jason, I find it very difficult to believe that CSIS simply missed problems that were visible through basic open-source research.
My source told me it would make sense to look closely at GAC. That fits previous intelligence reporting indicating that Global Affairs has prioritized trade and diplomatic relations with countries such as China and India over security concerns—a longstanding source of friction with CSIS.
So, could it be the case that CSIS raised red flags and Global Affairs Canada effectively said, Nothing to see here?
I don’t know. That remains a theory, not a proven fact. But I believe it is a serious and plausible theory—and one investigators must test.
That means examining the institutional environment around senior GAC figures, including Mélanie Joly and David Morrison.
Since 2018, as I have reported, Joly has led or participated in Beijing trade-lobby engagement involving the Canada China Business Council and prominent Eastern Canadian business figures. My reporting has also traced meetings involving some of the same CCP-linked entities that appear around the Markham illegal-casino network and political fundraising circles.
I am asking whether an institutional culture—one heavily invested in trade, access and renewed engagement with Beijing—could have caused legitimate security warnings to be minimized or overridden.
That question becomes even more important because the woman reportedly listed Liberal campaign volunteering on her résumé and appeared at a Justin Trudeau fundraising-style event in 2014.
Research from the Jamestown Foundation and leaked intelligence records describe how United Front Work Department networks cultivate Western politicians, establish bonds of obligation and promote favoured individuals for positions inside government. In my reporting, I have identified hundreds of Canadian community organizations connected to the CCP’s United Front system.
The Jamestown reporting presents a blueprint: surround politicians across party lines, provide campaign and community support, develop access—and then advocate for selected people to receive positions inside government institutions.
Importantly, we recorded this conversation before this week’s reporting on declassified FBI material concerning Fang Fang and Congressman Eric Swalwell. That material reportedly examined whether an alleged Ministry of State Security affiliate leveraged a campaign-donation network to help place interns inside Swalwell’s office.
Even before that news surfaced, I told Jason that this is precisely the type of methodology the Jamestown Foundation says the United Front and Chinese intelligence services use in Western democracies.
That does not prove the NATO case followed the same playbook. But it makes it a plausible hypothesis that demands serious investigation.
Conservative national-security critic Dane Lloyd tied the NATO case to what he described as a broader pattern of security failures:
“Yesterday Conservative members forced hearings this fall on Canada’s national security clearance vetting processes,” Lloyd posted to X.
“This comes in the wake of troubling allegations involving a Canadian intern at NATO headquarters accused of espionage.
“This isn’t an isolated incident and comes in the wake of several high-profile security failures. The minister of public safety needs to take responsibility and ensure the integrity of our national security clearance system.”
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That brought us to the current leadership question.
A leadership vacancy creates an opportunity. Members can be signed up. Networks can be activated. A preferred candidate doesn’t have to be Beijing’s ideal candidate—just somewhat “less bad” from Beijing’s perspective.
My reporting showed that a Chinese proxy agent, according to CSIS reporting I obtained exclusively, attempted to influence a federal party leadership contest in 2022 by paying for memberships, recruiting CCP members to join the party, and seeking to make it less hawkish toward Beijing.
While CSIS did not name the Conservatives, my sources inside the party and within the diaspora pointed to a network that sought a leader other than Poilievre, I told Brian.
I also told him that we know the Chinese Communist Party studies Western political systems and individual politicians in extraordinary detail. The objective, as I put it to Brian, is fairly simple: they are trying to win inside our system.
From there, I turned the questions back on Brian.
On party operative Kory Teneycke, I pressed Brian on speculation that Teneycke had been working back channels to encourage a Jason Kenney leadership bid.
Then we got into Larry Brock.
Brock’s departure, Brian said, has nothing to do with dissatisfaction with the Conservative leadership.
Brock had been on leave from his position as a Crown prosecutor and faced a September deadline to make a permanent choice.
The more significant disclosure involves what happened earlier this year. According to Brian, the Liberals dangled the possibility of a judicial appointment in front of Brock. Brock declined and immediately reported the matter to the Conservative whip and House leader.
Brian’s assessment is that nobody crossed the legal threshold for an inducement. But he believes the Liberals should still have to answer for what happened—and that Brock should not be blamed for reporting it.
We closed on two larger questions I’ve been looking at.
The first is whether consulting firms and law firms—including firms employing former senior politicians—are increasingly being used as access points into Canadian political institutions.
The second is what a decade of Liberal Party judicial appointments has done to public confidence in the courts.
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I said it because I was already in discussions with people on both sides of the border about the saturation of Indian transnational crime groups into the long-haul trucking industry. The people I was talking to are well aware of the Trump administration‘s concerns with Canada’s vulnerabilities to border exploitation and fentanyl trafficking, and some have also asked for my knowledge on the topics, a bit of background I didn’t explain on air with Gord.
That was July 1.
Six days later, on July 7, the Justice Department unsealed Operation Hard Ball: three indictments, twenty-four arrests across the United States, Canada and Europe, and India-based syndicates charged with racketeering, targeted killings, extortion and moving bulk cocaine and methamphetamine by long-haul semi-truck from the Los Angeles area to the Canadian border.
The Bureau was describing the picture before it broke into public view.
What those indictments do not reach, but United States agencies are certainly interested in, is the proliferation of fentanyl production labs across Canada that feed into the same Mexican cartel supply chain the long-haul mafia tapped for the cocaine and methamphetamine loads it ran out of California.
When Gord asked me about that fentanyl pipeline, I briefly explained a story The Bureau has reported on, in which a Drug Enforcement Administration source met with an Indian gangster in Vancouver, and an alleged Chinese fentanyl supplier, who promised he could produce massive loads of fentanyl precursors shipped from China to Vancouver’s port, and ship them south from British Columbia to Los Angeles, using his trucking company, fronted by an Indian driver.
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That is the question at the center of this episode.
Are Canadians being asked to solve an affordability crisis? Or are they being asked to protect the paper value of a corrupted real estate system that helped create the crisis?
We also discuss the political figures around this issue: David Eby, who once understood the role of dirty money in British Columbia real estate; Gregor Robertson, whose Vancouver mayoralty coincided with an enormous rise in housing prices and who is now federal housing minister; and Bob Rennie, the so-called condo king whose career has been deeply tied to Vancouver’s pre-sale condo economy and political fundraising circles.
To be clear, this episode is not an allegation that any developer, buyer, or politician involved in Vancouver and Toronto real estate is corrupt. It is an argument that Canada has failed for decades to confront the financial ecosystem that allowed offshore money, organized crime, and political influence to reshape our largest housing markets.
So the question is simple.
Will taxpayers finally get a housing reset?
Or will they be forced to bail out the same system that priced them out?
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That is why the Garbers case matters. If a senior Canadian defence official can be removed after warning that anti-American rhetoric benefits China and Russia, what message does that send across Ottawa? What does it tell other bureaucrats, analysts, military planners, and intelligence professionals who may privately know that Canada’s current direction is dangerous?
Her lawyer has suggested there is now a chill across the bureaucracy. That people are watching what happened to Garbers and asking whether they too could be punished for saying plainly that Canada’s alliance with the United States is not optional. It is the foundation of our defence, our economy, our continental security, and our ability to survive in a world being reshaped by Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and transnational criminal networks.
Jason and I also discuss how this fits into the broader Carney problem: Chinese electric vehicles, industrial policy, fentanyl-linked trade and money laundering networks, elite business interests tied to China, and the strange fantasy that Canada can somehow detach itself from the United States and drift into a new strategic relationship with Beijing.
As Jason bluntly puts it, any Canadian leader that truly believes the northern half of North America and China can be partners, is either stupid or corrupt.
Canada shares a continent, an air defence system, an economy, and a future with the United States. That does not mean Canada must agree with every American president. It does mean that any prime minister who treats Washington as the enemy while courting Beijing is playing a dangerous game.
The Garbers claim may be one of the first legal windows into that game.
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That is what my reporting on Chinese mortgage fraud and underground banking in Toronto, alongside the laundering apparatus mapped by British Columbia’s Cullen Commission, has exposed.
The homes must sell to real home buyers, even at a brutal discount, Cohodes said, and the government must then protect the financial system rather than the developers. “If you’re asking a million three for these,” he said, “we don’t care if you sell them for half a million bucks. As long as law-abiding Canadians buy these, we don’t care.” The banks would take write-downs; some builders would go under; and Canadians shut out of the market would finally buy at prices tied to local incomes. “The winners are the people who buy at a low price,” he said. “The losers are the people who borrowed money and built things at a ridiculously high price.” Instead, he argues, Ottawa is subsidizing the losers and penalizing the people it claims to help.
This is where Cohodes’s diagnosis converges with the reporting underlying The Bureau’s analysis of the bailout — and where his language runs ahead of it.
What gives the conversation its political edge is that the cast has not changed. The man Carney appointed as federal housing minister, Gregor Robertson, presided as Vancouver’s mayor during a period in which home prices doubled, and once dismissed the first study to flag the inflow of mainland-Chinese mortgage capital as racially divisive. Cohodes’s words for Robertson and for Premier David Eby are harsh. But the narrower point lands: the figures who waved away the warnings a decade ago are the ones now writing the cheque.
Cohodes situates the bailout within a darker reading of the whole economy. He describes a country dangerously leveraged to real estate, with a banking regulator he considers compromised and a currency he expects to weaken sharply — to the point that he speculates Carney could one day resort to capital controls. He calls the country “Arctic Mexico,” a deliberate provocation meant to argue that Canada has become a haven where financial crime, narcotics, and laundered capital intersect with too little consequence.
And he is scathing about why none of this is louder. The story, he notes, has barely registered in the national press. “This BC story hasn’t even been picked up in the mainstream media,” he said, tracing the silence to the federal subsidies that flow to large outlets — money he characterizes, in his trademark rhetorical style, as buying a comfortable narrative.
