OTTAWA — A Canadian woman linked to China stands today in a secret pre-trial court in Brussels, where a judge will weigh whether to keep her in custody on suspicion of spying inside the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) military command for a country prosecutors will not name, and of belonging to a criminal organization they will not describe.

Belgium’s Federal Prosecutor’s Office has said only that she is a Canadian national of Chinese origin, an intern at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe in Mons, arrested Friday.

The Federal Prosecutor’s Office, responding to detailed questions from The Bureau, said the appearance comes five days after the arrest warrant was issued, and that the pre-trial chamber will decide whether her detention should be maintained.

What is not routine is how she reached a desk inside allied command.

By standard Canadian security procedures, she would have been vetted by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) before being hired at NATO. Asked by The Bureau how that screening is conducted, and whether the woman had previously held a Canadian government position or clearance, CSIS referred the questions to Public Safety Canada, which said it was not in a position to comment on specifics while the matter remains under investigation.

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WASHINGTON — More than a year before the pandemic, in the autumn of 2018, coronavirus material was carried covertly out of a People’s Liberation Army medical academy toward the Minnesota laboratory of a federally funded virologist, a man named Fang Li, who was permitted to work on “bat coronavirus DNA.”

Border officers were so alarmed that the vials were handed to the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate — in a case the government warned “may pose a risk to the national security of the United States,” according to a Department of Homeland Security field report released last Friday by Senator Rand Paul, who chairs the Senate committee on homeland security.

The disclosure, describing a network of Beijing “Thousand Talents” recruits and People’s Liberation Army-linked scientists, mirrors the Canadian intelligence The Bureau documented in 2024.

That same October of 2018, the same Chinese military research network — working on bat coronavirus gain-of-function research in Wuhan — tried to smuggle ten vials out of Canada’s highest-security laboratory in Winnipeg.

At the center of both cases is one institution and one scientist.

The American documents trace a network linking the University of Minnesota virologist Fang Li to Yusen Zhou of China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences and to Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s deputy director, known in the scientific press as the “bat woman.”

This is the same Shi who appears in the Canadian records as a senior figure in the Wuhan collaboration that drew in Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, the Winnipeg scientist Canada’s spy service found had covertly served Beijing — and to whose Wuhan institute Dr. Qiu, in March 2019, organized a shipment of Ebola and Nipah virus samples from Canada’s highest-security laboratory.

The releases from Senator Paul’s document probe also show Dr. Anthony Fauci dismissing concerns that Central Intelligence Agency officers raised about military activity and coronavirus research in Wuhan, including pangolin sampling.

Among the released records is a note on a postdoctoral researcher in Li’s Minnesota laboratory whose doctoral thesis — titled “Bat coronavirus receptor analysis” — listed Fang Li as principal investigator and, as the adviser in China, Zhengli Shi.

In plain terms, the relationship was the same on both sides of the border, and it is now confirmed in both American and Canadian intelligence reporting: Fang Li in Minnesota and Xiangguo Qiu in Winnipeg were each collaborating with Shi’s group in Wuhan on dangerous bat-borne viruses.

Both Li and Qiu were apparently asked to arrange for Chinese scientists to carry biological materials from North American laboratories to Wuhan. Both facilitated formal shipments. In Qiu’s case, this occurred after members of her laboratory were caught attempting to smuggle vials out of the Winnipeg facility.

The American documents show Shi and Li researched how bat coronaviruses recognize and enter the cells they infect — the mechanism at the center of the debate over where the pandemic began.

In April 2018, the documents say, Shi asked Li whether a student could hand-carry severe acute respiratory syndrome antibodies back to China.

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TORONTO — In the first days of June, Ontario’s highest court quietly affirmed the release of Deepak Paradkar, a Toronto-area criminal lawyer accused by United States prosecutors of serving as a senior operative inside Ryan Wedding’s billion-dollar drug organization — the man who, the indictment alleges, introduced the former Canadian Olympian to the “trusted couriers” who carried cartel cocaine and methamphetamine into Canada through the arteries of the commercial trucking industry.

Seven weeks later, in Windsor, bordering Detroit, at the far end of Highway 401, police announced one of the largest drug seizures by weight in Ontario’s history — and described, at the center of it, the same corrupted long-haul trucking system.

The investigation, the Ontario Provincial Police and Canada Border Services Agency said, “revealed the use of a broker-style model within the commercial transportation sector,” one that “leveraged established connections to facilitate the cross-border movement of illegal drugs, including the arrangement of drivers to knowingly transport illicit commodities within legitimate supply chains.”

That sentence, in itself, is at once shocking, affirming and troubling, considering The Bureau’s exclusive reporting last year, sourced to a senior U.S. investigator, that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police stonewalled American requests in 2019 to target that same trucking industry, in cartel haulage cases involving Ryan Wedding and the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels.

In that story — “RCMP Rejected U.S. Bid to Target Cartel–Indo-Canadian Trucking Routes as Cocaine and Meth Surged North” — the senior U.S. investigator said: “This is the biggest threat facing Canada, because it’s just open borders.”

“We’ve been talking to RCMP for years about this, but nobody really wants to take it head on as a North American project,” the source said in the September 2025 story. “Six years ago, we went to the RCMP and said, ‘Hey, we really need to work this together.’ They said, ‘No, there’s no appetite.’”

The new Ontario Provincial Police case and the prior cases allegedly involving Ryan Wedding and Deepak Paradkar are not, on the public record, connected. None of the nineteen accused named by police in the new investigation, called Project Bay, appears in the American indictments against Wedding’s network — nor in the earlier Ontario files that track the same criminal patterns: Project Brisa, announced in 2023 as the largest drug bust in Toronto police history, Project Pelican in Peel Region, and others.

Most of the names on the new charging list, though, come from the same Punjabi diaspora in which Wedding’s network allegedly found its haulers.

What connects the cases is pattern and architecture — the alleged penetration of legitimate transportation by mafia brokers — and the highways and bridges it runs on. The same Ontario border crossings, and several of the same Ontario towns, where Wedding’s organization dominated the importation of cartel cocaine and methamphetamine into Canada, according to U.S. prosecutors and The Bureau’s senior U.S. sources.

The Paradkar bail decision drew a cycle of daily coverage from the Canadian press when it was rendered in December, and again when the appeal court ruled. What that coverage largely passed over is the ruling itself — the most detailed judicial narrative yet placed on the Canadian public record of how the Wedding organization is alleged to have worked.

Paradkar, 62, a criminal lawyer of nearly thirty years’ standing, was charged in California on October 28, 2025, and arrested three weeks later in what the court record calls “the urgent circumstances of a nation-wide takedown.” The indictment, as summarized by Justice van Rensburg of the Court of Appeal for Ontario, describes the Wedding organization as “a billion-dollar enterprise and the largest supplier of cocaine to Canada,” moving product from Colombia to Mexico, across the border into the United States, “where it was stored before being conveyed by Canadian drug transportation networks to final destinations, mostly in Canada.”

Within that enterprise, prosecutors allege, the lawyer performed functions no ordinary member could: introducing Wedding to trusted couriers for the transport of drugs; investigating the seizure of shipments bound for Canada or the United States; paying defense lawyers in both countries to find out whether arrested members of the organization were cooperating with police; speaking with arrested individuals himself to make the same assessment; and obtaining prosecution disclosure the organization could not otherwise access, so it could monitor cooperation and gauge the risk to shipments still moving. He was compensated, the indictment alleges, “with cash drops and expensive watches.”

The most serious allegation is that Paradkar advised Wedding and another member of the organization to murder a confidential source who was assisting American authorities — counsel, prosecutors allege, offered so that Wedding would avoid extradition from Mexico. The source was shot dead in Medellín, Colombia, on January 31, 2025. The Bureau has identified the victim as a Quebec-based convicted fentanyl trafficker, turned FBI informant, Jonathan Acebedo-García.

A cooperating witness — identified in The Bureau’s prior reporting and other media accounts as Wedding’s second-in-command, Andrew Clark, and described in the ruling only as a man who trafficked drugs with Wedding and assisted him in committing multiple murders — is expected to testify that Paradkar said the indictment “would most certainly be dismissed” if the source were killed.

The government asked the appeal court to admit fresh evidence, to address what the original judge called “peculiarities” in the cooperating witness’s claim that Acebedo-García had admitted to one of Wedding’s subordinates that he was cooperating with the FBI.

The appeal court agreed to allow fresh evidence, which Paradkar had opposed — and what the new American materials add is striking. According to the Revised Record of the Case, Wedding directed an alleged hitman, Atna Ohna, to delete everything from the phone used to confirm the informant’s cooperation except the message string with the dead man — and to hand the device to Paradkar, who believed the texts could be used as evidence in Wedding’s defense. After the killing, the cooperating witness is expected to testify, Paradkar “reaffirmed his belief, in conversations with Wedding and the CW, that the FBI’s case was no longer viable.”

And there is the encrypted chat that the bail judge, Justice Peter Bawden of the Superior Court of Justice, called the strongest evidence in the case: messages among Wedding, his second-in-command Andrew Clark, and Paradkar concerning two couriers arrested in Arkansas while transporting drugs for the organization. “The chat also indicates,” the appeal court wrote, “that Mr. Paradkar knew the DTO was considering killing the couriers.”

Justice Bawden released Paradkar anyway, finding the lawyer had “narrowly met his onus”: a 62-year-old diabetic with a serious cardiac history and no criminal record, presumed innocent, facing a case that was strong but “certainly defendable,” whose safety in jail could not be assured — and whose former associates, the judge concluded, “were more likely to kill Mr. Paradkar than assist him.”

He went home to house arrest under the supervision of his wife, five million dollars pledged against the family’s properties, a GPS monitor, a prohibition on electronic devices, and a home security system with twenty cameras. The appeal court found no legal error in any of it, and the release stands. Canada will now seek his committal for extradition on a single narrowed count: conspiracy to commit murder. Wedding was taken into United States custody in January; his trial is set for December in Los Angeles.

That is the court file.

The supply chain it describes, by every indicator The Bureau has documented for years — durable leadership, deep leverage inside Canadian infrastructure, operatives who have walked away from serious charges before — a cartel pipeline Wedding directed into Canada for immensely powerful criminal systems embedded into the Mexican state, remains embedded in Canada’s borders and transportation systems. On July 23, its signature method — brokers and trucks — surfaced again.

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NORTH AMERICA — A Western network of far-left, openly antisemitic activists — its founding doctrine the rejection of peaceful protest — has fused with the Islamist armed-resistance axis in the emotional aftermath of the October 7 massacre and the war that followed.

Its first high-profile prosecution, unsealed this summer in upstate New York, arrives with granular financial detail that inverts the conventional picture of terrorist financing. In the most notorious modern case, the September 11 attacks, money moved from the Middle East into American cities to fund devastating actions. This time, the Department of Justice alleges, it moved the other way. Catherine Beth Washburn, 37, of Irondequoit, New York, is charged with wiring $30,116 in cryptocurrency, in roughly eighty transfers over six months, to a purported fighter for Palestine Islamic Jihad — the faction descended from the Muslim Brotherhood and backed, according to the intelligence sourcing quoted in the charging documents, by Iran and Lebanese Hizballah.

In messages recovered from her iCloud account under federal search warrant, Washburn told the man she believed to be an Al-Quds Brigades fighter: “I wish every day were October 7th.”

The Bureau’s examination of the same network finds it surfaced earlier, and more violently, on Canadian soil. By claims of responsibility compiled by researchers, and by the participants’ own published communiqué, its documented arc runs from arson at a US defense contractor’s warehouse in Calgary, to the defacing of a Conservative member of Parliament’s constituency office north of Edmonton, and then south into a summer of vandalism and incendiary attacks across the eastern United States.

The analysis lands as attention slowly turns toward what sits behind a so-called progressive protest movement in North American cities.

In Toronto this week, a man was charged with a terrorism offense. The Toronto Police Service Hate Crime Unit, working with the federal Integrated National Security Enforcement Team, alleges that at pro-Palestinian demonstrations near Bay Street and Front Street West on May 25 and September 7, 2024, the accused used amplification devices to make public statements advocating harm against members of the Israeli and Jewish communities, and that he acted for the benefit of, and in association with, Hamas, a listed terrorist entity in Canada. Investigators searched a Toronto residence in March 2025 and seized multiple electronic devices.

Police allege that Ahmad Hassan Layosa Hajahmad, also known as Ahmad Jarrar, contributed to the activities of Hamas in order to enhance the group’s ability to carry out terrorist activity. Hajahmad, 33, was arrested on the morning of July 21 and has been released on bail. A man of the same name, using the alias recorded on the charging document, appears to have been so prevalent in the street protest movements of Ontario that he was recorded as a spokesman in Canadian television news coverage.

No public document connects the Toronto prosecution to the network described in the New York complaint.

What the two files share is a date — October 7, 2023. Read alongside the unprosecuted attacks in Alberta, they describe three concurrent national-security actions in North America arising from the same terrorist attack in Israel.

What surfaces, in The Bureau’s mapping, is a triangle drawn from documents.

One line runs from New York state to a purported fighter in Gaza — and behind him, according to the intelligence sourcing in the American charging papers, to Tehran.

A second runs through a Manhattan nonprofit and media complex toward the Marxist, Shanghai-based tech tycoon who finances it, Neville Roy Singham — and, in the reporting of a former Federal Bureau of Investigation counterintelligence expert, to the Chinese Communist Party.

The third runs through Canada: an arson in Calgary authorized in the words of a Palestinian faction’s founding theorist — the same ideological fountainhead claimed by Samidoun, the protest network coordinated from Vancouver.

And Samidoun closes the triangle.

Its international coordinator, a lawyer named Charlotte Kates, appeared repeatedly at events hosted by the protest coalition commanded from Singham’s Manhattan media complex — the tycoon whose network the former FBI analyst ties to the Chinese Communist Party. The same Samidoun is connected through its parent faction directly to Tehran, and is named by Ottawa — on paper, with no prosecution to follow — a terrorist entity.

These dots do not flow from a single command structure.

But they connect, again and again, to the same active leftist street movement in North American cities — a movement in which some voices have espoused violence, and in one case allegedly murder, in the killing of two young Israeli embassy staff outside a Jewish museum in Washington.

What can be said without equivocation is that the ideological glue is a doctrine of decolonization and anti-imperialism — one that intersects, in the documents, with overt Islamist religious language, with communist organizational lineages, and with the interests of Gaza, Tehran and Beijing.

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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.”

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.

MISSISSAUGA — Two men police describe as associated with MS-13 — the transnational Latin cartel that both Ottawa and Washington designated a terrorist organization last year — have been charged with running a human trafficking operation across the Greater Toronto Area while one of the accused was serving a lengthy prison sentence, a rare Canadian prosecution tying a transnational terror entity to the domestic sex trafficking economy.

Peel Regional Police announced the arrests Wednesday at the close of an investigation they called Project Mermaid, launched in November 2025 after allegations that a woman was being trafficked and sexually exploited across the region. Investigators worked with the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) and the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC).

The case carries an unusual detail. Police allege that one of the accused, while serving a lengthy prison sentence in a federal institution, used a contraband cellphone to communicate with both the victim and his co-accused, directing her exploitation from behind bars. The two men, police allege, relied on intimidation, manipulation and threats of violence to control the woman while profiting from her exploitation.

Officers executed four search warrants in Mississauga and the Collingwood area. Marcos Ariel Marinoni, 42, of Mississauga, faces the most serious slate of charges: trafficking in persons, receiving a material benefit from trafficking, advertising sexual services, communicating to obtain sexual services, exercising control, assault with a weapon, two firearms counts, and withholding or destroying documents for the purpose of trafficking.

Carlos Gutierrez, 30, of Toronto, is charged with trafficking in persons, receiving a benefit from trafficking, advertising sexual services, communicating to obtain sexual services, deriving a material benefit, and exercising control, direction or influence. Both men remain in custody. Investigators believe additional victims have not yet come forward. The charges have not been tested in court.

What lifts the case above a routine trafficking file is the affiliation police attached to the accused. On February 20, 2025, the government of Canada added MS-13, formally Mara Salvatrucha, to its Criminal Code list of terrorist entities, alongside six Latin American cartels including Sinaloa and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. The same day, the United States designated the same seven groups as Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

A terror listing is not merely symbolic: it hands police expanded powers, exposes anyone who knowingly deals with a listed group’s property to terrorism-financing offenses, and can render associates inadmissible to Canada. It has not been common for a Canadian municipal force to publicly attach a listed terror entity to a sex-trafficking prosecution.

Peel’s vice investigators have documented the convergence before.

In its 2023 annual report, the force said investigators from its Vice Bureau, assisted by the New York Police Department, conducted a yearlong investigation involving organized crime members belonging to MS-13 and Mexican cartels who were trafficking women from the Dominican Republic into the sex trade. The same investigation identified 60 migrant workers as victims of labour trafficking who were found living in unsanitary conditions and relocated with assistance from the Red Cross and Toronto Victim Services.

Police said three sex-trafficking survivors were rescued, two people were arrested and 18 charges were laid. Two vehicles were forfeited and more than $34,000 in Canadian currency was seized as proceeds of crime. Project Mermaid suggests that transnational organized-crime footprint in the Toronto region has not receded.

The arrests land squarely on terrain The Bureau has been mapping.

In an October 24, 2025 op-ed, these pages traced how Ottawa’s own border-intelligence analysts warned years ago that policy choices would ease the entry of Latin American criminal networks — cartels, human smugglers and foot soldiers — and argued that the Carney government inherited a threat picture its predecessors were warned about and discounted.

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VANCOUVER — When Vancouver police executed search warrants at a house on East 28th Avenue in May, what they catalogued read like the stockroom of a small department store.

More than 80 acoustic and electric guitars, hundreds of home improvement items, power tools and battery packs, over 100 containers of baby formula, designer sunglasses with price tags attached, new toiletries still in their packaging, racks of clothing from Lululemon, Aritzia and Arc’teryx with price and anti-theft tags intact, boxed electronics — and over $5,000 in cash.

At a storage locker across town, they found 200 more containers of baby formula, more tagged clothing, packaging materials, and a homemade tool built to bypass retail security tags.

The estimated value of the stolen property recovered from the two sites, according to British Columbia’s director of civil forfeiture? Over $890,000.

Now the director is suing to take the house — in a claim that casts the East Vancouver property as both the instrument of a sophisticated retail-theft fencing enterprise and the proceeds of it, held by three members of one family through an ownership structure that shifted, at one point, for consideration of one dollar.

The notice of civil claim, filed May 1 in B.C. Supreme Court’s Victoria registry, names Mrs. Zheng, her son Mr. Zhang, and Ms. Li—identified in the filing as Mr. Zhang’s current or former spouse—as owners of a property in the 3400 block of East 28th Avenue.

Situated between a pair of dated, stucco-trimmed, box-like homes known locally as “Vancouver Specials” — the 2,000-square-foot residence targeted by the director was bought by the family in 2015 and assessed at $1,762,000 in 2023, property and legal records indicate.

None of the allegations have been proven. The director’s claim is a civil pleading to be tested on the balance of probabilities; the defendants have admitted only basic ownership, mortgage and registration facts, denied the substance, and no criminal charges are referenced in the forfeiture pleadings.

The claim describes a detailed police surveillance operation.

On October 2, 2024, the Vancouver Police Department’s Identity Theft and Anti-Fencing Unit opened a file on what the pleading calls a “prolific shoplifter” targeting retailers throughout the Lower Mainland.

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By Garry Clement

Canadians have traditionally viewed national security through the familiar lens of spies, cyberattacks, military threats and terrorism. We imagine foreign adversaries stealing secrets…

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By Mehmet Tohti

OTTAWA — China’s new Ethnic Unity Law should not be viewed in isolation, nor should it be dismissed as inapplicable to foreign nationals or Canadians. It is the latest addition to an i…

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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.

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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VANCOUVER — British Columbia’s civil forfeiture director has moved to seize two Lower Mainland homes from Ravinder Singh Dhanda, the Vancouver-area long-haul trucking broker charged in Los Angeles with running an industrial cocaine and methamphetamine pipeline from California into Canada — the second Operation Hard Ball forfeiture action the province filed last week, a fresh sign that the director is racing the American prosecutions into British Columbia’s own courts.

The notice of civil claim, filed July 10 in B.C. Supreme Court, targets a White Rock property on Cliff Avenue and a Surrey property on 36A Avenue, both held by Dhanda and his wife, Manjit Kaur Dhanda, as joint tenants. It lands two days after the director’s parallel action against Garinder Singh Deo, the West Vancouver alleged gangster arrested in France on an American warrant, and it draws on the same investigative spine: a criminal probe the RCMP’s Federal Policing Pacific Region opened in coordination with the FBI in 2023, “involving organized criminal activity, international drug trafficking, extortion, racketeering and violence,” connecting three India-based transnational crime groups. Dhanda, the claim states, was a target of that investigation, was indicted in the United States as a result, and was arrested in British Columbia.

The indictment underlying the claim is the one The Bureau examined in detail last week — the eight-count filing that reads as the industrial blueprint of the Mexico-to-Canada corridor.

Its manner-and-means section alleges that Dhanda operated a brokerage providing international smuggling services to drug trafficking organizations in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, moving hundreds of kilograms of cocaine and methamphetamine each week: Mexican cartel couriers delivering cocaine in Los Angeles parking lots, identities verified by the matched serial numbers of torn dollar bills; the drugs held at stash sites across greater Los Angeles; loads concealed aboard long-haul semi-trucks carrying legitimate goods, and, at the frontier, hidden aboard farm trucks working the borderland itself.

The indictment’s most damning allegation for Canadian institutions is that one of Dhanda’s alleged associates, Gurtej Singh Smagh of Creston, gathered the Canada Border Services Agency’s inspection schedules from an individual working inside the agency — Canada’s border, on the sworn account of an American grand jury, sold. And in a South Surrey meeting with an undercover informant in January 2025, Dhanda allegedly announced he intended to start a new “cartel.”

Smagh's home base tells its own story.

Creston is a Kootenay mountain farming community of some 5,500 people, set in a river valley about 20 miles north of the Idaho line, where the Rykerts border crossing feeds onto U.S. Route 95 — the two-lane highway that runs south through Bonners Ferry and Sandpoint to Coeur d'Alene, and from there, by way of Interstate 90, west into Spokane.

It is precisely the kind of rural corridor, far from the commercial congestion of the Pacific Highway truck crossing at Surrey, that the indictment describes the network exploiting.

An hour west, across the Kootenay divide, lies Nelson — the mountain town where, seventeen years before Smagh's charges, a twenty-four-year-old mountain biker and helicopter pilot named Samuel Lindsay-Brown ran BC Bud into Washington State before the DEA arrested him unloading a load in the Colville National Forest, and where, four days later, he was found hanging in a Spokane jail cell.

Where the American indictment charts the drugs, the forfeiture claim charts the money.

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VANCOUVER – British Columbia’s civil forfeiture director has moved to seize more than $11 million in Vancouver-area real estate from Garinder Singh Deo, a longtime Lower Mainland gangster charged in the United States with facilitating an India-based transnational crime syndicate — in a claim built on years of suspicious transaction reports filed by Canadian banks to Fintrac, and on a parallel RCMP investigation that shadowed the FBI’s Operation Hard Ball.

Deo is charged in California with aiding the India-based Bhagwanpuria gang, according to U.S. indictments, by purchasing bulk quantities of cocaine and heroin that were to be shipped from Southern California to the eastern United States. The RCMP said Deo was arrested in France on July 7, the day after the Los Angeles announcement, and is in custody there awaiting extradition to the United States.

In a rare feature of a British Columbia forfeiture pleading, the director’s notice of civil claim — filed July 8 in B.C. Supreme Court — cites the United States Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, the Hobbs Act and the U.S. Controlled Substances Act as the unlawful activity underpinning the seizure of Canadian homes. The province, in other words, appears to be reaching for American criminal statutes to strip assets on Canadian soil — a legal architecture that reflects the underlying reality of the case and a pattern documented in The Bureau‘s extensive reporting on the Ryan Wedding case.

The investigation that exposed Deo’s alleged role was led by American prosecutors, in a pattern The Bureau has documented across the most significant transnational organized crime cases touching Canada, where disclosure burdens flowing from the Supreme Court’s Stinchcombe ruling and the absence of any Canadian equivalent to the RICO statute have left it to United States grand juries to charge what Canadian courts do not.

The claim also pleads terrorism financing offenses under Canada’s Criminal Code — allegations that Deo was “enriching international criminal organizations and terrorist groups” — language that lands in a new legal environment. Canada designated the Bishnoi enterprise, the lead syndicate charged in Operation Hard Ball, as a terrorist entity in September 2025, and Ottawa has moved under sustained pressure from the Trump administration to designate Latin American cartels as terrorist organizations, opening terror-financing liability for those who service the trafficking economy.

Deo, 40, was named in a federal indictment unsealed in Los Angeles alleging that, though not charged as a member of the Bhagwanpuria organization — a syndicate of more than 1,000 members worldwide engaged in murder-for-hire, drug trafficking, kidnappings, extortions and weapons trafficking — he helped enrich it by purchasing bulk quantities of cocaine and heroin to be shipped from Southern California to the eastern United States, including an attempted June 2025 shipment of 99.2 kilograms of cocaine and one kilogram of heroin intercepted by law enforcement.

Vancouver Sun reporter Kim Bolan has reported that Deo is a Wolfpack gang associate — the Canadian alliance of Hells Angels, Red Scorpions and Independent Soldiers figures and Iranian-linked criminals that police have confirmed distributed cocaine in Canada for the Sinaloa Cartel.

Police raided his West Vancouver home the day of the Los Angeles announcement; the RCMP has since confirmed he was arrested in France the following day.

The forfeiture claim itself states that Deo “was arrested as a result of the Investigation.”

What the pleading maps, in granular land-registry detail, is the machinery The Bureau has spent years documenting and that Wilful Blindness traced through the casino and real estate economies of British Columbia: the conversion of transnational crime proceeds into Vancouver-area property through numbered companies, family nominees and short-term private lending — the province’s housing market operating as a laundering platform and, in the government’s own pleaded words, an instrument of unlawful activity.

According to the claim, Deo “did not have sufficient lawful employment, income, and/or legitimate business income to acquire, finance, improve, maintain, or preserve” any of the three properties targeted.

Instead, the director alleges, he used corporate entities and family members to hold them. His company, 1163658 B.C. Ltd., of which he is president and sole director, bought the West Vancouver house at 2030 Westdean Crescent in October 2020 for a stated $2.8 million; after substantial demolition and renovation work between 2023 and 2025 — financed through short-term private mortgages from VWR Capital Corp. and a syndicate including the Lohn Foundation, with Deo as covenantor — the property now carries a 2026 assessed value of $5,543,000.

The allegations are unproven, and no legal response has yet been filed.

GSMD Enterprises Ltd., whose president and sole director is Deo’s wife, Aleksandra Ponomareva — but in which the claim alleges Deo “retains a beneficial and controlling interest” — bought a Surrey property at 16087 59 Avenue in November 2023, assessed at $2,646,000. And in May 2023, Deo, his sister Harinder Kaur Deo and his brother-in-law Lakhbir Singh Gill took joint title to a third property at 12645 26A Avenue in Surrey for $1,950,000, financed through Toronto-Dominion Bank mortgages; it is now assessed at $2,852,000. The claim states the director is not aware of any participation or knowledge of unlawful activity by TD Bank or Vancouver City Savings Credit Union.

On or about June 19, 2026 — less than three weeks before the American indictments were unsealed and the forfeiture claim was filed — Deo transferred his interest in the 26A Avenue property to his sister and brother-in-law for one dollar “and natural love and affection.”

The director alleges the transfer “was made to hinder or defraud the Director of Civil Forfeiture and others from obtaining their just and lawful remedies,” that it was made to non-arm’s-length individuals, not for good consideration or in good faith, and that the family members “knew or ought to have known” its purpose. The province is asking the court to void the transfer outright.

Beneath the property structure sits the financial intelligence spine.

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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.

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.

VANCOUVER — British Columbia’s Pacific ports have become an exploitable platform for what a new security analysis calls “hybrid threat pressure” — the non-kinetic tactics by which hostile states and transnational criminal networks penetrate supply chains, move contraband, launder money and position themselves inside critical infrastructure — because Canada never built the security architecture to match the trade strategy it laid over the Pacific.

That is the conclusion of a Frontier Centre for Public Policy essay published by Scott McGregor, a senior fellow at the think tank, combat veteran, and former intelligence adviser to law enforcement and government.

His finding is blunt.

“Canada can have a Pacific trade strategy, or it can have a thin-security Pacific gateway. It cannot credibly have both.”

That echoes earlier reporting by The Bureau on the work of Ashleigh Rhea Gonzales, a former Simon Fraser University data scientist and Mounted Police analyst, who argued that the Pacific Rim strategy begun under Pierre Trudeau curdled over decades into a vector for money laundering and foreign interference — with underground diaspora banking, opaque by design and knit together by community trust, its most predictable weakness and a lever Beijing's party-state was positioned to pull. Gonzales followed the money; McGregor follows the ports; each lands on a state that wrote a trade strategy without the security architecture to hold it.

The threat picture McGregor assembles is as sophisticated as the foreign adversaries that are exploiting Ottawa’s myopic failings.

“British Columbia’s ports move exports, keep store shelves stocked and connect Western Canada to global markets,” he writes. “They also sit at the front line of two converging problems: a lethal synthetic-drug economy that fuels organized crime and community harm, and a renewed era of state competition where adversaries use hybrid tactics, pressure below the threshold of open conflict, to gain leverage over supply chains, data and critical infrastructure.”

Drug traffickers use the ports to bring fentanyl precursors and cocaine in and to ship methamphetamine out to premium markets like Australia. Organized crime has infiltrated the port workforce itself, giving networks the insider access to contaminate containers and time shipments around enforcement. And hostile states — China foremost among them in McGregor’s analysis — along with sanctioned regimes such as Iran, per the advisories the essay cites, exploit the same seams for commercial intelligence collection, sanctions evasion and strategic positioning. Canada’s Centre for Cyber Security assesses that state-sponsored actors will “very likely” continue targeting the marine transportation sector to steal logistical and operational data.

The same footholds, the essay notes, can support disruption in a crisis. The gaps that let a trafficker move a container of fentanyl pills are the same gaps that let a state adversary map, penetrate and, if needed, paralyze Canada’s Pacific gateway.

The numbers underneath the argument come from Canada’s own public record. Citing the Policing Our Ports report commissioned by the City of Delta and prepared by Peter German & Associates in 2023, McGregor notes that while the Canada Border Services Agency scans all inbound containers for radiation, less than two percent of containers moving through Metro Vancouver are imaged with X-ray or gamma equipment, and less than one percent are physically opened and searched. At those rates, the essay argues, “traffickers treat detection as a manageable risk, not a deterrent” — the business model is simply built around the odds.

The outbound picture is worse, because there effectively is no outbound picture. CBSA’s own internal audit of marine-mode targeting, McGregor reports, states that the agency’s National Targeting Centre does not conduct targeting of exports, outgoing shipments, outbound vessels or outbound crew at all.

That structural blind spot exists even as export trafficking through British Columbia has been documented at industrial scale.

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OTTAWA – Dennis Lu, the veteran federal scientist accused in an explosive foreign interference case echoing the scandal involving Dr. Xiangguo Qiu at Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Laboratory, published a book after his arrest that lists his institutional affiliation not as the Government of Canada, where he worked for nearly three decades, but as a Chinese university — one credited, along with the book, as receiving Chinese state funding and red-flagged by Australian security analysts for ties to Chinese intelligence.

The revelation, collected by The Bureau from open-source records, adds a new dimension to a prosecution that already reaches into Canada’s most closely guarded offices. In December 2024 — months after Ottawa INSET, the RCMP-led national security enforcement team, detained Lu — a scientific publisher released a monograph Lu co-authored on carbon-capture technology, Fluidized Bed Reactors for Carbon Capture: A Review of …Techniques for Decarbonization.

On the publisher’s official listing, Lu is placed under a single institution: the School of Energy and Environment at Southeast University in Nanjing — the same Chinese university where Lu earned his master’s degree in 1985. The volume’s acknowledgments credit the National Natural Science Foundation of China and a Southeast University research fund.

The publisher’s own biography of Lu, published alongside the book, celebrates the Canadian government career now at the center of his prosecution, describing his nearly three decades at CanmetENERGY, Natural Resources Canada. It is a portrait of a scientist operating at the summit of Canada’s clean-energy research establishment — and, under the banner of a Chinese university.

As The Bureau has reported, Lu, 65, a longtime Natural Resources Canada carbon-capture specialist, faces two counts of unauthorized use of a computer and one count of breach of trust, in a case first detailed by CBC News and confirmed by The Bureau through a May court ruling ordering Canada’s national security agencies to disclose sensitive records to his defense.

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OTTAWA – A senior Natural Resources Canada scientist who court records say collaborated with Chinese counterparts on government energy research has been charged with breach of trust and unauthorized use of federal computers, as an Ontario Superior Court judge has ordered Canada’s national security agencies — including the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Privy Council Office — to disclose volumes of sensitive records in a high-profile foreign interference prosecution now heading to trial in Ottawa.

The case has been confirmed by The Bureau through a May 25 court ruling, and was first reported Monday by CBC News, which cited courthouse records containing explosive allegations: that CSIS briefed Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) about Dennis Lu no fewer than three times between 2000 and 2021, and that the department finally launched a covert internal investigation to monitor and search his computer.

NRCan cut Lu’s access to its email and servers in June 2023 — after he had traveled to China and, while there, allegedly sent nearly 2,000 emails from his work account to his personal account. When Lu returned to Canada and asked why his access was blocked, a manager ordered it reinstated so his retirement could be processed. Weeks later, Lu allegedly copied more than 2,600 documents from a departmental shared server.

Those circumstances now form a central part of Lu’s defense, CBC reported. His lawyers, Reem Zaia and Michael Nesbitt, have accused Natural Resources Canada of operating as an extension of law enforcement — an agent of the state acting for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police from the moment its surveillance of Lu began — and have argued that Lu, as an employee, was owed an expectation of privacy in his workplace.

The prosecution, focusing on the future of clean-energy technology, lands in the midst of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s sweeping engagement with China, in which both nations have pledged that Canada will become a major exporter of energy to the Chinese market. In January, Carney traveled to Beijing for the first prime ministerial visit since 2017, and his Energy and Natural Resources Minister, Tim Hodgson, signed a memorandum of understanding committing both countries to talks on oil and gas resource development and liquefied natural gas. Carney declared that by 2030 Canada will produce 50 million tonnes of liquefied natural gas each year, all destined for Asian markets, and Ottawa has set a goal of increasing exports to China by 50 percent by 2030, with Carney and President Xi Jinping discussing two-way investment in clean energy and technology.

Lu, 65, researched clean energy for decades at Natural Resources Canada’s Centre for Mineral and Energy Technology, specializing in carbon capture and decarbonization, and was fired during the week of his scheduled retirement in August 2023.

He is charged with two counts of unauthorized use of a computer and one count of breach of trust. The allegations are unproven. The alleged breach spans from the day Lu began a leave of absence to travel to Taiwan and China in 2023 to his arrest in 2024, shortly after he returned to Ottawa from a year living in China following his departure from the department.

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By Michael Lima

NEW YORK — This week at the United Nations, U.S. Ambassador Mike Waltz confronted the Cuban delegation with the human cost of the regime’s repression. Holding photographs of political …

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OTTAWA – In 2016, through a citizens’ lawsuit over a City of Vancouver land-swap deal with a private developer, records surfaced pointing to something stranger than fiction.

In Mayor Gregor Robertson’s City Hall, an independent review of the file — commissioned to answer the community’s victory in court — indicated that a Chinese state investment giant had an interest in the file. Reports on the controversial condo development could be provided to China Investment Corp, the sovereign fund managing Beijing’s foreign assets, under a formal clause written into the contract.

As it turned out, according to City of Vancouver lawyers, the reference to China Investment Corp was merely a clerical error — that was the city’s explanation at the time.

Not everyone at City Hall found the city’s explanation – China Investment Corp had zero connections to the condo development file – entirely convincing.

“I find it very curious,” George Affleck, then a sitting councillor, told Global News. “You would think that this document would have been vetted by several lawyers and senior staff.”

Affleck also commented on a Global News investigation that found the city had waived $1.5 million in construction fees for another major Vancouver developer — money returned to Robertson’s City Hall only after reporters asked.

As it turns out, that developer’s current chief of staff — a former senior operative in Gregor Robertson’s Vision Vancouver party who now chairs the federal Liberal Party in British Columbia — has been called as a witness by the Conservatives in their blocked bid for a bailout ethics inquiry, which centers on the February 2026 Mark Carney fundraiser attended by leading Vancouver developers.

Back in 2016, commenting on these clerical errors, Affleck pointed to a larger problem: “There is something broken at City Hall and we need to fix it.”

It is exactly this type of historical file that should continue to drive skepticism toward the Mark Carney–David Eby–Gregor Robertson Vancouver condo bailout, investor Marc Cohodes — the short-seller who exposed the selective-bailout logic at the heart of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto fraud — said in an interview with The Bureau.

Cohodes’s argument begins with a simple mechanical fact about failure.

“When you go bust, the list of creditors becomes public,” he said. For Mark Carney, B.C. Premier David Eby, and Robertson — formerly Vancouver’s mayor, now Carney’s Housing Minister — Cohodes said, “I think that is a problem.”

Receivership, in other words, is a disclosure machine.

If Pierre Poilievre’s contention that Carney “seems to have a bailout for anyone who’s part of the Liberal club of power brokers, corporate insiders and lobbyists” is borne out, the receivership path would be beneficial to Canadian taxpayers and young workers trying to enter Vancouver’s foreign-investment-shaped housing market — but would be a problem, as Cohodes puts it, for Mark Carney.

That problem was compounded by the witness list Conservatives sought at an ethics committee meeting this week, starting with “Condo King” marketer Bob Rennie, who held a fundraiser for Carney attended by prominent Vancouver developers — some connected to Robertson-era City Hall development files, and some holding inventory in the glut of unsold condos the bailout would address.

The Conservatives also called for Brookfield — the asset-management giant Carney chaired before entering politics — to be examined, with a Conservative MP telling the committee that a Brookfield affiliate had entered a commercial real-estate joint venture with a Vancouver developer that has numerous condo developments in Burnaby, a primary bailout glut zone. Conservative MP Gabriel Hardy noted that the joint venture was announced June 3 — 15 days before Carney announced the Vancouver condo bailout.

Here is how Cohodes, a legendary American investor and financial analyst, describes his theory.

A court officer takes the books, and the lenders, investors, and counterparties behind a distressed developer become part of the record.

A bailout that arrives before failure keeps every one of those files closed. To Cohodes, that is the unexplained oddity of the plan Ottawa and Victoria announced June 18 — a program to absorb more than 2,200 unsold condos from developers the governments have declined to name, at prices they have declined to state.

It is also, he said, what reminds him of FTX, the massive crypto-exchange fraud that sent founder Sam Bankman-Fried to prison.

What made Cohodes suspicious of Bankman-Fried was not simply the spectacular collapse of FTX, but the selective rescue of certain exposed actors before the market could reveal who was really at risk.

In Cohodes’s market logic, a legitimate rescue lets a distressed counterparty fail and then bids on the assets at the bottom, securing the better price. Bailing someone out before failure only makes sense, he argues, if something exists between the rescuer and the rescued.

Cohodes’s logic is applied here as a test, not an accusation.

If the condo program is genuinely for taxpayers and affordability, the value-maximizing play is obvious.

Let overexposed developers fail. Buy the assets in receivership at the lowest price. Backstop any exposed banks or B.C. credit unions that need liquidity support. Recycle the discount into homes young Canadians can actually afford, at prices reset toward British Columbia’s roughly $85,000 median household income.

There is another structural and historical piece of evidence that Canadian taxpayers should understand, which broadly points back in the direction of China — and toward some of the names the Conservatives requested to examine before Carney’s new majority on the ethics committee shut down the probe in a 5–4 vote.

The city’s troubled Olympic Village — a bailout that put taxpayers on the hook for some $740 million before it landed in receivership on Robertson’s watch in 2010 — was relaunched for sale the following year under Robertson’s council, with “Condo King” Bob Rennie brought in to market the unsold units.

As this writer reported in The Province in 2014, Rennie went on to organize an exclusive $25,000-a-seat lunch giving developers private access to Robertson, an arrangement that drew outrage as a case study in how real-estate money fills a governing party’s coffers.

Ultimately, the city, under Robertson, sold the Olympic Village’s final 67 condos to the Aquilini Group for $91 million, with Robertson declaring taxpayers had been delivered “gold.”

The details emerged only after a two-year freedom-of-information legal battle by Business in Vancouver. The city fought disclosure, and when the documents finally came out, they showed the transaction wasn’t quite what had been announced: roughly $20 million of the $91 million purchase price was not for the 67 unsold condos, but for the buyer’s acquisition of about $400 million in tax losses.

In a research paper, The Failed Experiment of Vancouver’s 2010 Olympic Village, Burnaby developer William McCarthy concluded taxpayers were left holding the bag.

Critics put the true taxpayer loss at $100–150 million against Robertson’s claimed $70 million surplus. The deal was lawful. But the point is what the public was told by Mayor Gregor Robertson to justify the transfer of unsold product to a Vancouver developer, versus what the documents later showed.

And here is the China thread, on the record: Francesco Aquilini told Business in Vancouver in 2011, when he first pursued the remaining Olympic Village bailout units, that the city’s asking price was high but he was confident he could sell the units to buyers from China. Offshore demand was explicitly part of the buyer’s stated calculus for moving high-priced Vancouver condo inventory.

There is a personal irony in Cohodes’s critique, because he says he heard the affordability case made best, years ago, by David Eby himself.

In their private conversations during Eby’s years as British Columbia’s leading voice against money laundering, Cohodes recalls, Eby shared concerns about some of the very figures the Conservative party has now enumerated as witnesses — and David Eby worried openly about China’s influence on Vancouver real estate.

Eby, he said, professed to support policy that would make housing answer to local incomes rather than offshore investors.

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TORONTO – Great Canadian Entertainment, the casino operator whose Richmond, British Columbia flagship sat at the epicenter of the “Vancouver Model” Chinese transnational money laundering scandal, has been ordered to pay $170,000 in monetary penalties by Ontario’s gaming regulator for failing to adequately identify, assess and monitor high-risk patrons and report suspicious activity — including potential money laundering indicators — at its Pickering Casino Resort east of Toronto.

The penalties strike at a company whose ownership and geographic footprint have shifted dramatically since the British Columbia scandal. In November 2020 — less than a year after this reporter documented a pattern of suspect cash transactions migrating from British Columbia into Ontario casinos — Great Canadian Gaming Corporation entered an agreement to be acquired by funds managed by affiliates of New York private equity giant Apollo Global Management. The roughly $3.3 billion transaction closed in September 2021, taking the company private and rebranding the operator of Richmond’s River Rock Casino Resort as Great Canadian Entertainment, headquartered in Toronto.

It is that post-acquisition entity that Ontario’s regulator has now cited for anti-money-laundering failures in the Greater Toronto Area.

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