Carney’s Ethics Test: How Brookfield’s Teekay Purchase Brushed Close to a Sanctioned Sino-Russian Venture

Op/Ed: Brookfield’s 2017 purchase of Teekay Offshore tied it to a corporate family whose LNG arm partnered with China’s COSCO to ship Russian Arctic gas under the shadow of Crimea-era sanctions.

OTTAWA — In 2017, Brookfield, the investment giant that would later launch Prime Minister Mark Carney’s global business and political reach, bought control of Teekay Offshore Partners — a shipping deal that now casts a long geopolitical shadow.

On the surface, it looked like just another Brookfield deal. But behind it lies a complicated backstory, one that deepens concerns about the global-security risks lurking beneath Carney’s sprawling portfolio of more than 550 corporate holdings.

Teekay Offshore was part of the wider Teekay corporate family, which also included Teekay LNG Partners. That LNG arm entered a major joint venture with China LNG Shipping (CLNG), a subsidiary of COSCO, the Chinese state-owned shipping giant. Together, they financed and operated six ice-breaking carriers built to transport Russian natural gas from the Arctic Yamal LNG project.

The timing could hardly have been more sensitive. The Teekay-COSCO venture was launched in 2014 — the same year Russia seized Crimea and the West hit Moscow with sanctions. Five years later, in 2019, the U.S. government sanctioned a COSCO affiliate for carrying Iranian oil, which briefly caused Teekay’s joint venture with COSCO’s China LNG Shipping on the Arctic Yamal project to be treated as a “Blocked Person” under American rules.

The sanction was lifted after COSCO restructured its ownership.

Brookfield never owned Teekay LNG; its stake was in the Teekay Offshore arm, a separate division of the Teekay corporate family. But the two companies shared the Teekay brand, and as long as Brookfield remained tied to that structure, it was positioned uncomfortably close to a Sino-Russian natural gas venture that Washington had already flagged as risky.

COSCO – or China Ocean Shipping Company, a state-owned maritime giant – is a story in itself.

It has repeatedly faced U.S. scrutiny over its potential role in illicit and sensitive activities. In 1996, U.S. Customs agents seized 2,000 disassembled Chinese assault rifles hidden in containers on a COSCO ship at the Port of Oakland, allegedly bound for Mexican drug cartels. While official blame fell on Poly Technologies Inc. — a Chinese arms exporter — and the smuggling network behind the shipment, the incident heightened concerns about COSCO’s links to Beijing’s military and underground proliferation networks.

Other troubling episodes include a 1993 incident involving a COSCO vessel suspected of carrying chemical-weapons precursors to Iran, a 2015 seizure of explosives on a COSCO ship in Colombia headed for Cuba, and the 2019 U.S. sanctions on COSCO subsidiaries for violating Iran oil embargoes.

The Bureau has also reported on Canadian concerns. In December 1999, former Crown prosecutor Scott Newark wrote to an Ottawa intelligence review panel, noting that Canadian intelligence officials had long scrutinized COSCO’s activities at Vancouver’s port, citing alleged ties to both Chinese Triads and the People’s Liberation Army.

As Carney steps back into Parliament today, he is likely to face scathing questions from the Opposition not only about his Brookfield holdings and potential conflicts tied to deals like Teekay, but also over his government’s billion-dollar loan to BC Ferries for vessels built at a Chinese state-owned shipyard linked to Beijing’s civil-military fusion strategy.

This is where Carney himself enters the Brookfield story. After stepping down from the Bank of England in 2020, he joined Brookfield as Vice Chair and Head of ESG and Impact Investing. He later became Chair of Brookfield Asset Management. That means while Brookfield was still closely tied to Teekay Offshore, Carney was one of the most senior figures shaping Brookfield’s strategy — and holding significant personal stakes in its success.

Today, Brookfield has no exposure through Teekay. Teekay Offshore has since been renamed Altera Infrastructure and separated from its parent. In other words: while Brookfield has avoided direct legal risk, the reputational and geopolitical iceberg remains just beneath the waterline. Fresh controversy now looms in the case of the BC Ferries deal, in which the federal government, through the Canada Infrastructure Bank, which is overseen by Housing Minister and former Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson, has provided a $1 billion low-interest loan to help BC Ferries purchase four hybrid vessels built by CMI Weihai, a Chinese state-owned shipyard. Opposition MPs say the loan contradicts Carney’s “Buy Canada” rhetoric and risks strengthening a PRC enterprise under civil-military fusion policy, at a moment when Beijing is openly threatening to invade Taiwan — with vessels constructed by state-owned shipbuilders such as CMI Weihai potentially part of that buildup.

As The Bureau has reported, an Ottawa democracy watchdog has already warned that Prime Minister Carney’s sprawling private investments — including substantial holdings in Brookfield as well as shares in more than 550 other companies — create a disabling conflict of interest that cannot be solved by his so-called “ethics screen,” ultimately undermining Ottawa’s credibility and weakening Carney’s capacity to confront hostile regimes, including China.

“PM Carney’s so-called ‘blind’ trust isn’t blind at all,” Democracy Watch stated this summer. “He knows exactly what he put in, he chose his own trustee, can instruct them not to sell, and can receive updates at any time. On top of that, he owns stock options in Brookfield that he can’t sell for years, guaranteeing he stays tethered to these corporate interests.”

These warnings echo The Bureau’s March 2025 pre-election investigation, which outlined in granular detail Carney’s deep entanglements with Brookfield and China. The Bureau revealed that Brookfield, the $900 billion investment giant Carney joined in 2020, held over $3 billion in politically sensitive assets connected to Chinese state-linked real estate and energy conglomerates, as well as a significant offshore banking footprint. One of its headline deals — a $750 million stake in a Shanghai commercial property project dating back to 2013 — was tied to a Hong Kong tycoon with official links to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a central “united front” body identified by the CIA as a tool of Beijing’s overseas influence operations.