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.
