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.
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.
