OTTAWA — The legendary American short-seller Marc Cohodes says he does not invest a dollar in Canada. What Cohodes brings to this conversation is not a financial position but a memory — more than a decade of it, beginning in 2014, when he started traveling to Vancouver and meeting with a young opposition politician named David Eby.
We are publishing this discussion for a specific reason. Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative opposition, has requested an urgent session of Parliament’s ethics committee to examine the Carney–Eby plan to spend up to $3.2 billion in public money absorbing Vancouver’s unsold condominiums.
Cohodes — who made his name diagnosing the frauds beneath the 2008 American subprime collapse, and who has watched British Columbia’s housing market for a dozen years — says that if he is called, he will testify. This podcast is, in part, his account of what he would say.
Cohodes is a blunt, polarizing figure who has made politically incorrect claims about Canada for years, and the characterizations he offers here are his own. Many are unproven, and The Bureau presents them as one man’s recollection and opinion, not as established fact. Readers and listeners should treat contested allegations as exactly that. The taped discussion has been lightly edited.
Cohodes reiterates that he would testify in Canada’s Parliament to back up his claims, offering specifics.
“If called, I’ll testify in front of the committee with names and dates, and things like that, with (Eby),” Cohodes said.
What is not in dispute, and what gives the conversation its weight, is that the meetings happened: the photograph we discuss shows Cohodes and Eby together at Tojo’s famed sushi restaurant in Vancouver, where, by Cohodes’s account, he and Eby met repeatedly over the years.
In those years, David Eby was not a figure of power but the province’s most forceful official voice against money laundering and offshore capital in real estate.
That is not Cohodes’s characterization alone — it is the public record. As the New Democrats’ housing critic for Vancouver–Point Grey, Eby named the phenomenon with specifics, pointing to clusters of multimillion-dollar homes on Vancouver’s west side held on title by people listed as students and homemakers.
As he told me for a November 2015 article in The Province, drawn from an academic land-title study his office helped with: “When you see all the homemakers and students on the titles buying $3-million homes with mortgages, it really supports the idea that money from somewhere else is coming in.” He went further, asking whether the money was the kind Canada should admit.
“China is an authoritarian state that has lots of issues with corruption,” Eby said. Is the money coming into Vancouver the kind we want to be encouraging? And are we doing everything we can to make sure we leverage this investment to benefit British Columbians as much as possible?”
Ironically, the same question could be asked of Eby and Carney today, as the taxpayer-funded luxury condo bailout plan announced a week ago fuels outrage.
Back in 2015, as Eby paved his rise to power, Cohodes notes, the New Democrats rose with him, on the strength of that type of Vancouver Province quote, interrogating Chinese capital flight and Vancouver real estate impacts.
What Cohodes describes — and what this series has reported through documented sources — is a reversal.
The crusader who once demanded answers about Chinese capital in Vancouver real estate is now, as premier, in China, courting trade and meeting a Chinese housing official, at the same moment his government and Mark Carney’s are preparing to spend public money backstopping the very condo market Eby once warned about.
Eby has since appeared to step back from those 2015 remarks, expressing regret on the record at the Cullen Commission for his role in the study they were drawn from. Cohodes does not pretend to know what changed. He says plainly that he doesn’t. But he is willing to sit before Parliament and recount, under whatever scrutiny the committee applies, what Eby told him in the years before he held power.
That is why we are posting this.
Not because Cohodes’s every word is proven — it isn’t — but because a credible witness with a documented relationship to the premier has offered to testify in a live ethics proceeding, and because the questions he raises are the ones this bailout has yet to answer. Listen, weigh it, and judge for yourself.
