When Officers of the Court Are Extorted, Canada’s ‘State Capture’ Problem Comes Into View

Op/Ed: Transnational mafias with foreign-state links are now reportedly threatening lawyers in B.C. That’s not just a crime trend — it’s the hybrid warfare I warned about in Wilful Blindness.

Police in India arrest Lawrence Bishnoi, a transnational gang leader accused of running repression operations for Indian intelligence officials.

VANCOUVER — When a country reaches the point where officers of the court are receiving extortion threats, you are no longer talking about organized crime nibbling at the margins. Lawyers are not only central to Canada’s justice system; as a class, they form the backbone of governments and political parties. We are watching the justice system itself being tested — and, I would argue, seeing increasing signs of the hollowing-out of the state.

This week, the Law Society of British Columbia warned its members that lawyers have begun receiving threats demanding “substantial sums of money,” and that some face explicit threats to their physical safety. Members were told to contact police immediately; cases may be handed to the new provincial Extortion Task Force, which now includes the Canada Border Services Agency to deal with transnational elements in the crime wave. The alleged culprits are not just local thugs. They include networks tied to India’s Lawrence Bishnoi gang, which the federal government formally listed as a terrorist entity this fall, citing its pattern of murder, shootings, arson and terror through extortion and intimidation.

The broader allegation from Ottawa — which New Delhi denies — is that Bishnoi’s gang has been tasked with destabilizing elements of the Sikh diaspora that India associates with separatist and terror threats against its government.

Conservative MLA Steve Kooner called it a “disturbing escalation” of what he describes as B.C.’s “extortion crisis,” and urged Ottawa to classify extortion as a terrorism offence, arguing that threats against those who uphold the justice system amount to an attack on the system as a whole.

On social media, Conservative MLA Harman Bhangu put it in plain language after sharing my post on this breaking story:
“Lawyers in British Columbia are now getting extortion threats. That shows you how far this has spread. I am Sikh. I know the community. I hear the fear from families and business owners. And I also know that some of these criminal networks are coming from India and setting up here because past Liberal governments failed to keep them out.”

Conservative party leader John Rustad also linked to my post.
“Now transnational mafias are threatening lawyers in British Columbia, this is lawless, third-world chaos under [Premier] David Eby. Where are the arrests? Where is the crackdown?”

It is true, in my opinion, that British Columbia is like a canary in a coal-mine for the saturation of vast threats to Canadian sovereignty from hostile-state networks and related mafias: China, India and the Khalistan activists it is at war with (especially in Ontario and B.C.), Iran, Russia, Mexican cartels. Canada’s western coast is being overrun with deadly threats, and the Bishnoi gang currently appears to be the most brazen.

But this is ultimately a Canadian problem.

This is what “state capture” looks like from the ground up. Simply put, Canada’s security arms have not been empowered with modern laws, or funded and trained with the practical resources, to push back against the incursions of foreign mafias and spies. Brazen threats against lawyers — officers of our courts — now speak to how far the threats have come.

When I was researching my book Wilful Blindness, Canadian criminal intelligence experts described to me a troubling picture that forced me to look at Canada differently. I was told to think not just about Canada, but about three nations together: Canada, China, and the United States.

“The big geopolitical picture I was presented with,” I wrote, “suggested a concept that David Mulroney, Canada’s former ambassador to China, refers to as ‘elite capture.’ Anti-democratic powers like China, Russia and Iran, I was told, do not need to influence every politician or official in a target country. They only need enough of them — and specifically the ones positioned at key chokepoints in geopolitics, economy, intelligence, military and policing. Once those people, and the wealthy families behind them, are perceived to be embracing a hostile power, ‘the ranks fall in line, knowing their careers depend on it,’ as one intelligence source put it to me years ago.”

My book made these controversial warnings almost five years ago. But if one parses and understands the new CSIS Director Dan Rogers’ first-ever annual threat brief to Canadians last week, I’d suggest he is very cautiously — and in a very minimal and sanitized way — making the same points that I did.

Across a range of threats, Rogers appeared to elevate, for the first time from a CSIS director, a growing focus on the use by foreign states of mafia-style networks.

“While I’ve outlined today threats of violent extremism, foreign interference, and espionage, I could say much more,” he said. “The threat of hostile hybrid and cyber operations against us continues to rise, and the nexus between criminal groups and state actors challenges traditional definitions and complicates our efforts to respond.”

“It will be important for CSIS and its national security partners to work closely together to understand the intentions and activity of foreign states, and to ensure our response uses the full range of government options,” he added.

“We’ve publicly discussed transnational repression by the People’s Republic of China, India, and others,” he said, noting that such operations disproportionately target journalists, activists, dissidents, and community leaders.

Broadly, Rogers added, CSIS “reprioritized our operations” this past year to counter Iranian intelligence proxies involved in plots that required “disrupting potentially lethal threats” against people in Canada.

And if Rogers had pointed to the same threat networks but broadened his frame from death threats and repression to extortion and “elite capture,” then he could have, in my assessment, broadly added lawyers, judges, politicians, academics and business leaders to that target list.

In my book, I used the Cameron Ortis affair to illustrate the national-security nightmare that state capture can produce. As I wrote: Is it surprising that hostile actors would try to control “the RCMP’s boss of intelligence — a man who had the keys to the kingdom of CIA, NSA, and Pentagon secrets”? A person in Ortis’s position could warn Chinese or Iranian threat actors of investigations, misdirect Canada’s national-security apparatus, and “even disable Canada’s intelligence capacity and help boost the cyber-capabilities of Iranian and Chinese intelligence in cities like Vancouver.”

I argued that what we are witnessing is not just corruption but hybrid war tactics: “With Chinese state capture — or perhaps hybrid war tactics is a better descriptor — Beijing can influence key office-holders in other countries, or their business backers, gaining significant control and perhaps turning those countries against the United States and dividing the Five Eyes.”

Whether it is Beijing’s United Front organs or Indian gangster–politician networks, the pattern is the same. Geopolitically aligned mafias exploit our openness, target immigrant communities, and probe the weaknesses of our policing and legal systems. If they can terrorize ordinary families, business owners — and now lawyers — with near impunity, they send a clear message: they, not the Canadian state, are the true authority in these communities.

That is the essence of state hollowing.

Back in 2021, when Wilful Blindness first came out, I argued that Canada needed a new legal architecture for this era: modern, RICO-style laws aimed at transnational criminal organizations that are entangled with hostile foreign states, and specific anti–hostile-state-activity statutes recognizing hybrid warfare on our soil.

The basic idea was simple:

• Treat foreign-linked mafias that act as tools of state influence as national-security threats, not just “organized crime.”
  
  

• Give police and prosecutors the ability to connect the dots between shootings, money-laundering, political donations, intimidation campaigns and foreign intelligence services.
  
  

• Build offences that go after the full enterprise — financiers, front-men, enablers and corrupt officials — not just the shooters and bagmen.
  
  

To this day, Ottawa has not meaningfully acted on those recommendations. We still lack comprehensive enterprise-crime tools comparable to U.S. RICO statutes; we still do not have clear hybrid-warfare provisions aimed at foreign state–backed criminal networks. And now, more than a year has passed since the Trudeau government passed the Foreign Influence Transparency and Accountability Act, which received Royal Assent on 20 June 2024.

Chinese diaspora experts like Cheuk Kwan and Sinologist Dr. Charles Burton are concerned that the government, seeking to renew deeper ties to China after the deep chill caused by the Meng Wanzhou affair, may have paused implementation of the registry — which Beijing’s intelligence services have already shown hostility towards. The question is whether this could be an example of elite capture inhibiting Canada’s security agencies and signalling the broader risks of state-capture dynamics.

Put another way: Does Prime Minister Carney’s lethargy in enacting a measure that would hold China’s agents of influence in Canada to account speak to the very problems I outline in this op-ed?

Back to B.C. and the Bishnoi gang.

The result of Ottawa’s lack of diligence is what we see in B.C. today: a patchwork response. The province has formed an Extortion Task Force. Communities are terrified. Business owners and families try to keep their heads down. And now, lawyers are checking their messages and wondering if they should take a call from an unknown number.

In the third edition of Wilful Blindness, Dr. Charles Burton summed up my findings this way in his foreword:
“Sam concludes that the current state of Canada–China relations not only is informed by comprehensive ‘elite capture,’ but also is moving incrementally towards full ‘state capture,’ which threatens the integrity of our democratic institutions and undermines the values of openness and honesty and the freedoms of citizenship that define Canada as a nation.”

Those words were written before B.C.’s extortion crisis reached lawyers’ inboxes. But they anticipated what we are now seeing.