OTTAWA – I told Jason James something shortly after the B.C. provincial election that I suspect exit polls may not capture.
David Eby didn’t lose British Columbia only because voters were tired of him playing the Trump card, or because of the wreckage of fentanyl decriminalization and a safer supply that ended up feeding the gangs. Underneath those issues, I believe, was a deeper anxiety that few people would say out loud.
Under DRIPA, the province’s law binding British Columbia to the United Nations declaration on Indigenous rights, title and land deals were being worked out at the highest levels while most of the province, including private landowners, was left in the dark. People stopped trusting that they knew what their government was giving away, or who stood to gain.
Canada’s long and unresolved history of colonialism has left a patchwork of jurisdictions.
Some First Nations hold almost national-level control over their lands while operating as subnational governments. I believe foreign states and transnational crime groups have learned to work the gaps between Ottawa, the provinces and those lands.
China, but also Mexican cartels, Iranian networks and Indian transnational groups. Some of the land bordering the Port of Vancouver, which I consider the most exploited port in North America for the Chinese Communist Party and transnational crime, is Indigenous-controlled, and it has seen development by figures with open ties to the United Front.
In Ontario, the Six Nations lands near Hamilton and Buffalo, and Akwesasne, the Mohawk territory straddling Ontario, Quebec and New York, form what I see as some the most exploited stretch of the northern border.
I also told Jason about the scale my law enforcement sources describe.
Some crime leaders operating on Indigenous lands, they say, could buy Ryan Wedding a few times over. The man Kash Patel called a modern-day Pablo Escobar would rank below them in wealth. Just last week, the U.S. Treasury said Ryan Wedding has laundered billions of dollars through currency exchanges in Vancouver and Toronto, sanctioning eight Canadian firms it said served Iran, many of them dealing with addresses tied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “Canada cannot be a safe haven,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said. The Bureau has led the coverage of that nexus for years, and it’s now on the American record.
In this discussion with Jason James, I say Indigenous lands are another major under-recognized piece of the financial and jurisdictional platform in Canada that enemy states and entities are exploiting. My sources talk about cartel operations hosted on reserve land, contraband tobacco, weapons, and cannabis grows of white Quonset huts stretching for acres. I tell Jason I’m cautious in this area as well. I’ve met Indigenous police officers who are among the best I know, working cartel cases on the northern border with little support from the RCMP, the Ontario Provincial Police or Ottawa. But some leaders, I believe, may use their status as a shield. Some are acting, I hate to say it, like hostile foreign interference forces on Canadian soil. And after botched operations in the past, Canadian police are, I think, afraid to act.
That’s the jurisdictional and historical backdrop of the criminal superstructure I’ve been calling the Canadian platform.
David Luna, a former State Department official, counts 698 known crime groups in Canada, 48 of them connected to foreign states. The groups at the top now have state-like capacity, tied to China, Iran, Mexico and increasingly to India. Tony Soprano looks quaint beside them.
Jason and I walked through how the pieces connect. In the Heather Zhang case in California, Chinese state security tasking, a real estate cover in Arcadia and a home a past DEA probe tied to Sinaloa Cartel money laundering all turn up in the same file. Which raises the question I keep asking: who’s really the boss of the Sinaloa Cartel?
In Operation Hard Ball, the FBI’s case against the Dhanda network in Vancouver, Indian transnational crime linked to the Bishnoi group is accused of running cartel cocaine and methamphetamine through a trucking industry it has largely captured, with alleged help inside the Canada Border Services Agency.
We also discuss Huawei, which I believe is the most important criminal trial in America in decades.
In a Brooklyn courtroom, jurors have seen what prosecutors describe as a bounty list paying employees to steal technology, and FBI charts tracing money from an Iranian telecom through Skycom and HSBC in Hong Kong into the payroll of Huawei’s American subsidiary. Iranian witnesses were allowed to testify under protection. And the American government told the court that China, too, could target witnesses. To me that echoes the 2019 CSIS assessment I obtained, which found Beijing’s security ministry was tasked to stop Meng Wanzhou from ever testifying. Huawei denies all wrongdoing.
