The Bureau Podcast

<p><strong>TORONTO</strong> — In this breaking news episode for <a target="_blank" href="https://www.thebureau.news/p/new-records-link-carney-floor-crosser"><em>The Bureau</em></a><a target="_blank" href="https://www.thebureau.news/p/new-records-link-carney-floor-crosser">,</a> I speak with political columnist Brian Lilley about the <a target="_blank" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20250726211002/https://foundintran.substack.com/p/a-canadian-woman-was-assaulted-on?utm_source=substack&#38;utm_medium=email">diaspora pressure networks</a> now surfacing around Michael Ma, the Conservative MP who crossed the floor last week and left Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals one seat short of a majority. </p><p>Brian says his sourcing points to a straightforward explanation. Tim Hodgson, the minister of energy and the MP for Markham–Thornhill, played a key role in persuading Ma to switch sides, drawing on the pair’s business-network affinities.</p><p>I tell Brian that is likely true — but it may not be the only dynamic at work. Diaspora pressure groups that have repeatedly aligned themselves with Beijing’s interests and intervened in Conservative Party politics could be operating in parallel. In both scenarios, actors advocating expanded trade with Beijing could be a shared underlying motivation.</p><p>A second layer concerns the pro-Beijing ecosystem embedded in Hodgson’s riding. The Liberal executive head in Hodgson’s riding, a senior Liberal organizer and former leader of the Jiangsu Commerce Council of Canada, has already come under scrutiny after Prime Minister Mark Carney falsely denied meeting the group during his January leadership campaign. </p><p>The episode is one of many concrete data points emerging from a years-long <em>Bureau</em> investigation into the Jiangsu council’s structure and leadership, documenting direct ties to Beijing’s United Front Work Department, and significant overlap between this pro-Beijing business network and Liberal Party organizing.</p><p>Against that wider backdrop, I walk Brian through the core findings of my new reporting on Ma. <a target="_blank" href="https://www.thebureau.news/p/new-records-link-carney-floor-crosser">Chinese-language records reviewed by </a><a target="_blank" href="https://www.thebureau.news/p/new-records-link-carney-floor-crosser"><em>The Bureau</em></a><a target="_blank" href="https://www.thebureau.news/p/new-records-link-carney-floor-crosser"> </a>show he was part of the Chinese Canadian Conservative Association, a controversial diaspora organization that urged Erin O’Toole to resign after the 2021 election over what it called his “anti-China” stance, later urged Chinese Canadians to “vote carefully” ahead of the 2025 election, and resurfaced after the vote to call for Pierre Poilievre to step down.</p><p>None of this is proof of wrongdoing by Ma, I tell Brian. But taken together, it suggests he should answer questions about the pro-Beijing supporters who endorsed his Conservative campaign this year.</p><p><p>The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></p><p></p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.thebureau.news/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_2">www.thebureau.news/subscribe</a>

<p><strong>OTTAWA</strong> — In this investigative conversation, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.thebureau.news/p/the-third-son-how-chinas-narco-commanders">sinologist Chris Meyer </a>and I start with Chinese threats against Japan’s new prime minister, Sanae Takaichi—and advance the argument that Beijing’s “diplomacy” is increasingly inseparable from criminal subversion operations worldwide, and should be treated as such.</p><p>The trigger is simple. Newly elected Takaichi reiterates a strategic reality Japan has been forced to confront for years. An attack on Taiwan would represent a grave threat to Japan. Chris, who writes for <a target="_blank" href="https://open.substack.com/pub/widefountain/p/chinas-united-nations-protest-against?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&#38;utm_medium=web">Wide Fountain, </a>notes this was not some wild new doctrine, but a restatement of what former prime minister Shinzo Abe had already made public. The response from Beijing, however, does not resemble conventional state-to-state disagreement. Chris describes how China’s consul general in Osaka replied with language that reads like a street-level threat—saying that if Takaichi “sticks her dirty neck out,” it will have to be “sliced off.”</p><p>What follows matters even more than the threat itself. </p><p>Chris explains how Beijing then moved to the United Nations with a concerted effort to discredit Japan’s prime minister and pressure her to retract her comment—an example of how international institutions can be leveraged as tools of coercion and narrative warfare. I frame it as gaslighting: the familiar move in which Beijing provokes, threatens, and escalates, then turns around and casts the democratic target as the aggressor.</p><p>Chris offers a theory for why the intimidation is so brazen. He says there is constant chatter in Beijing that Xi Jinping has been losing leverage internally—over military networks and provincial factions—while his external apparatus, especially diplomatic channels, may be less disturbed. In that scenario, Chris argues, foreign intimidation becomes one of the few levers still available. Louder, uglier, and more reckless precisely because it is meant to compensate for weakness elsewhere.</p><p>From Japan we widen to the United Nations not as an abstract symbol, but as a venue where Chris and I argue the line between “diplomacy” and “criminal enterprise” has been blurred before—and where Beijing nonetheless demands to be treated as an arbiter of international law. Chris references the cases of Ng Lap Seng and Patrick Ho as part of the backdrop—figures he describes as operating around the UN ecosystem while pursuing corrupt influence projects. </p><p>His core point is that China cannot plausibly posture as the guardian of international legal order while, in the same era, actors linked to Beijing were accused of bribery and covert influence schemes tied to Belt and Road ambitions.</p><p>From there, the conversation becomes less about one diplomatic incident and more about a recurring operating system: intelligence-linked influence, organized-crime logistics, and the laundering of legitimacy through formal titles and institutions. </p><p>The most sprawling and contemporary case we examine is Cambodia’s Prince Group. Chris describes it as an industrial-scale scam ecosystem — a network of “prison factories” where coerced workers are forced to run global fraud operations under threat of violence, their passports confiscated to prevent escape.</p><p>What distinguishes Prince Group, Chris argues, is that it appears to function not merely as a criminal enterprise but as a Chinese intelligence-directed operation designed to destabilize Western nations — and it is far from the only one of its kind operating across Southeast Asia. We also note that U.S. Treasury sanctions and recent indictments highlight that players linked to Prince Group, including a United Front figure named Rose Wang and sanctioned “Hongmen” Triad boss Broken Tooth Koi, perform diplomatic functions for Beijing.</p><p>Near the end, we return to North America with a detail that we both treat as chilling. I reference CBC/Radio-Canada reporting about a Chinese operative known as Eric—someone whose phone records reportedly suggested lethal targeting of dissidents, including a Vancouver-based Chinese dissident who later died in a suspicious kayaking incident.</p><p>All of that sets up the ending. Canada’s leadership has spoken about re-engaging China as a strategic partner. After what we have just mapped—threat diplomacy against Japan, coercive lawfare at the UN, criminal-corporate influence systems in Southeast Asia, triad-linked “patriotic” networks, and North American beachheads that, in my view, were never checked—what does “strategic partner” even mean? Chris’s answer is unambiguous. In his assessment, there is no reset available with Xi Jinping’s system in place.</p><p><p>The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></p><p></p><p></p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.thebureau.news/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_2">www.thebureau.news/subscribe</a>

<p><strong>OTTAWA</strong> — In this episode of <a target="_blank" href="https://buymeacoffee.com/thebureau"><em>The Bureau Podcast, </em></a>I chat with Canadian author, historian and former national security analyst Dennis Molinaro to unpack <a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.ca/Under-Assault-Interference-Espionage-Against/dp/1039011705"><em>Under Assault: Interference and Espionage in China’s Secret War Against Canada</em></a> — the book <em>The Bureau</em> has reviewed in <a target="_blank" href="https://www.thebureau.news/p/overrun-washingtons-grim-verdict">three pieces,</a> and which covers a vast array of cases revealing how Beijing has shaped Canada’s trajectory for more than half a century.</p><p>One of the central themes of the conversation is Molinaro’s insistence that you cannot understand the evolution of Canada–China relations by looking only at diplomatic files or security reports.</p><p>“We can’t just detach security from diplomacy and from relations,” he says. “So I wanted to try to tell that complete story as best I could.”</p><p>That fuller picture includes a re-assessment of Pierre Trudeau and the 1970 recognition of the People’s Republic of China. Molinaro is careful with his evidence, but blunt about the pattern it reveals. On the recognition decision, he tells me: “I would say that the recognition of China, I’m comfortable in saying that likely looks like it was a foreign interference operation by the PRC … because of Paul Lin.”</p><p>Molinaro walks listeners through the previously obscure figure of Paul Lin, an academic who moved between the West Coast, the United States, China and finally McGill University. Newly released RCMP and allied intelligence files show Lin under heavy surveillance and flagged as a likely Chinese Communist Party influence operator. In Molinaro’s words, the Mounties “flat out say that this is part of his task of being an agent of influence is to get China recognized.”</p><p>At the same time, Beijing’s internal language about Canada’s leaders was far from neutral. Drawing on the testimony of defector Chen Yonglin, Molinaro explains how Chinese internal documents categorized Pierre Trudeau, Jean Chrétien and Henry Kissinger as “old friends” of the regime. As he tells me: “Old friends… it’s this category of an individual that is very close to the PRC in supporting the CCP… the CCP views them as a close ally, in a sense… even generations later, which is quite a substantial thing, I would say.”</p><p>I push the conversation further, asking whether Molinaro’s work is forcing a broader re-evaluation of Pierre Trudeau’s ideological legacy and the way Canada’s elites still “see” China. Molinaro argues that the Hogue Commission hearings themselves became an example of how much Canada’s political class has preferred a comforting story over a harder look at Chinese Communist Party power.</p><p>The discussion then turns to the Canada–China Business Council, Power Corporation and the Desmarais network of political relationships. I note my own reporting on how Power Corp, the Desmarais family and Jean Chrétien have been intertwined with senior Chinese state–investment bodies. Molinaro adds a deeper origin story, explaining that Paul Lin helped midwife the business council itself and then became a gatekeeper to “curated” deals inside China.</p><p>For Molinaro, the problem is not legitimate business in 2025, but the origins and intent: “The problem becomes Paul Lin… his central interests were the CCP… it brings into all kinds of questions… mainly, if the government’s getting briefed on this guy… what was done about this?”</p><p><strong>Winnipeg, Wuhan and the lab-leak debate</strong></p><p>Midway through the episode, Molinaro and I shift to the Winnipeg Level 4 lab and the contested origins of COVID-19 — a chapter Molinaro says “was all about… Canada being this place where the PRC is just actively somehow operating … as it will.”</p><p>We walk through the now-public documents on Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, Thousand Talents applications, the transfer of Ebola and other high-consequence pathogens to Wuhan, and the proposed “bat filovirus” gain-of-function project linking Winnipeg and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Molinaro is explicit that the lab-leak hypothesis is not fringe: “I see this as probably more likely than having a virus that emerges so fast, basically overnight, that can infect humans on scale, just on a mass scale.”</p><p><strong>‘Canada is overrun’: how Washington now sees its northern ally</strong></p><p>In the final third of the conversation, Molinaro reveals what senior United States officials told him when he asked how they now view Canada’s China file. One line that stuck with me: “I don’t want to say joke,” one official told him, “but the saying you get a lot of times here is, look to Canada if you want to see what could happen here.”</p><p>Another was even starker: “Canada is overrun.” Molinaro interprets that as a quiet warning about intelligence sharing: “What they were trying to essentially say as nice as possible was we’re going to have to start thinking about how we share intelligence with you if you don’t clean up your PRC problem.”</p><p>The episode closes with prescriptions. Molinaro says Canada must finally pass and use a meaningful foreign-agent registry. It needs RICO-style anti-racketeering laws: “You need a structure of laws that will target the people who are running these organizations and tie them to the individual offenses like the Americans are doing.” And the country must overhaul its security culture — including how CSIS, the RCMP and political leaders share and act on intelligence.</p><p>Above all, he says, this is a leadership question: “If you don’t have good leadership, that’s going to take the lead on these things and solve them… don’t expect any changes.”</p><p><p>The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></p><p></p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.thebureau.news/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_2">www.thebureau.news/subscribe</a>

<p>In today’s <a target="_blank" href="https://buymeacoffee.com/thebureau"><em>Bureau Podcast,</em></a> I reconnect with my former journalism colleague Jesse Ferreras. We both came of age as reporters in Vancouver and worked together at Global News, including on an investigation into some of the most significant figures in what became known as the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.thebureau.news/p/repost-fake-chinese-income-mortgages?utm_source=publication-search">Vancouver Model. </a>We don’t walk through those cases in detail on the tape, but I’ve long believed some of the people we examined could and should be the focus of deportation orders from Canada — if Ottawa’s border and security agencies fully exercised their mandates. Quietly resolving those long-ignored files would, in my view, go a long way toward rebuilding trust with Washington, where officials remain deeply concerned about certain actors embedded in Vancouver’s financial and real-estate systems.</p><p>Our conversation turns on two main threads. First, we explore Jesse’s new work of fiction — a gothic horror story set in Vancouver real estate, a kind of clash-of-civilizations tale rooted in the city’s housing market. Second, we talk about how both of us, as reporters, leaned heavily on the data and analysis of B.C. urban planner Andy Yan to understand how foreign capital has dominated and distorted Vancouver’s housing market. Yan’s work on glaring income-to-home-price “incongruities” helped me see that what I once called the Vancouver Model had grown into something much larger: the “Canada Model.”</p><p>The podcast goes deeper into Jesse’s story. </p><p>Here in the notes, I want to unpack a bit more of Andy Yan’s seminal research, and how it intersected with confidential datasets and banking disclosures I later obtained. Two years after <a target="_blank" href="https://www.thebureau.news/p/repost-fake-chinese-income-mortgages?utm_source=publication-search">my 2023</a> investigation, the U.S. Treasury has<a target="_blank" href="https://www.thebureau.news/p/us-treasury-warns-of-312-billion"> now identified the same global </a>Chinese underground money-laundering typologies I reported on, in a major dataset that tracks roughly $300 billion in Chinese money laundering for Mexican narco-cartels over the past four years—including more than $50 billion tied to real-estate laundering.</p><p>Yan’s earlier Vancouver mortgage work supported my <a target="_blank" href="https://www.thebureau.news/p/repost-fake-chinese-income-mortgages?utm_source=publication-search">deep dive in Toronto, </a>showing that the same suspicious Chinese real-estate mortgage patterns he identified in Vancouver had also become deeply embedded in eastern Canada, inside Canada’s largest banks, with virtually no enforcement response. </p><p>My reporting also drew on FINTRAC’s release of a sweeping analysis of 48,000 transactions involving members of the Chinese diaspora. That study revealed massive wire transfers from Hong Kong and Mainland China moving through “money mule” accounts held by students, homemakers, and shell companies—including law firms. In a nutshell, FINTRAC found that during the pandemic, massive money laundering through Vancouver-area government casinos evolved into Canadian bank accounts, law office accounts, real-estate developer accounts, and more complex electronic transaction paths. </p><p>For me, the findings showed that FINTRAC, a division of Canada’s Ministry of Finance, had complete visibility into how Canada’s banking system was being exploited at scale by Chinese transnational crime networks. At the same time, this raised serious alarms about Canada’s banking oversight, because FINTRAC’s data led to no Canadian police prosecutions and only a few minimal fines in the range of millions against several banks, including TD Canada. FINTRAC’s patterns overlapped neatly with the U.S. Justice Department’s US$3-billion TD Bank case, where international students from China and Beijing-linked United Front networks played central roles in laundering drug proceeds, according to former <a target="_blank" href="https://www.thebureau.news/p/canadian-banks-tied-to-chinese-fentanyl">U.S. investigator David Asher.</a></p><p>At the heart of my exclusive story on mortgage fraud was reporting sourced from an HSBC Canada whistleblower, who uncovered dubious Toronto-area mortgages propped up by fabricated, high “remote-work” salaries from China. The types of mortgages the whistleblower discovered—fake job titles, faked massive incomes, failed banking due diligence—in my analysis, explained the patterns behind the data that Andy Yan first uncovered in Vancouver, that FINTRAC examined in 2023, and that the U.S. Treasury flagged again in 2025.</p><p><p>The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></p><p></p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.thebureau.news/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_2">www.thebureau.news/subscribe</a>

<p><strong>OTTAWA</strong> — In this conversation with Canada’s highest-profile political columnist, Brian Lilley, I dive into how I first uncovered the improbable rise of Ryan Wedding — and how <a target="_blank" href="https://www.thebureau.news/p/from-caledon-to-mecca-and-medellin">he turned Canada into a conduit</a> for the world’s most powerful and dangerous Mexican cartels, working alongside state-adjacent actors from Iran, China, and beyond.</p><p>Brian, a veteran Toronto Sun reporter, will also be sharing this videocast on his rapidly growing Substack. I recently highlighted his deep reporting on Mark Carney’s gambit for a majority through Conservative <a target="_blank" href="https://www.thebureau.news/p/from-elbows-up-to-51st-state-how">floor-crosser recruitment in a Bureau op-ed,</a> so you may see some interesting conversations between us in the future too.</p><p><p>The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.thebureau.news/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_2">www.thebureau.news/subscribe</a>