The Bureau Podcast

OTTAWA — In this investigative conversation, sinologist Chris Meyer 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.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 Wide Fountain, 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.”What follows matters even more than the threat itself. 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.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.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. 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.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. 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.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.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.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.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA — In this episode of The Bureau Podcast, I chat with Canadian author, historian and former national security analyst Dennis Molinaro to unpack Under Assault: Interference and Espionage in China’s Secret War Against Canada — the book The Bureau has reviewed in three pieces, and which covers a vast array of cases revealing how Beijing has shaped Canada’s trajectory for more than half a century.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.“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.”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.”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.”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.”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.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.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?”Winnipeg, Wuhan and the lab-leak debateMidway 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.”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.”‘Canada is overrun’: how Washington now sees its northern allyIn 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.”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.”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.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.”The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

In today’s Bureau Podcast, 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 Vancouver Model. 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.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.”The podcast goes deeper into Jesse’s story. 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 my 2023 investigation, the U.S. Treasury has now identified the same global 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.Yan’s earlier Vancouver mortgage work supported my deep dive in Toronto, 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. 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. 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 U.S. investigator David Asher.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.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA — 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 he turned Canada into a conduit for the world’s most powerful and dangerous Mexican cartels, working alongside state-adjacent actors from Iran, China, and beyond.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 floor-crosser recruitment in a Bureau op-ed, so you may see some interesting conversations between us in the future too.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA — In a recent episode of The Shawn Ryan Show, former Navy intelligence specialist Chase Hughes laid out what a psychological operation really is — and how to recognize one. He describes a psyop as a narrative-driven effort to control perception in order to shape behaviour, with the ultimate goal being identity change: getting a population to see themselves as a certain kind of person (“people like us believe X, support Y, reject Z”) and then act accordingly. His FATE model — Focus, Authority, Tribe, Emotion — shows how attention-grabbing stories, trusted voices, tribal identity and fear-driven messaging can be woven together into a sustained campaign.In this conversation with Jason James, I explain why I’ve come to believe that Canada’s last federal election carries many of the hallmarks of a successful political psyop. Mark Carney’s Liberals didn’t just win on policy; they won by persuading a critical mass of older voters that Donald Trump was determined to turn Canada into the “51st state.” That storyline — Canada as a besieged, decent nation in need of Liberal protection from an unhinged America — operated as an identity script, inviting voters to decide what “people like us” do at the ballot box.If you want visible evidence of behaviour change, look at the “Elbows Up” slogan — a deliberate nod to old-time Canadian hockey players like Gordie Howe, meant to trigger memories of hard-fought victories in Canada’s national game among an aging voter base. We saw Canadian actor Mike Myers seated rinkside with Mark Carney in hockey jerseys, talking through these themes, then later throwing his elbow in the air during a Saturday Night Live cast gathering. After that bombardment of imagery and messaging through the campaign, rallies ended with crowds literally jutting their elbows into the air in awkward, almost chicken-like poses — physically acting out the identity they were being sold.As I tell Jason, we also know from government election-threat disclosures that Chinese propaganda was pushing a parallel line, promoting Carney as the preferred champion to stand up to Trump. And I worry that this campaign hasn’t ended. Carney is now trying to convince Conservative MPs to “cross the floor” so he can secure a majority without going back to voters. I argue that would be dangerous, especially as his government promises deeper ties with Beijing as a “strategic partner” — at the very moment the United States and Japan are drawing closer militarily and politically in response to China’s growing threats against Taiwan.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

In this episode, Charles Burton recounts his 2018 detention by China’s secret police — an ordeal that included hours of interrogation by MSS officers and a covert escape from Shanghai aided by friends who feared for his safety. One of his interrogators, Burton later discovered, resurfaced in Taiwan working with Buddhist groups tied to Beijing’s United Front network — a revelation that adds new weight to The Bureau’s reporting on transnational influence operations.Burton also delves into newly surfaced RCMP intelligence from historian Dennis Molinaro’s book Under Assault, confirming that UBC academic Paul Lin — described in those files as an alleged senior Chinese agent — “certainly influenced Pierre Trudeau.” Drawing from his own diplomatic experience in Beijing, Burton provides rare context on how Lin’s access to Zhou Enlai and Trudeau shaped Canada’s early China policy, setting patterns of engagement and elite capture that persist to this day.The conversation spans Burton’s personal confrontation with Chinese intelligence, his critique of Ottawa’s complacency in his new book The Beaver and the Dragon, and his warning that the same influence machinery that once shaped Trudeau’s worldview continues to operate across Canada’s political and cultural institutions.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA — In this episode, I join Jason James of BNN to unpack The Bureau’s latest findings on the Westminster espionage scandal that has sent shockwaves through British politics — and to draw the lines connecting that case to Canada’s own national-security crisis.In the case, President Xi Jinping’s powerful ally and reported spymaster, Cai Qi, is alleged to have overseen a covert Ministry of State Security operation inside the U.K. Parliament. According to British parliamentary records and corroborating media leaks, Cai’s network cultivated a young British teacher while he was living in China, recruiting him through a front company run by the MSS. The recruit allegedly secured access to Westminster through another young Brit — a researcher and adviser who was reportedly tasked with gathering real-time intelligence on Conservative MPs critical of Beijing’s human-rights abuses in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Taiwan.The explosive Cash and Berry prosecution was pursued under Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government, but was later quietly abandoned by Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government. Documents and sources cited in London suggest that senior political advisers close to Starmer, including a former banker known for pro-China trade advocacy, may have influenced the decision to collapse the case — raising profound questions about ethical interference in Britain’s judicial process.I argue that this transnational case is not just a scandal but a systemic warning: the same dynamic of political suppression, elite capture, and economic dependency that has compromised the United Kingdom’s response to CCP influence has already unfolded in Ottawa. As I said in my testimony in Parliament earlier this week, similar patterns that troubled Justin Trudeau’s government on Chinese election interference could persist under Mark Carney’s leadership. And in the case of Starmer, the powerful U.S. House Select Committee on the CCP has directly lodged concerns with the British Ambassador, questioning whether the Cash and Berry case was cancelled due to pressure from China or trade and development considerations between Beijing and London.We also discuss The Bureau’s reporting from Vancouver and Toronto, where Chinese and Mexican cartel networks have built a global hub for synthetic-opioid production and shipment. These networks, operating through Canadian ports and logistics channels, are now targeting Australia and New Zealand, demonstrating how the same state-linked criminal and intelligence systems driving espionage in Westminster are simultaneously fueling a deadly global trade in fentanyl and methamphetamine.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

Ammon Blair, a former U.S. Border Patrol agent and Texas Army National Guard officer, discusses the alarming evolution of Mexican cartels into hybrid-warfare actors wielding significant power across the globe. He explores their infiltration into various legal economies such as agriculture and telecommunications, and highlights their troubling connections with Chinese nationals. Blair warns that Canada is becoming increasingly vulnerable to cartel influence, as these organizations adapt and expand their reach, posing unprecedented threats to North America.

OTTAWA — In this episode, I sit down again with BNN’s Jason James to unpack one of the most powerful and underexamined networks shaping Canadian policy: the enduring influence of McKinsey & Company and Dominic Barton — former global managing director of McKinsey, former Canadian ambassador to China, and architect of the Canada Infrastructure Bank (CIB).Through meticulous reporting and newly obtained government documents, I trace how Barton’s deep connections to McKinsey form part of the mysterious backstory surrounding the CIB’s $1-billion loan to BC Ferries — a deal to purchase four vessels from a Chinese shipbuilder tied to the People’s Liberation Army’s military-civil fusion system.I explain how Barton’s long history with Chinese state-owned enterprises, through McKinsey contracts, and his advisory role with senior Liberal officials beginning with Justin Trudeau, have effectively continued to shape Ottawa’s decision-making through both formal and informal networks — long after Barton’s formal exit from the Liberal government.Jason poses the central question: is this the face of an unelected shadow government behind the more theatrical government of Justin Trudeau — a leader whom multiple former Liberal cabinet ministers, most recently Catherine McKenna, have described as almost entirely uninterested in substantive policy and preoccupied instead with appearances and tokenism in governance?Jason asks: if that’s true, wouldn’t figures like Barton — and, Mark Carney, both acknowledged advisers to Trudeau — be closer to the true centers of power, a kind of “deep state” operating within Canada’s economic and foreign-policy apparatus?That’s a loaded concept and term, no doubt. My answer draws directly from evidence — parliamentary testimony, freedom-of-information records, and the BC Ferries loan saga — to respond to Jason’s questions and let listeners make up their own minds about Barton, McKinsey, the CIB, and Carney.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA — In this episode, Sikyong Penpa Tsering, President of the Central Tibetan Administration, joins me for a conversation on Tibet’s global significance.We explore Tibet’s geographical and geopolitical importance as the “water tower of Asia,” where rivers from the Tibetan Plateau sustain nearly two billion people across the region. Tsering explains why Tibet is central to Beijing’s ambitions — and why its fate matters for the international order.The discussion also turns to China’s campaign of transnational repression: from pressuring diaspora communities and intimidating student leaders abroad — including a notorious case at the University of Toronto, where Chinese students were reportedly tasked by the Toronto consulate to flood a Tibetan-Canadian student leader with hostile messages and death threats — to leveraging influence networks and corruption to sway foreign politicians. Tsering details how these tactics, first tested in Australia and New Zealand, have since spread across Europe and North America.Finally, Tsering underscores that Tibet is not only about Tibet: the world must defend Tibetan freedom if it hopes to defend its own. He warns that Beijing’s ultimate objective is to export its authoritarian system globally — a project already underway through United Front operations.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe