Reflections on Vancouver, British Columbia and other topics, related or not

 

The “Vancouver model”

How Canada’s gateway to the Orient
became the CCP’s entry to the West

Greg Klein | July 1, 2021

 

It’s a testament to our society that this book had to begin with a Chinese giving us permission to criticize Chinese criminals operating in Canada. Political correctness, along with political corruption (not to mention wide-open immigration and an obliging judiciary) largely allowed the Chinese Communist Party, Chinese triads and Chinese robber barons to pump their money, drugs, influence and power into Western countries—especially Canada and especially the Vancouver area.

But let’s not overstate their ethnocentrism. They also enjoy Canadian-based synergies with Iranian-backed narco-terrorists and Latino cartels, as well as Canadian politicians.

Those are among the topics related in Sam Cooper’s recent exposé Wilful Blindness: How A Network of Narcos, Tycoons and CCP Agents Infiltrated the West. What started with inquiries into really brazen money laundering at B.C.’s government-owned casinos, known internationally since at least 2017 as “the Vancouver model,” found far deeper ramifications than even the real estate speculation that helped wreck this city. Now we have the Cullen Commission, which shows signs of brushing off or sugar-coating much of this morass. And we have Cooper’s book. The latter might get a similar response from Canada’s establishment, at various times complicit or cowardly.

A few marginalized cop whistleblowers aside, law enforcement largely gave up by 1997 after Sidewinder, a two-year RCMP/CSIS study exposing Canada’s infiltration by an alliance of the Chinese government, Hong Kong tycoons and triads. “Those involved with the investigations were demoted, moved aside or ridden out of town by senior RCMP and CSIS team members,” Cooper states.

Additionally, Canada screwed our Five Eyes allies through Cameron “The Prince” Ortis, an extremely powerful civilian RCMP agent arrested in 2019 on several espionage-related charges. Ortis was an apparently suspicious hire from the beginning but was idolized by top Mountie Bob Paulson, further demonstrating that our national force simply can’t handle complex work and sophisticated analysis. Little is publicly known about CSIS, but as a federal agency it’s quite possibly another Quebecois-run affirmative action program that wallows in critical race theory.

Speaking of Five Eyes, Australia and even little New Zealand often show up Canadian pusillanimity towards China.

Chinese criminals, on the other hand, exude patriotism—but to the “Motherland,” of course, certainly not Canada. If there’s money to be made in fentanyl, for example, then all the better if it can be “weaponized” to help destroy our society.

Credible sources maintain China does just that. Facilitating the regime’s agenda is “Xi Jinping’s magic weapon,” the United Front. With agents posted in consulates and embassies around the world, the organization fosters ties between the Chinese Communist Party, triads and business. The United Front also encourages intellectual property theft, exerts influence on politicians and academics, sponsors political candidates, demands racial loyalty from the Chinese diaspora and intimidates dissidents.

“Most United Front ‘overseas leaders’ are businessmen who trade on their guanxi with Beijing to earn fortunes,” Cooper writes, referring to the relationships that bind businessmen, gangsters, plutocrats and fascists.

One of the bigger Chinese criminals in B.C. is Paul King Jin, who contributed $20,000 to help the United Front’s opportunistic purchase of Canadian PPE before the pandemic was known outside China. Of course that couldn’t have been much to someone whose “wealth comes from drug trafficking, illegal casino operations, loan sharking, human trafficking and prostitution, and transnational money-laundering, police say.”

This is “state-sponsored crime,” Cooper warns. It’s “the greatest threat to Canadian society.”

 

John Horgan backs Burnaby Citizens Association councillor
James Wang’s 2017 candidacy for New Democrat MLA in
Vancouver-Langara: United Front fascism matters not to
B.C.’s establishment, and therefore the Cullen Commission.

 

Among very active United Front associates is current Burnaby Citizens Association councillor and 2017 Vancouver-Langara B.C. NDP candidate James Wang. Richmond Liberal MP Joe Peschisolido adds a bit of ethnic variation at United Front-heavy social events. His law office has handled “millions of suspicious transactions” for overseas Chinese.

Want more names? Here are some, not necessarily United Front or Chinese, but all pillars of the B.C. and Canadian establishment:

Richard Ching Chang, a Burnaby Citizens Association councillor/B.C. NDPer/loanshark who travelled to China with River Rock casino manager Rick Duff; Larry Campbell, the media-popular former Vancouver mayor who was richly rewarded for his addiction-encouraging policies and casino support; Lou Sekora, former Coquitlam mayor/Liberal MP/citizenship judge/Chinese dealmaker; Carolyn Mulroney, ex-PM’s daughter, Ontario Conservative attorney general and VP of BloombergSen, a major shareholder of Great Canadian Gaming, the China-friendly casino operator enjoying carte blanche in at least two provinces; Vancouver Liberal MP/cabinet minister Joyce Murray and her association with United Front manoeuvres; Justin Trudeau, whose family foundation received $1 million from a Chinese organization led by United Front official Bin Zhang; Jean Chretien, “who since leaving office, has been at the CCP’s financial trough earning millions for himself and influencing Global Affairs in the public policy realm. Various Liberal Ministers and Global Affairs have shown a bias and written policy that is favourable to China and not to Canada.”

The list goes on, but B.C. NDP MLA David Eby gets credit for breaking his party’s muted response (notwithstanding concerns previously raised by NDP MLA Shane Simpson). After some initial backtracking, premier John Horgan appointed the narrowly focused Cullen Commission into money laundering.

 

Austin F. Cullen brings a lifetime of establishment
service to his commission of inquiry.

 

NDP hopes of embarrassing the BC Liberals succeeded, but the commission already looks like a typical B.C. establishment exercise with an establishment judge presiding over establishment lawyers massaging selected bits of info. That might be all Eby, now attorney general, wanted. God forbid the inquiry should anger Chinese voters, scrutinize NDPers like Chang or Wang or upset the federal Liberal party, the future home of so many ambitious provincial New Democrats.

B.C. bigshots might lack Middle Kingdom sophistication, but they have guanxi of their own.

Apart from the establishment-run Cullen Commission, we have establishment media coverage. Postmedia’s Ian Mulgrew has already scoffed at “Yellow Peril” fears. Luckily for us, Hitler’s Nazis were white.

It’s from Cooper that we get a much broader and credible indictment of a wide-ranging problem. Yet his work might not get the attention it deserves. Some of the circumstances that allowed Chinese money, drugs and power into Canada—political correctness, political corruption, establishment conformity—could undermine Cooper’s revelations. He might also face jealousy from B.C.’s mice-in-a-maze media. The former Vancouver Province/Sun reporter now works for Global News in Ottawa. With Jonathan Manthorpe no longer on staff and Terry Glavin contributing remotely, that leaves Douglas Todd as very much an outsider in the smug, stifling little world of Vancouver Postmedia.

Uniformly conformist, other B.C. journalists are much the same.

In a wider context, corruption has long flourished in Vancouver. The former Vancouver Stock Exchange held international notoriety as the scam capital of the world and the city probably retains the planet’s highest concentration of really dumb penny stock promos. Much more dangerously, B.C.’s ever-expanding poverty pimp industry presents an entirely new style of corruption, combining highly destructive public policies, grasping opportunism and nauseating hypocrisy. With the support of almost everyone in local politics and media, the B.C. industry seems to be, at least proportionally, the world’s largest.

Some problems with Wilful Blindness include shit writing. That’s typical for a journalist but inexcusable for a publisher.

Another journalistic fault is Cooper’s hubristic passion for the first-person singular. But at least that primes the book for one hilarious line: “As reporters, we never want to become part of the story.”

The book’s organization is a mess. The sequence lurches back and forth with abandon.

Cooper thinks the RCMP at one point backed away from casino scrutiny for fear of provoking the BC Liberals into replacing Mounties with a provincial force. But the incorrigible weirdness of cop culture must surely make B.C. politicians appreciate the advantage of offloading so many police imbroglios on Ottawa.

As for his references to China’s Belt and Road agenda, Cooper doesn’t seem to fathom its enormity.

In an astoundingly naive comment about American DEA and FBI activity in B.C., he writes: “To me, it seemed like Canada’s sovereignty on the west coast was gradually eroding. At least a little bit.” A little bit? Canada’s sovereignty is long gone, soundly trumped by political correctness. And the idea that Canada exists solely to make money, indeed that the country is for sale, predates PC.

The most curious aspect of the book, however, is the timing of its publication. Wilful Blindness came out within days of Cullen wrapping up his hearings, but about seven months before his report’s due. Could the timing be an effort to influence Cullen with evidence that his process ignored or downplayed? Certainly there’s an awful lot more to learn from Cooper’s work than from the commission hearings.

That should make Wilful Blindness ready for an update by year-end. Or else Cooper could write a separate, but equally thorough response to Cullen’s report.

That response may well have to be a rebuttal.