The Bureau Podcast

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.

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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.

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This week on The Bureau Podcast, I speak with Jason James of BNN about Canada’s almost completely unknown crisis: major transnational drug-trafficking and money-laundering networks that either go uninvestigated or collapse before trial. From E-Pirate to E-Nationalize, Sindicato, Project Brisa, Project Cobra, Project Endgame, and a Quebec fentanyl super-lab network—every one of these high-stakes cases failed to reach conviction, some never prosecuted at all. The fallout from the Falkland super-lab case is still reverberating in President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canada. The collapse of prosecutions in Canadian courts—and the failures of law enforcement and lawyers and legislatures behind them—have left U.S. enforcement partners deeply frustrated with their Canadian counterparts.

We examine the roadblocks: Stinchcombe’s sweeping disclosure burdens, Jordan’s strict ceilings on trial delays, and a political reluctance in Ottawa to take on globally networked cartels and their financial enablers. With evidence bottlenecks, under-resourced prosecutors, and defense lawyers weaponizing procedure, the system virtually guarantees collapse for intelligence-driven cases. What would it take—legislative reform, resourcing, specialized courts? My answer: all of the above. But nothing will change until Canadians demand action, and political leaders in Ottawa finally muster the will.

The gangs involved in these cases—Mexican cartels, Chinese state-linked Triads, Italian mafias, Middle Eastern state- and terror-linked groups, transnational Indian networks, along with metastasizing home-grown facilitators such as former Canadian Olympian Ryan Wedding’s operation, which worked with all of these foreign-backed threats—have only grown stronger and more deeply embedded because of Canada’s political and legal failures, Canadian policing sources insist.

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TORONTO — This week on The Bureau Podcast, we speak with Toronto lawyer and independent journalist Caryma Sa’d about her explosive claims that Discord — the same chat platform now under FBI scrutiny after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk — is also being used inside Canada by Antifa-aligned networks to coordinate harassment campaigns and share dossiers on political targets.

Sa’d describes Discord as a central hub, where tiered servers give vetted insiders access to “dox-style” files that go far beyond what is publicly available. She argues some of this information must come from people in positions of trust — teachers, union members, bureaucrats, even political staffers — who are feeding sensitive details into activist networks.

She also connects these practices to the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, a federally funded NGO that she says has “assisted Antifa” and shaped government focus in a way that overlooks the risks of left-wing extremism. Public records confirm CAHN has received more than $900,000 from Ottawa since 2020. Sa’d contends this money is effectively underwriting political targeting in Canada.

In our full conversation, she goes further. Sa’d speaks about:

* Her own targeting: how she was profiled after declining to work with CAHN, and how swarming campaigns have tried to undermine her legal practice.

* Police reluctance: her frustration that even when harassment is “verifiable and documented,” law enforcement often shrugs off complaints as political disputes.

* The protest ecosystem: how Antifa-aligned cells blend with movements for Indigenous rights, migrant rights, trans rights, encampment occupations, and pro-Palestine rallies — creating what she calls a “solidarity banner” that can rapidly pivot narratives.

* Amplification abroad: her concern that hostile states seize on Canadian protest footage, using it in information operations that echo broader foreign interference campaigns.

“The Canadian Anti-Hate Network. I think this is the most obvious and in my view, shocking example. It is an NGO that purports to document and fight against specifically far right hate. And in having such a narrow focus, they're obviously ignoring everything else that happens. And, you know, they would probably say that it's not equivalent. The real dangers, the real threats, the real risk of violence, comes from the right, not from the left. And I think that that has created almost a vacuum of focus and interest that has allowed the far left to metastasize in the way that it conducts itself. The Anti-Hate network has been found by an Ontario court to have assisted the Antifa movement, which that same court decision recognizes has been violent. Anti-Hate in practice takes public money to put targets on private citizens and its base then gets riled up to act on the articles that they put out, whether that's mobilizing to try and cancel events, mobilizing to try to get people fired, so on and so forth. But it is sort of a smear factory, especially, and I say this because I've been the target of one of those hit pieces.” — Caryma Sa’d

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Today on The Bureau Podcast: unpacking my reporting on an explosive Justice Department watchdog report that confirmed the worst kind of national security malpractice. A senior FBI counterintelligence official leaked case-critical information from the agency’s multi-year probe into CEFC China — the energy conglomerate that bribed United Nations officials while simultaneously attempting to draw the Biden family into a $100-million natural gas project in Louisiana, through a web of companies tied directly to a close associate of President Xi Jinping.

On this episode I speak with Chris Meyer of Widefountain. Chris has spent years tracing CEFC’s global influence network — the money flows, the murky intermediaries — and he frames the new inspector-general findings as the latest revelation in a Chinese military intelligence operation that Chris calls a “shadowplay”: a deliberate, many-armed campaign that mixes kompromat and targeted interference aimed at dividing and distracting the U.S. government. The brilliance of China’s successful campaign — which succeeded in appropriating U.S. military technology — involves fracturing political institutions and inserting spies into those divisions to make the plunder of sensitive information easier, Chris argues.

We’ll connect senior FBI agent Charles McGonigal’s leaks to the larger criminal tapestry. The CEFC probe in New York and at the United Nations touched figures charged in the Southern District — Patrick Ho and other CEFC executives — and it intersected with allegations of arms brokering, sanctions evasion, and influence peddling that prosecutors later tied to an accused operator now indicted as Gal Luft, the so-called “Target 3” in related filings. Chris ultimately links the CEFC case — in which James Biden was implicated in efforts to determine whether Patrick Ho, central to the CEFC influence play targeting the Bidens, would be arrested if he returned to the United States — to the earlier “Chinagate” scandal, which targeted the Clinton White House, and the GOP’s election fundraising networks during Newt Gingrich’s comeback era.

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VANCOUVER — In today’s Bureau podcast, Sam Cooper joins Jason James of BNN to probe the causes of RCMP non-cooperation before a U.S. Treasury sanction forced Canada’s police to investigate the Falkland superlab. The massive site in British Columbia contained enough precursor chemicals to manufacture 95 million lethal doses of fentanyl, exposing Canada’s deep links to Chinese and Mexican cartel networks.

Sam traces how the case connects to decades of failures in Ottawa: RCMP resistance to joint investigations and U.S. intelligence sharing; entrenched cartel financiers from China working with Mexican lab operators and distributors; Iran-linked laundering and trafficking and terror-financing actors; and Indian crime groups dominating Canada’s transportation infrastructure.

The discussion turns to the Cameron Ortis scandal, where the former RCMP intelligence chief was convicted of selling Five Eyes secrets to some of the very Vancouver-based Sinaloa Cartel and Iranian threat networks tied to the Falkland case. For Washington, the broader concern goes beyond legal loopholes — it points to possible corruption or high-level cover for foreign threat actors operating inside Canada.

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OTTAWA—LOS ANGELESIn today’s Bureau podcast, Sam Cooper and Chris Meyer of Widefountain dig into the dramatic escape of Zhi Dong Zhang — code-named “Chino” — from house arrest in Mexico City just as U.S. courts unsealed a 30-page detention memo. Born in Beijing in 1987, Zhang is alleged to have commanded both Chinese and Mexican wings of cartel operations, controlling 150 companies and 170 bank accounts, training operatives on U.S. soil, and bridging fentanyl precursor supply for both Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels.

Sam and Chris compare Zhang’s role to Chi Lop Tse, the Toronto-based architect of Sam Gor, and Zhenli Ye Gon, the Mexico City meth baron with $207 million seized from his mansion. The discussion highlights how CCP-linked actors shaped these figures by controlling precursors, finance, and cartel connectivity — and how U.S. intelligence now openly states Beijing subsidizes fentanyl production abroad.

The episode closes with reflections on Xi Jinping’s tightening but fragile grip on power. Chris details the reformist challenge inside the Party, the seaside conclave without a clear successor, and the unforgettable scene of Hu Jintao being escorted out of a Party Congress meeting. Together, Sam and Chris suggest Xi’s dominance is showing cracks, even as CCP influence over transnational crime continues to expand.

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In this episode of The Bureau Podcast, investigative journalist Sam Cooper sits down with Chris Meyer of WideFountain to trace the stunning global patterns of cartel, Triad, and Chinese Communist Party–linked networks penetrating legitimate trade structures to launder narcotics proceeds and move fentanyl and meth invisibly around the world.

Together, they examine how cartels and Chinese Triads exploit commodities, corporate shells, and international trade routes—controlling entire sectors like oil, seafood, and luxury goods—as part of a new hybrid criminal statecraft that links Mexico, Canada, China, and beyond.

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Key Themes in This Episode

* Cartel Oil Corruption in MexicoWe break down a new U.S. indictment from Houston, charging Mexican nationals with bribing officials at Pemex. Documents suggest the scheme is one piece of a vast conspiracy in which cartels steal and smuggle crude oil across the U.S. border, refine it, and sell it globally—while laundering fentanyl and meth profits through the same pipelines of trade.

* Casino Intel: Triads & Cartels in VancouverA classified Canadian source revealed explosive evidence seized from an underground Richmond mansion casino, where a Triad operative’s phone exposed over a thousand messages with Mexican cartel counterparts. Beyond drug logistics, the communications showed how these groups use commodities—everything from avocados and limes to geoduck clams and lobsters—to wash dirty money through trade-based laundering.

* Historic Parallels: The Lai Changxing Smuggling EmpireCooper and Meyer revisit the case that first brought them together—Lai Changxing’s notorious Xiamen-based smuggling syndicate. At its core, Meyer argues, Lai’s contraband empire was not just about oil, narcotics, and luxury goods, but a covert PRC military intelligence operation. The parallels to today’s cartel-Triad partnerships are striking.

Why It Matters

* Trade-based money laundering (TBML) has become the central node where narcotics, corruption, and geopolitics converge.

* The same methods that once fueled Lai Changxing’s empire now enable Mexican cartels and Triads to move fentanyl proceeds at scale, under the radar of Western regulators.

* With governments often paralyzed or complicit, these networks function as a “shadow state” embedded in legitimate economies—from Vancouver real estate and casinos, to Mexican energy, to global shipping routes.

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In this sweeping conversation with Jason James of BNN, I discuss some of The Bureau’s biggest investigations of the summer — including the widening pattern of prosecutorial failures in major synthetic narcotics and money laundering cases in British Columbia. We spotlight the recent collapse of charges against a Chinese-state linked scientist accused of importing over 100 kilograms of precursors for MDMA production.

I connect the networks involved to entities previously entangled in the RCMP’s infamous E-Pirate probe, then broaden the lens to examine organized crime's penetration of British Columbia institutions — including the province’s auto insurer.

We also dig into the geopolitical and financial stakes behind Premier David Eby and BC Ferries’ controversial $1-billion deal to build vessels in China with a military-linked state shipyard — a project reportedly financed through a federal development bank overseen by Canada’s new Housing Minister, Gregor Robertson. As Vancouver’s former mayor, Robertson and his council were previously embroiled in questions surrounding Chinese political influence and real estate investment in British Columbia. The question of foreign investment in Canadian cities has returned to the forefront in Victoria and Ottawa.

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OTTAWA — A prominent former Canadian Special Forces operator who continues to train law enforcement says his former unit, Joint Task Force 2 (JTF2), should be granted the authorities and mandate to target fentanyl superlabs and dismantle the transnational narco-terror networks now embedding across Canada — from Chinese Communist Party proxies to cartel cells crossing the southern B.C. border with grenades and Mexican passports.

“This is our problem. It’s on our soil,” former JTF2 member Randy Turner says in an exchange with investigative reporter Sam Cooper of The Bureau. “And our kids are the ones that are going to feel the wrath of it. So we need to do something about it — and do something about it right now.”

This unique back-and-forth interview — with Turner questioning Cooper on his expertise and prescription for better national security outcomes in North America, and Cooper in turn questioning Turner — has also been posted to Turner’s Direct Action podcast.

Midway through the conversation, Cooper puts the national security question bluntly: now that Ottawa has followed the Trump administration’s lead and designated Mexican cartels operating on Canadian soil as terror entities, should JTF2 be granted clearance and authority to target transnational narco-terror threats inside Canada?

Framing the discussion, Cooper notes that — just as U.S. national security officials like Kash Patel have said — it is cartel syndicates working with Chinese Communist Party and Iranian threat networks, particularly in cities like Vancouver, that encapsulate the deadly scourge of fentanyl killing tens of thousands of young North Americans every year.

He presses the point: should the cartels and Chinese networks now operating in Canada be considered executable targets for JTF2, which is mandated to counter terror threats on Canadian soil?

Cooper points to evidence in court records — including arrests of cartel operatives at a house in Surrey, British Columbia, where police seized grenades, dozens of Mexican passports, and heavy weaponry consistent with open warfare.

Turner’s answer is unequivocal. “We have forces and people and professionals and talented individuals that have a solution to these problems. Let them do their work.”

“There’s pieces and parts to ensure successful missions like this go off — but it would start with policy change,” he explained. “And it would start with having a legitimate conversation about: what action steps are we going to put into place right now? What can we change? And why have we not yet? There are some things that could have been put in place years ago.”

“I think part of that is the public conversation,” Cooper responded. “First, knowing we have the capabilities. Second, admitting we have the problem.

Yeah — our borders have been weak.Yeah — we do have fentanyl superlabs.Yeah — Vancouver and Toronto are laundering trillions — over a trillion dollars, my research shows — from these networks.

“And it’s impacting every part of your life, and your children’s lives to come. Can they compete for a home?”

Throughout the conversation, which traces both of their professional paths, Cooper explains why he sought out Turner for personal defense training. It followed a judicially authorized RCMP warning in July 2023: Cooper had been identified as a target of transnational repression due to his reporting on People’s Republic of China operations in Canada.

Like some of Turner’s other private clients, Cooper chose to train with someone who understood the terrain — hostile surveillance, targeted intimidation, and potential conflict.

In a wide-ranging exchange covering national security policy and what both described as Canada’s cultural blindness to foreign threats, Turner delivered a blunt message. He criticized what he sees as a passive-aggressive Canadian response to increasingly urgent warnings from U.S. intelligence and law enforcement — and called for a national shift in mindset.

“Sometimes I get fired up,” Turner said. “And I will sometimes say things that are, you know, rightfully emotionally driven. It’s because I give a s**t. And I’m also very wide awake to what’s going on.

“Until we start, as a Canadian collective, coming together, working together, and sharing these ideas with each other and actually taking a stance — it’s only gonna get worse. And for Canadians out there that believe otherwise, you need to get your head out of the sand, look up, and shake your head a little bit. Take heed to what’s actually happening right here in Canada.”

“I’ve said before, let’s apply the passion we do to the hockey playoffs to other things going on in the country,” Cooper responded. “If someone runs your goalie, you don’t let that stand. We’re letting our country be run over.”

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