The Bureau Podcast

OTTAWA — In this episode, I sit down with Indo-Pacific researcher Cleo Paskal and frequent Bureau guest Chris Meyer to investigate a part of the world that rarely commands sustained Western attention — but could determine the outcome of the next global conflict.

Paskal has testified repeatedly before the United States Congress and the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. A former journalist, she has spent years travelling through the Pacific’s smallest and most strategically important states. The path that drew her into this subject resembles my own in Vancouver.

As a travel journalist, she wa...

OTTAWA — This week, MPs on the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security unanimously agreed to hold hearings this fall into Canada’s national-security clearance and vetting system.

The probe follows the arrest of a Canadian intern who worked at NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe in Belgium. Belgian prosecutors have charged her with espionage on behalf of a third country and participation in a criminal organization. Reuters has reported, citing a security source, that she is accused of spying for China.

Last week—before Parliament agreed to investigate—I conducted my own examinatio...

OTTAWA – I joined Brian Lilley for a wide-ranging conversation that started with the machinery of Beijing’s foreign influence in Canada and Conservative leadership politics, then moved into MP Larry Brock’s departure and Brian’s explosive scoop: Brock disclosed to his party leaders that Mark Carney’s party had dangled a judicial appointment before him amid Carney’s floor-crossing campaign.

I started with the documentary record on Beijing’s 575 United Front Work Department community groups in Canada, including a group that pressured two successive party leaders to step down.

Drawing on Jamestown Foundation research into Chinese C...

OTTAWA — When Gord Magill asked me onto his podcast on July 1, I said yes for a reason I don't often get to act on. Magill is not commenting from a distance. He is a third-generation trucker who has driven the ice roads of northern Canada, the Australian outback and the American interstate system, and who wrote End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers.

When a practitioner who has spent thirty years in the cab wants to talk about how North American workers are getting squeezed out of a critical industry by immigration scams, or as I...

In this episode with Jason James, we revisit the Vancouver Model — the Chinese transnational money-laundering system that helped make Vancouver infamous around the world — and we connect that history to a live political question in Canada today.

Because this is not just a story about casinos, luxury homes, or offshore capital. It is a story about how dirty money, political weakness, and a captured real estate economy can combine to distort an entire country.

For years, I have reported on how money from China moved through underground banking networks, casinos, numbered companies, law offices, developers, and...

I’m back with Jason James to discuss an explosive wrongful dismissal claim that I believe may get to the heart of Mark Carney’s pivot to Beijing — and to a larger question now facing Canada.

Who is this government really listening to?

The case involves Raquel Garbers, a senior Canadian defence policy specialist and military figure who, according to reporting on her legal claim, helped shape Canada’s Arctic and NORAD defence policy — the very architecture that binds Canadian and American security together against the real strategic threats facing North America.

Those threats ar...

OTTAWA – I joined Canadian columnist Brian Lilley this week to walk through three developing Bureau investigations — the Carney government’s Vancouver condo bailout, a record fentanyl-precursor seizure in British Columbia, and a corruption case emerging from Toronto’s Project South investigation.

On the condo bailout, Lilley asked me to explain the connections behind Vancouver marketer Bob Rennie, the man dubbed the industry’s “condo king.” I traced the story back to my own history covering Vancouver city hall for the Province, and to the city’s 2010 Olympic Village crisis, when a developer went under and the city — under then-mayor G...

VANCOUVER — Marc Cohodes built his name and his fortune betting against frauds, from small public companies to the American subprime-mortgage machine that collapsed in 2008. This week, he returned to The Bureau with a blunt verdict on Prime Minister Mark Carney’s plan to spend up to $3.2 billion absorbing Vancouver’s unsold condominiums: he has seen this movie before, and this version is worse.

“This Carney buying back Vancouver condos is just really rich,” Cohodes said, “especially on the backdrop of him cutting a deal with China.” What makes it worse than 2008, Cohodes says, is not the size of the losses...

OTTAWA — In this episode with Jason James, I break down my criticisms of the raft of public-safety and surveillance laws Mark Carney’s manufactured-majority government is attempting to push through Canada’s Parliament before the summer break — a legislative push now drawing serious concern from privacy experts, media lawyers, civil-liberties advocates, and technology leaders including Shopify founder Tobi Lütke.

I also reiterate my analysis that Canada’s failed trade dealings with the Trump Administration are now foreseeably snagged on Carney’s Chinese EV import deal. The Liberal government, I argue, is trying to have its cake and eat it to...

OTTAWA — Rushan Abbas, co-founder and executive director of the Campaign for Uyghurs and author of the memoir Unbroken, joined The Bureau Podcast from Istanbul, in the middle of a tour that has carried her from the Oslo Freedom Forum to the halls of the U.S. Congress — where, she says, countering Beijing is now one of the only things uniting Republicans and Democrats.

In this conversation, Abbas delivers a direct warning to Prime Minister Mark Carney: that Canada is on what she calls a “suicide mission,” repeating a mistake Washington took decades to correct. She argues that Beijing...

WASHINGTON/OTTAWA — In this episode I connect with Grace Jin Drexel in Washington, as she pleads for the release of her father — and, almost in spite of herself, becomes a target of the same regime that imprisoned him.

Her father is Pastor Ezra Jin, founder of Zion Church, once one of the largest underground churches in China. Last October, Chinese authorities arrested him along with dozens of his fellow leaders, in what Grace told the United States Congress was the largest takedown of an independent house church since the Cultural Revolution. His crime, in essence, was refusing to i...

OTTAWA — This podcast discussion from late April was recovered from the cloud by Jason James, and was taped a month before my appearance this week alongside an incredible cast of national experts at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.

At that event, Mike Doran — director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at Hudson and a former senior White House national security official — asked me to explain how China seeds its influence through elite financial institutions. My answer, it turned out, foreshadowed a bombshell congressional report released this week by the House Select...

OTTAWA – This week, I appeared on a panel at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., alongside Mike Doran, Professor Brenda Shaffer, and Zineb Riboua — and one of the central themes that emerged from that conversation also runs through this episode with Jason James.

It’s a question I’ve been investigating for years. How does Beijing cultivate the business and political elite networks that shape Canadian foreign policy from the inside out? We’re talking about the Canada China Business Council, the Power Corporation orbit, and the figures now surrounding Prime Minister Mark Carney — people who, through co-i...

OTTAWA — In this discussion with Jason James, I break down the stunning rise of Liberal floor-crosser Michael Ma — a story The Bureau has led Canadian media on with at least 10 investigative reports since mid-December 2025, culminating in our coverage of his suspicious cross-examination of expert Margaret McCuaig-Johnston.

This is a wide-ranging conversation.

I explain the earlier rise of Markham-area Liberal figure Mary Ng, who was selected to run in a by-election after Liberal heavyweight John McCallum left Parliament to become ambassador to China. Ng had quickly risen from an Ontario Liberal government staffer, to a powerful memb...

CALGARY — In this episode, I sit down with Brian Lilley to break down one of the most troubling moments in recent Canadian parliamentary history — Liberal floor-crosser Michael Ma’s attempt to discredit University of Ottawa China expert Margaret McCuaig-Johnston during a Commons industry committee hearing, and what happened in Beijing hours after the cameras stopped rolling.

Chinese state-linked media didn’t just celebrate Ma’s performance. Within hours they published a detailed biographical attack on McCuaig-Johnston with a level of institutional knowledge about her career that raises an uncomfortable question: was this a coordinated operation, and does it trace b...

OTTAWA — In this conversation with BNN's Jason James, I wrestle with the central confusion surrounding the United States-Israel campaign in Iran. Is the objective regime change, the retrieval of enriched uranium, Israel's own objectives, or something deeper and more indirect — the culmination of a pivot from the Middle East, and a strategic warning to Xi Jinping and his axis partners in Russia and North Korea? My view is that the United States military would not have launched this campaign without a rigorous analysis of what it means for Taiwan.

I open by recounting a reporting trip to Taiw...

LONDON — Jason Pack has spent his career advising Western governments and corporations on the Middle East, running a Libya oil-and-gas consulting firm, and briefing United Nations bureaucrats. Now a fellow at RUSI, the storied British defense and security think tank, his career has sometimes crossed paths with actors in the Western intelligence alliance.

That background provides solid fundamentals for understanding the world Jeffrey Epstein operated in — and the known knowns and known unknowns surrounding the recent US government disclosures. While the disclosures have led to new revelations, such as Bloomberg’s scoop on a DEA investigation into allega...

The Bureau has been covering the war against Iran’s Islamic regime largely through American political and military sources — the strategic calculus, the intelligence assessments, the geopolitical reverberations reaching from Beijing to Moscow. But there is a different angle that comes from standing in a city under bombardment, and that is what Adam Zivo has been delivering from Tel Aviv.

We last talked when he was in Israel during the 12-day war last June. He returned to Tel Aviv roughly a week before this current campaign began, because his sources — political and journalistic — told him that what was comi...

OTTAWA — In this episode, former senior Mountie Garry Clement joins Sam Cooper to answer a question that should unsettle every Canadian: how does a figure like Ryan Wedding — an Olympic athlete from Coquitlam — end up becoming one of the most feared Sinaloa Cartel operatives in North America? The answer, Clement argues, has less to do with Wedding himself than with the country that made his rise possible.

Clement spent 34 years in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, including deep-cover undercover operations in British Columbia and an extraordinary posting to Hong Kong in the early 1990s, where he and immigr...

OTTAWA — In this episode, I dug deeper into the Epstein network revelations with Jason James.

Building on our earlier conversation in the Christmas special—where we explored the global networks that can bridge Western leaders and bankers, including Mark Carney, with Chinese Communist Party–linked investment funds—I said the late-2025 and early 2026 picture of Jeffrey Epstein had come into sharper focus: not only as a potential intelligence asset of any single nation, but as a fixer and facilitator moving among elites worldwide.

I will develop this thread in the coming days, as additional evidence emerges...

OTTAWA — I sat down with author and researcher Cheryl Yu to unpack her groundbreaking new report on the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department—a sweeping mapping project that identifies more than 2,000 linked organizations operating across democratic societies, with a focus on the United States, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Yu’s work helps explain what The Bureau has been reporting through a series of explosive investigations: that United Front networks are not an academic concern, but a practical system for building access—inside politics, business, diaspora organizations, and civic institutions—while preserving the appearance o...

OTTAWA/TORONTO — In this episode, I catch up with columnist Brian Lilley to unpack Prime Minister Mark Carney’s emerging trade and cooperation agenda with the People’s Republic of China — and why I argue these agreements could accelerate Canada’s decline on multiple fronts.

Before we get into Ottawa’s electric vehicle deal — which I argue risks introducing foreign surveillance platforms onto Canadian roads while aggravating our most important trade partner, the United States — we step back and ask: what is Carney really trying to accomplish?

I lay out my view that Carney is rewarding key bu...

OTTAWA/LOS ANGELES — On the Bureau Podcast’s second episode on the extraordinary political turmoil in China, I’m joined again by former U.S. official and veteran China watcher Chris Meyer to walk listeners through what we can say about the reported purge swirling around General Zhang Youxia in Beijing.

Known knowns: Zhang is not a mid-level casualty—he is the most senior and respected military figure associated with the Central Military Commission, and his removal or neutralization is a major signal about the state of control, cohesion, and fear inside the People’s Liberation Army. This event...

OTTAWA/LOS ANGELES — The weekend delivered a jolt from Beijing that underscores a theme Chris Meyer and I have explored across multiple podcast discussions: Xi Jinping’s regime can look strong yet be brittle.

China’s Defence Ministry says it has opened investigations into senior military figures including Gen. Zhang Youxia, a vice chairman of the Central Military Commission—an escalation that is shaking the top ranks of the People’s Liberation Army and fuelling fresh questions, inside and outside China, about whether this is an anti-corruption purge, a political power struggle, or both.

On Saturday...

OTTAWA — In this podcast interview with Jason James of BNN, taped shortly before Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Beijing trip, I lay out why I expected the visit to deepen long-running elite commercial ties between Chinese Communist Party-aligned networks and Canadian industries — relationships that have shaped Liberal Asia policy for decades.

We cover a lot of ground, including heightened tensions over Greenland; Elbridge Colby’s “strategy of denial”; the United States’ race to prepare for potential conflict with China and Russia; and the parallel race to secure critical minerals in the Western Hemisphere—aimed at breaking Beijing’s decades-old effo...

VANCOUVER-OTTAWA

In this Bureau Podcast breaking episode, I’m joined by my former colleague Negar Mojtahedi — now a Canadian investigative journalist with Iran International English — to unpack a revolt in Iran that was moving at internet speed abroad until the regime shut down networks last night, making Negar’s on-the-ground sourcing all the more crucial — especially as major broadcasters, from the BBC to the CBC, have appeared reticent to cover this monumental story.

We begin where both Negar and I share expertise: exposing the Iranian regime and the organized-crime national security story hiding in plain sight here...

OTTAWA — In this episode, I speak with Canada’s top political columnist Brian Lilley to unpack the fast-moving opening days of 2026 — a week that has redrawn the Western Hemisphere’s security map. We trace how the Trump administration’s dramatic extraction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and the Justice Department’s superseding indictment are part of what I see as a wider strategy to counter hybrid warfare — the fusion of narco-states, cartel finance, terrorism, and authoritarian state influence stretching from Caracas to Beijing and Moscow.

Our conversation also takes in this morning’s U.S. military interception of a...

OTTAWA — For The Bureau’s 2025 Holiday Special, I sat down once again with Jason James for a long-form, two-hour conversation—our second holiday edition—to answer his questions about the elite networks surrounding Prime Minister Mark Carney and the China connections that have quietly defined his ascent.

Perhaps presciently, during the federal election campaign The Bureau published a network-mapping model outlining the key figures orbiting Carney, including Dominic Barton, Jin Liqun, Mark Wiseman, and Evan Solomon. Months later, that exercise looks well founded. Wiseman has now been appointed Carney’s ambassador to the United States—a critical position as...

TORONTO — In this breaking news episode for The Bureau, I speak with political columnist Brian Lilley about the diaspora pressure networks 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.

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.

I tell Brian that is likely true — but it may not...

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 alre...

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...

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...

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 conversati...

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 susta...

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...

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 h...

OTTAWA/AUSTIN — In today’s episode of The Bureau Podcast, former U.S. Border Patrol agent Ammon Blair traces his path from military service to the front lines of America’s border—and explains why he believes Mexican cartels now function as a parallel power with expanding operations in Canada and in more than 60 countries worldwide.

Blair says U.S. military sources have for years classified cartels as hybrid-war operators threatening American citizens, but only recently has Washington begun to respond to the threat as such—one he argues is greater than ISIS and, in little-understood ways, connected...

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 Peopl...

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...

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 legi...