The Bureau Podcast

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 but the refusal to let them happen at all.In the United States, Cohodes notes, the government let housing fall — “everything went down 40 to 50 percent” — and only then stepped in to keep the banks and brokerages from failing, once the leveraged players had taken their hits. Painful, but the market cleared and prices found a level. Canada, he argues, is doing the opposite: propping up prices before anyone is allowed to lose. “Here, the Canadian government won’t even let the prices clear,” he said. The result, in his words, is “a moral hazard on steroids, which encourages these developers then to go and do this again, and do it again on probably a greater scale.”Moral hazard is the concept Carney, a former central banker, knows intimately, and Cohodes defines it the way a short-seller does: “people doing bad things and taking exceptional risk to benefit themselves. And the risk eventually gets subsidized by the federal government, aka the taxpayer.” Reward the people who built and bought at unsustainable prices, he argues, and you have taught the next cohort that the downside is socialized. His prescription is the mirror image of the bailout, and it is the same argument he has made for more than a decade. Let the towers sell for what the market will bear — but let that “market” consist of Canadian income earners and taxpayers, not foreign investors propped up by underground-banking flows. That is what my reporting on Chinese mortgage fraud and underground banking in Toronto, alongside the laundering apparatus mapped by British Columbia’s Cullen Commission, has exposed.The homes must sell to real home buyers, even at a brutal discount, Cohodes said, and the government must then protect the financial system rather than the developers. “If you’re asking a million three for these,” he said, “we don’t care if you sell them for half a million bucks. As long as law-abiding Canadians buy these, we don’t care.” The banks would take write-downs; some builders would go under; and Canadians shut out of the market would finally buy at prices tied to local incomes. “The winners are the people who buy at a low price,” he said. “The losers are the people who borrowed money and built things at a ridiculously high price.” Instead, he argues, Ottawa is subsidizing the losers and penalizing the people it claims to help.This is where Cohodes’s diagnosis converges with the reporting underlying The Bureau’s analysis of the bailout — and where his language runs ahead of it. I frame it in the podcast discussion like this: “I’m not saying any one developer or even casino owner is knowingly laundering money. I’m saying the structure of the money and the market is Chinese capital flight.” That structural claim is the one The Bureau has documented — through leaked bank files showing fabricated foreign-income mortgages, through a federal financial-intelligence study of roughly 48,000 diaspora transactions, and through the casino-and-real-estate apparatus mapped by British Columbia’s Cullen Commission.What gives the conversation its political edge is that the cast has not changed. The man Carney appointed as federal housing minister, Gregor Robertson, presided as Vancouver’s mayor during a period in which home prices doubled, and once dismissed the first study to flag the inflow of mainland-Chinese mortgage capital as racially divisive. Cohodes’s words for Robertson and for Premier David Eby are harsh. But the narrower point lands: the figures who waved away the warnings a decade ago are the ones now writing the cheque.Cohodes situates the bailout within a darker reading of the whole economy. He describes a country dangerously leveraged to real estate, with a banking regulator he considers compromised and a currency he expects to weaken sharply — to the point that he speculates Carney could one day resort to capital controls. He calls the country “Arctic Mexico,” a deliberate provocation meant to argue that Canada has become a haven where financial crime, narcotics, and laundered capital intersect with too little consequence.And he is scathing about why none of this is louder. The story, he notes, has barely registered in the national press. “This BC story hasn’t even been picked up in the mainstream media,” he said, tracing the silence to the federal subsidies that flow to large outlets — money he characterizes, in his trademark rhetorical style, as buying a comfortable narrative. Editor's note: The Prime Minister's Office frames the June 18 announcement as a new "Canada–British Columbia Partnership on Condo Conversion," delivered through Build Canada Homes and BC Housing using what it calls "innovative financing tools." The government states the partnership remains "subject to Treasury Board approvals," and the specific terms — including the price at which units would be acquired and the discount to be achieved — have not been published. The "up to $3.2 billion" cited here is the government's own figure for the announcement's housing stream; because the condo-conversion financing carries no published cost and remains subject to approval, the ultimate public exposure, and the price of condo absorption, are not yet clear.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. 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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, Chinese state media reported that Zhang is under investigation for alleged “serious violations” of Party discipline and state law. But as Chris Meyer argues in this episode, the announcement may be only the visible edge of a much larger rupture unfolding inside China’s opaque military and political system.The Wall Street Journal reported that Zhang is accused of leaking information related to China’s nuclear weapons program to the United States and accepting bribes, including in connection with a senior promotion. The Journal said the allegations were raised during a closed-door briefing held Saturday morning with senior officers, shortly before the formal announcement.As Chris and I note in this episode, those WSJ claims—sourced to internal Communist Party accounts—may not ultimately be borne out, and could even serve Xi’s interests as a narrative frame. What is clear is that Zhang sits at the apex of the Party’s military command structure, and his reported downfall signals an extraordinary level of turmoil at the top.Chris and I also discuss the obvious: Prime Minister Mark Carney’s new strategic engagement with Beijing, already questionable to many critics of China’s hybrid warfare efforts in the West and especially targeting Canada, now looks increasingly dubious as questions hover over the stability of Xi’s regime.As Meyer explains in the episode, social media and dissident sources have circulated dramatic claims about what really happened. According to these accounts, there was a planned operation to arrest Xi Jinping at an elite CCP leaders’ hotel on the outskirts of Beijing around January 18th. Meyer heard reports that approximately 20 people—split between Xi loyalists and Zhang faction members—were killed in a confrontation when Xi received advance warning and turned the tables on Zhang.There is no verified evidence of violence, mass arrests beyond senior officers, or an active coup attempt. Claims of shootings and widespread detentions remain unconfirmed and trace back to social media posts and opposition-linked outlets. Analysts caution that China’s opaque political system often fuels speculation, and such reports should be treated carefully until independently confirmed.What we do know is that China’s military command structure is in unprecedented disarray. Whether this represents a foiled coup or an anti-corruption purge, the result is the same: China’s military leadership has been gutted. As Meyer outlines in the episode, since Xi came to power in 2012, he has systematically installed loyalists throughout the PLA’s top ranks. Now, those same appointees have been systematically removed.The Central Military Commission has been left almost entirely vacant, with only Xi and Zhang Shengmin, who heads the anti-corruption committee, remaining. Every uniformed commander appointed to the commission in 2022 has been removed.The purge extends beyond Zhang. Since summer 2023, more than 50 senior officers and defense industry executives have been ousted. In October 2024 alone, nine generals were dismissed, including another vice chairman of the Central Military Commission. The Communist Party expelled He Weidong, the other vice chair of the commission, in October 2024.Meyer notes that PLA Daily published a series of articles in December 2024—one per week—that were highly critical of Xi Jinping. Zhang was urging the civil servant class that opposed Xi to get involved, according to Meyer. 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

VANCOUVER-OTTAWAIn 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 in North America. Negar’s reporting has found “hundreds, potentially if not thousands” of regime-linked officials and intermediaries living freely in Canada — often not uniformed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps figures, but family-linked networks and financial middlemen who can move money, facilitate influence, and in some cases monitor dissidents.We discuss how this threat extends beyond the Iranian diaspora, reaching into the Jewish community as well — including lethal threats against former Canadian justice minister Irwin Cotler. Later in the episode, I return to the point that even if Western citizens think they don’t care about the Iranian regime’s harms abroad, they should understand the dangers they face at home — including how organized crime networks can traffic fentanyl one day and take Iranian intelligence-linked hit contracts the next.From there, we move into how this uprising began in an unexpected place and metastasized into something larger and more dangerous for the clerical state. We discuss how the first sparks appeared in the bazaar’s electronics and phone sector — a modern pressure point where merchants live and die by currency volatility and market shocks — before widening into a protest movement not anchored to one grievance. We discuss how the breadth of complaints matters as much as the size of street protests — and how what stands out is where the revolt has taken root: smaller and religious cities the regime traditionally counted on, including Mashhad, alongside multi-ethnic participation from Kurds, Baluch, and Azerbaijanis. As Negar frames it, the regime’s legitimacy is eroding across constituencies it once relied on.We also discuss the day-by-day escalation and the accelerants outside Iran’s borders. A major theme, Negar says, is the “Trump factor”: we discuss how President Trump’s warning that if the regime kills its people “we’re locked and we’re loaded” appears to have shifted the psychological environment for protesters, even if the threat so far remains rhetorical. We discuss why that message lands differently given Trump’s history of action — including the killing of Qasem Soleimani, strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, and this week’s stunning special forces extraction of Iranian regime ally President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela — and how Trump’s at-times chaotic, unpredictable approach may be shaping how regime officials calculate risk now, even as he has publicly kept his options open.Against that backdrop, we discuss reports of mounting deaths and mass arrests as the internet goes dark, and why the blackout itself becomes part of the story — cutting off real-time verification, restricting organizing, and enabling harsher repression away from the cameras.On the ground, we discuss whether state coercive power is cracking and what signals analysts watch in a true revolutionary moment. We discuss protests targeting symbols of control, including isolated attacks on Revolutionary Guard assets, reports of some security personnel withdrawing rather than confronting crowds, and — most striking — scenes described as police in smaller towns cheering protesters. We also discuss the regime’s use of outsourced repression, including Iran International reporting that “more than 800 members” of an Iran-backed Iraqi militia have entered Iran, alongside accounts of Arabic being heard on the streets, buses transporting detainees, and people disappearing into prisons without family notification.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 — 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 Canada tries to steer a course between the world’s two rival superpowers. And Solomon, the former CBC host once caught up in an art-dealing scandal involving Carney, is now Minister of Artificial Intelligence—another portfolio that sits squarely between U.S. and Chinese competition over advanced technology, critical minerals, and energy security.In the episode, I tell Jason that the pattern isn’t coincidental. It reflects the same constellation of influence The Bureau mapped before Carney ever took office: long-standing relationships of trust shaped through finance, global governance, and shared ambition—often paired with a marked propensity to favour deeper trade and engagement with Beijing, an authoritarian regime built on the subjugation of hundreds of millions of Chinese nationals. That context is central to how I assess Carney’s rise, including analysis I have previously provided in testimony at a Parliamentary ethics hearing.A review of corporate records showed that Brookfield—the influential Canadian investment fund from which Carney stepped away to replace Justin Trudeau as Canada’s leader—maintains many billions in politically sensitive investments with Chinese state-linked real estate and energy companies, alongside a substantial offshore banking presence. One major venture included a $750 million entry into high-end Shanghai commercial property in 2013 with a Hong Kong tycoon affiliated with the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference—an entity U.S. intelligence and national-security analysts have described as central to Beijing’s united front ecosystem.As that market later deteriorated—vacancies rising in Shanghai and credit conditions tightening—Brookfield secured hundreds of millions of dollars in loans from the Bank of China to refinance its Shanghai commercial holdings. The Bureau’s reporting has also noted the broader continuity: a decade earlier, Carney, as Governor of the Bank of England, publicly advanced policies designed to expand China’s financial footprint, including support for renminbi clearing in London. In a 2013 speech, UK at the Heart of Renewed Globalisation, Carney said: “The Bank of England [has] signed an agreement with the People’s Bank of China … Helping the internationalisation of the Renminbi is a global good.”In this episode, Jason adds a finding about Mark Carney’s promotion of Beijing’s Belt and Road plan—another massive boost, I argue, to President Xi Jinping’s global ambitions.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 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

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