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 watched patterns of Chinese investment advance rapidly across smaller states, year after year, until they formed the unmistakable outline of a larger strategic objective. Her research examines how Beijing combines political influence, commercial activity, organized crime and intelligence-linked networks to alter conditions on the ground without firing a shot.
Paskal explains that maritime geography is leverage in this contest of great powers.
Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands — including Saipan and Tinian — are U.S. territories. Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands are independent nations linked to Washington through Compacts of Free Association. Together, they form an American-controlled corridor between Hawaii and the first island chain encompassing Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines.
If war erupts over Taiwan, those islands become the logistical spine for moving American forces west. Paskal argues that Beijing understands their importance far better than Washington often appears to.
Meyer, a former U.S. official and veteran China analyst, connects what he has found in Saipan to the casino-based money laundering, underground banking and political influence networks I documented in Wilful Blindness. His assessment is blunt: Beijing sends its “A team” into Micronesia, while Washington too often treats the region as an afterthought.
Their investigation focuses in part on Imperial Pacific International, the spectacularly troubled Saipan casino venture. Paskal and Meyer examine its reported financial volumes, its Chinese state-connected construction contractor and allegations involving illegal labour, human trafficking, money laundering and public corruption. In congressional testimony, Governor Arnold Palacios described the casino era as being marked by precisely those problems.
The episode also scrutinizes a special, CNMI-only immigration pathway that currently permits eligible, pre-screened Chinese visitors to enter the islands without a conventional visa for stays of up to 14 days. Critics fear that such access, combined with direct flights and uneven enforcement, creates vulnerabilities close to Guam’s military installations.
The most sensitive part of our discussion concerns Palacios himself.
After taking office in 2023, Palacios pressed federal agencies to examine public corruption and the handling of enormous amounts of American funding. In April 2025, he reportedly asked the territory’s congressional delegate to carry a request directly to FBI Director Kash Patel for “intensive investigations of public corruption,” saying his administration possessed considerable evidence.
Three months later, Palacios collapsed in his office. He was flown to Guam and died that night at 69.
Paskal says some people in the Northern Marianas remain deeply suspicious about the circumstances, including questions surrounding the medical response and whether his transfer was delayed. She does not claim to possess proof that Palacios was killed. But she argues that this uncertainty produces its own strategic effect: If an official challenges entrenched interests, dies suddenly, and the unanswered questions are never resolved, other officials may decide that speaking out is too dangerous.
That, she says, is cognitive warfare — the shaping of behaviour through fear, doubt and the appearance that democratic institutions cannot protect those who defend them.
The conversation then moves to the Marshall Islands, home to the critical U.S. missile-testing facility at Kwajalein and one of Taiwan’s remaining diplomatic partners. There, Cary Yan and Gina Zhou pleaded guilty in a U.S. federal case to conspiring to bribe Marshallese officials. Prosecutors said they sought legislation establishing a semi-autonomous zone on Rongelap Atoll, with relaxed tax and immigration rules that could benefit their commercial interests.
Paskal sees that case as a warning. Corruption in a remote island legislature can become a matter of global security when the territory involved sits beside indispensable American military infrastructure.
This is not a story about a conventional warfare.
It is about strategic terrain being softened through money, access, intimidation and elite capture. From Saipan to the Marshall Islands, Paskal and Meyer argue that the laws already exist to confront much of this activity. What is missing is consistent enforcement — and the political recognition that defending these islands may be inseparable from preventing China’s aggression against Taiwan, and the West.
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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 examination of the case with Jason James. We broke down the known knowns, the known unknowns and the probabilities behind the competing explanations.
Was this simply an extraordinary series of bureaucratic failures? Or could a political-access network have helped move this woman through Canadian institutions despite warning signs?
I also explained what a former senior CSIS officer told me about the likely vetting process—and why my source believes investigators should look closely at Global Affairs Canada.
So, what happened here?
We have a young woman who came to Canada from China, moved through universities and Canadian government institutions, and was ultimately sponsored by Global Affairs Canada for a sensitive position at NATO.
Yet before that placement, she had submitted applications to the Canada Border Services Agency using different names and different universities. The Public Service Commission found that she committed fraud during that appointment process, and the Federal Court later dismissed her attempt to overturn that finding. To me, the young woman’s persistence in attempting to overturn the negative finding, in itself, seems interesting.
Her case information wasn’t in some hidden intelligence intercept. It is sitting in the public record.
So how did she get through?
A former CSIS officer told me that CSIS would have conducted security vetting—and, in this officer’s assessment, it is likely the service produced a concerning red-flag report.
CSIS is a capable intelligence agency. It works with the CIA and other top allied services. As I tell Jason, I find it very difficult to believe that CSIS simply missed problems that were visible through basic open-source research.
My source told me it would make sense to look closely at GAC. That fits previous intelligence reporting indicating that Global Affairs has prioritized trade and diplomatic relations with countries such as China and India over security concerns—a longstanding source of friction with CSIS.
So, could it be the case that CSIS raised red flags and Global Affairs Canada effectively said, Nothing to see here?
I don’t know. That remains a theory, not a proven fact. But I believe it is a serious and plausible theory—and one investigators must test.
That means examining the institutional environment around senior GAC figures, including Mélanie Joly and David Morrison.
Since 2018, as I have reported, Joly has led or participated in Beijing trade-lobby engagement involving the Canada China Business Council and prominent Eastern Canadian business figures. My reporting has also traced meetings involving some of the same CCP-linked entities that appear around the Markham illegal-casino network and political fundraising circles.
I am asking whether an institutional culture—one heavily invested in trade, access and renewed engagement with Beijing—could have caused legitimate security warnings to be minimized or overridden.
That question becomes even more important because the woman reportedly listed Liberal campaign volunteering on her résumé and appeared at a Justin Trudeau fundraising-style event in 2014.
Research from the Jamestown Foundation and leaked intelligence records describe how United Front Work Department networks cultivate Western politicians, establish bonds of obligation and promote favoured individuals for positions inside government. In my reporting, I have identified hundreds of Canadian community organizations connected to the CCP’s United Front system.
The Jamestown reporting presents a blueprint: surround politicians across party lines, provide campaign and community support, develop access—and then advocate for selected people to receive positions inside government institutions.
Importantly, we recorded this conversation before this week’s reporting on declassified FBI material concerning Fang Fang and Congressman Eric Swalwell. That material reportedly examined whether an alleged Ministry of State Security affiliate leveraged a campaign-donation network to help place interns inside Swalwell’s office.
Even before that news surfaced, I told Jason that this is precisely the type of methodology the Jamestown Foundation says the United Front and Chinese intelligence services use in Western democracies.
That does not prove the NATO case followed the same playbook. But it makes it a plausible hypothesis that demands serious investigation.
Conservative national-security critic Dane Lloyd tied the NATO case to what he described as a broader pattern of security failures:
“Yesterday Conservative members forced hearings this fall on Canada’s national security clearance vetting processes,” Lloyd posted to X.
“This comes in the wake of troubling allegations involving a Canadian intern at NATO headquarters accused of espionage.
“This isn’t an isolated incident and comes in the wake of several high-profile security failures. The minister of public safety needs to take responsibility and ensure the integrity of our national security clearance system.”
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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 Communist Party influence operations in Canada, I explained how these United Front organizations are tasked with targeting local politicians and community leaders, mobilizing voters behind candidates viewed as supportive of Beijing, and applying pressure to political parties and institutions.
This isn’t about one political party, and it doesn’t require us to assume that any individual politician understands or acquiesces to Beijing’s community networks.
The broader picture is roughly 575 organizations, or 576, counting the organization led by a Canadian senator and now confirmed to The Bureau as having Beijing links, operating in Canada within systems that Beijing can mobilize to surround politicians, shape political narratives and, ultimately, try to influence elections and leadership contests.
Brian then gave a striking example from his own experience.
The morning after Erin O’Toole lost the 2021 election, Brian received a cold call from a man he had never heard of—and who, Brian said, had no obvious reason to have his number. The message was simple.
O’Toole had to go.
Brian’s interpretation was equally clear. O’Toole had been hawkish on China from the beginning. Beijing disliked him and, in Brian’s view, wanted him removed.
I added what Canadian intelligence reporting has shown. In my reporting, I described intelligence intercepts involving Chinese consular officials discussing the need to push a message through diaspora communities that electing a leader like O’Toole would be comparable to electing Donald Trump.
That brought us to the current leadership question.
A leadership vacancy creates an opportunity. Members can be signed up. Networks can be activated. A preferred candidate doesn’t have to be Beijing’s ideal candidate—just somewhat “less bad” from Beijing’s perspective.
My reporting showed that a Chinese proxy agent, according to CSIS reporting I obtained exclusively, attempted to influence a federal party leadership contest in 2022 by paying for memberships, recruiting CCP members to join the party, and seeking to make it less hawkish toward Beijing.
While CSIS did not name the Conservatives, my sources inside the party and within the diaspora pointed to a network that sought a leader other than Poilievre, I told Brian.
I also told him that we know the Chinese Communist Party studies Western political systems and individual politicians in extraordinary detail. The objective, as I put it to Brian, is fairly simple: they are trying to win inside our system.
From there, I turned the questions back on Brian.
On party operative Kory Teneycke, I pressed Brian on speculation that Teneycke had been working back channels to encourage a Jason Kenney leadership bid.
Then we got into Larry Brock.
Brock’s departure, Brian said, has nothing to do with dissatisfaction with the Conservative leadership.
Brock had been on leave from his position as a Crown prosecutor and faced a September deadline to make a permanent choice.
The more significant disclosure involves what happened earlier this year. According to Brian, the Liberals dangled the possibility of a judicial appointment in front of Brock. Brock declined and immediately reported the matter to the Conservative whip and House leader.
Brian’s assessment is that nobody crossed the legal threshold for an inducement. But he believes the Liberals should still have to answer for what happened—and that Brock should not be blamed for reporting it.
We closed on two larger questions I’ve been looking at.
The first is whether consulting firms and law firms—including firms employing former senior politicians—are increasingly being used as access points into Canadian political institutions.
The second is what a decade of Liberal Party judicial appointments has done to public confidence in the courts.
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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 explain, how transnational organized crime has exploited our borders and vulnerable migrants to capture an essential economic tie between the U.S. and Canada, threaten our national security and sovereignty, and move cartel loads through the freight system, that is a conversation worth having, and worth sharing with readers of The Bureau.
I asked him for the recording so I could post it here.
What made the discussion unusual is that we came at the same machinery from opposite ends. I have spent years tracing how Chinese organized crime, the Mexican cartels and Canadian-based trafficking networks use commercial transportation corridors to move cocaine, methamphetamine, fentanyl precursors and laundered proceeds between China, Mexico, the United States and Canada — including the alleged use of Canada-based long-haul trucking companies in the Ryan Wedding investigation.
Magill has watched the same corridors fill up from the driver’s seat: the exploitation of migrant drivers, the fraudulent licensing and recruitment pipelines, the unsafe carriers that vanish into a new limited liability company the moment enforcement catches up, and the economic pressure that makes a legitimate freight network easy for criminal groups to infiltrate.
One exchange is worth marking now, in hindsight. Magill asked me why one community keeps surfacing in the border seizures, and I told him this was not a matter of “profiling” or tracking Punjabi origin names across a few Blue Water Bridge seizure news cycles.
As I put it to him: “this is state level criminal intelligence I’m talking about.”
I said it because I was already in discussions with people on both sides of the border about the saturation of Indian transnational crime groups into the long-haul trucking industry. The people I was talking to are well aware of the Trump administration‘s concerns with Canada’s vulnerabilities to border exploitation and fentanyl trafficking, and some have also asked for my knowledge on the topics, a bit of background I didn’t explain on air with Gord.
That was July 1.
Six days later, on July 7, the Justice Department unsealed Operation Hard Ball: three indictments, twenty-four arrests across the United States, Canada and Europe, and India-based syndicates charged with racketeering, targeted killings, extortion and moving bulk cocaine and methamphetamine by long-haul semi-truck from the Los Angeles area to the Canadian border.
The Bureau was describing the picture before it broke into public view.
What those indictments do not reach, but United States agencies are certainly interested in, is the proliferation of fentanyl production labs across Canada that feed into the same Mexican cartel supply chain the long-haul mafia tapped for the cocaine and methamphetamine loads it ran out of California.
When Gord asked me about that fentanyl pipeline, I briefly explained a story The Bureau has reported on, in which a Drug Enforcement Administration source met with an Indian gangster in Vancouver, and an alleged Chinese fentanyl supplier, who promised he could produce massive loads of fentanyl precursors shipped from China to Vancouver’s port, and ship them south from British Columbia to Los Angeles, using his trucking company, fronted by an Indian driver.
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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 Canadian banks. In the simplest version of the Vancouver Model, corrupt officials, wealthy insiders, and organized crime figures used underground money brokers to move value out of China while avoiding capital controls. In Vancouver, that money could arrive as bags of cash, casino chips, bank drafts, real estate purchases, or mortgage-backed transactions that made little sense against local Canadian incomes.
And over time, that money helped drive Vancouver and Toronto real estate into a fantasy economy.
Jason and I talk through the Vancouver Model, the Toronto Model, mortgage fraud, underground banking, and the way Chinese money brokers became central players in global laundering systems used by cartels, traffickers, and corrupt elites. We also talk about what this has done to ordinary Canadians — especially in Vancouver — where an entire generation watched home ownership disappear while governments looked away, explained it away, or called legitimate questions divisive.
And that brings us to Mark Carney’s condo bailout plan.
Because now, after years of speculative building, offshore-driven pricing, and developers profiting from a market inflated far beyond local incomes, thousands of condo units are sitting unsold in Vancouver and Toronto. The official language is affordability. The promise is that governments can buy or support these unsold units and convert them into homes Canadians can afford.
But my concern is much darker.
If taxpayers are used to rescue developers from a market inflated by murky offshore money, then Canadians may not simply be funding housing policy. They may, in effect, be helping launder the consequences of that money. They may be taking assets whose values were boosted by capital flight, speculation, and questionable financial flows — and using public money to keep those values from falling back to earth.
That is the question at the center of this episode.
Are Canadians being asked to solve an affordability crisis? Or are they being asked to protect the paper value of a corrupted real estate system that helped create the crisis?
We also discuss the political figures around this issue: David Eby, who once understood the role of dirty money in British Columbia real estate; Gregor Robertson, whose Vancouver mayoralty coincided with an enormous rise in housing prices and who is now federal housing minister; and Bob Rennie, the so-called condo king whose career has been deeply tied to Vancouver’s pre-sale condo economy and political fundraising circles.
To be clear, this episode is not an allegation that any developer, buyer, or politician involved in Vancouver and Toronto real estate is corrupt. It is an argument that Canada has failed for decades to confront the financial ecosystem that allowed offshore money, organized crime, and political influence to reshape our largest housing markets.
So the question is simple.
Will taxpayers finally get a housing reset?
Or will they be forced to bail out the same system that priced them out?
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