The Bureau Podcast

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 effort to dominate rare-earth supply chains essential for munitions and advanced weapons.
We discuss how the fast-moving headlines and heated rhetoric of 2026 have convinced many Western citizens that President Trump is the biggest threat to world peace. I understand where those concerns come from, but I don’t believe that is the right interpretation of world events. A better reading, I tell Jason, comes from a 2023 clip in which President Xi Jinping, after meeting President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, is heard saying:
“Right now there are changes—the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years—and we are the ones driving these changes together.”
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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 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.
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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 Russian-flagged oil tanker in the North Atlantic, a vessel linked to Venezuela’s sanctions-evasion “dark fleet.”
We then turn to the terrain covered in The Bureau’s Monday report: a deeper dive into the U.S. indictment against Maduro, Cilia Flores, and their military-security inner circle, which alleges a 25-year enterprise trafficking “thousands of tons” of cocaine northward under state protection.
Prosecutors describe a system that fuses diplomatic cover, armed colectivos, and National Guard airlifts enriching political and military elites while empowering insurgent groups such as the FARC and ELN.
Notably, I tell Brian, the indictment recounts drug shipments routed through Margarita Island involving generals, Maduro’s son, and flights tied to Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA, citing recorded DEA meetings and other evidence.
We also discuss striking commentary from senior Canadian Conservative figures. Jason Kenney revealed that, while in cabinet, he was briefed by a foreign intelligence service on a Venezuela–Hezbollah–Iran pipeline using Quds Force logistics to move cocaine through Beirut and finance terror operations, and that he was shown “receipts” linking these flows to Canada-based laundering channels and lax immigration controls.
And Senator Leo Housakos argued that Beijing is “leading the way” in a broader bloc in Latin American states — including Russia, Iran, and Turkey — that exploits drug trafficking, migration, and information warfare to undermine Western democracies, calling the environment “a threat we haven’t seen since the Second World War.”
I also brief Brian on my breaking TD Bank story: a bank insider admitting to helping Chinese networks launder nearly half a billion U.S. dollars in drug proceeds through New York branches.
I argue it reflects a broader laundering model involving Chinese underground-banking cells taking over Latin cartel finance, with Canada functioning as a key command-and-control hub — a pattern I first reported through the British Columbia casino money-laundering surge.
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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.
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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 be the only dynamic at work. Diaspora pressure groups that have repeatedly aligned themselves with Beijing’s interests and intervened in Conservative Party politics could be operating in parallel. In both scenarios, actors advocating expanded trade with Beijing could be a shared underlying motivation.
A second layer concerns the pro-Beijing ecosystem embedded in Hodgson’s riding. The Liberal executive head in Hodgson’s riding, a senior Liberal organizer and former leader of the Jiangsu Commerce Council of Canada, has already come under scrutiny after Prime Minister Mark Carney falsely denied meeting the group during his January leadership campaign.
The episode is one of many concrete data points emerging from a years-long Bureau investigation into the Jiangsu council’s structure and leadership, documenting direct ties to Beijing’s United Front Work Department, and significant overlap between this pro-Beijing business network and Liberal Party organizing.
Against that wider backdrop, I walk Brian through the core findings of my new reporting on Ma. Chinese-language records reviewed by The Bureau show he was part of the Chinese Canadian Conservative Association, a controversial diaspora organization that urged Erin O’Toole to resign after the 2021 election over what it called his “anti-China” stance, later urged Chinese Canadians to “vote carefully” ahead of the 2025 election, and resurfaced after the vote to call for Pierre Poilievre to step down.
None of this is proof of wrongdoing by Ma, I tell Brian. But taken together, it suggests he should answer questions about the pro-Beijing supporters who endorsed his Conservative campaign this year.
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