The Bureau Podcast

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 business backers with deep commercial ties to Chinese Communist Party–linked entities, in ways I compare to the Lord Peter Mandelson playbook: elite influence, insider networks embedded with investors aligned with Chinese intelligence interests, and a political strategy designed to look pragmatic and beneficial to all Canadians in the “new world order,” as Carney calls it, while primarily benefiting party backers behind the scenes.
We also examine the domestic politics driving the moment — including the argument that helped win support before: positioning Carney as a steady “adult in the room” against a polarizing and unpredictable United States president — and why I believe the real maneuver is more complicated. As Carney asks Canadians to believe the country can “pivot away” from the United States, I argue he also knows Canada cannot survive without a serious trade arrangement with Washington, because our deepest economic and security partnership remains our most powerful asset.
I argue that Carney is trying to thread the needle for a domestic audience while pleasing Beijing, the Liberal Party’s business wing, and Washington — a balancing act that is not transparent and will be difficult to pull off.
We also discuss Carney’s “media cooperation” deal.
In a threat environment where Chinese-language media ecosystems have been tied to intimidation, narrative control, and election interference — and where Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai has been imprisoned for challenging Party rule — I argue this is the wrong lesson at the worst time: Ottawa is treating propaganda infrastructure like normal journalism. I point to intelligence reporting that, as The Bureau has reported, describes clandestine operations on Canadian soil, including Chinese police paying Chinese-language journalists to track dissidents and coercing targets not to cooperate with Canadian law enforcement.
And that’s why I frame the judgment as reckless: Carney widened access for a Party-state media apparatus — and expanded information-sharing with Chinese police and the RCMP — without publicly detailing safeguards, enforcement, or even acknowledging the documented threat, effectively expanding the very channels through which intimidation, manipulation, and Chinese clandestine police operations already manifest in Canada.
Finally, we discuss the stunning Toronto Police organized-crime corruption scandal — a set of allegations I tell Brian shows hallmarks of Mexican-cartel penetration also alleged in Washington’s case against former Olympian Ryan Wedding, including allegations in the same Ontario jurisdiction of bribery, penetration of police databases, and an alleged conspiracy to murder a United States federal witness involving a Toronto lawyer and numerous other alleged conspirators.
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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 increasingly appears to revolve around Zhang’s view that the PLA is not ready to invade Taiwan by 2027, which is the order that President Xi has publicly issued. At the same time, Xi Jinping has continued to appear in public and host visiting leaders, a reminder that the regime is trying to project stability at the top even as the system appears to be shaking underneath.
Known unknowns: Beyond the official acknowledgement of Zhang’s arrest, the information environment turns murky fast. Online reporting and diaspora chatter have pushed dramatic claims about a coup attempt, counter-moves, internal armed standoffs, injuries, arrests, and family detentions. Chris is careful: he cannot confirm the most sensational accounts, and he cautions listeners against treating viral narratives as settled facts simply because they appear in Western headlines. One of the strangest features, he notes, is what he describes as an unusually heavy silence—the absence of the kind of coordinated denunciations and public bandwagon messaging that often follows a top-level takedown in China. Whether that reflects uncertainty, fear, or an operation still unfolding behind closed doors remains unclear.
Chris credits diaspora channels with surfacing fragments that sometimes align with later signals—especially the shape of unrest: elite anxiety, hesitation, and the sense that loyalty inside the PLA may not be as automatic as Beijing wants the world to believe. What can be seen and heard from Beijing currently is enough for him to conclude this is not being experienced inside China as a routine corruption case. It’s being felt as a power event.
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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.
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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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