The Bureau Podcast

• ‘Old Friends’ of Beijing: Dennis Molinaro on Trudeau and the Elite Networks That Rewired Canada–China Relations

  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’t just detach security from diplomacy and from relations,” he says. “So I wanted to try to tell that complete story as best I could.”That fuller picture includes a re-assessment of Pierre Trudeau and the 1970 recognition of the People’s Republic of China. Molinaro is careful with his evidence, but blunt about the pattern it reveals. On the recognition decision, he tells me: “I would say that the recognition of China, I’m comfortable in saying that likely looks like it was a foreign interference operation by the PRC … because of Paul Lin.”Molinaro walks listeners through the previously obscure figure of Paul Lin, an academic who moved between the West Coast, the United States, China and finally McGill University. Newly released RCMP and allied intelligence files show Lin under heavy surveillance and flagged as a likely Chinese Communist Party influence operator. In Molinaro’s words, the Mounties “flat out say that this is part of his task of being an agent of influence is to get China recognized.”At the same time, Beijing’s internal language about Canada’s leaders was far from neutral. Drawing on the testimony of defector Chen Yonglin, Molinaro explains how Chinese internal documents categorized Pierre Trudeau, Jean Chrétien and Henry Kissinger as “old friends” of the regime. As he tells me: “Old friends… it’s this category of an individual that is very close to the PRC in supporting the CCP… the CCP views them as a close ally, in a sense… even generations later, which is quite a substantial thing, I would say.”I push the conversation further, asking whether Molinaro’s work is forcing a broader re-evaluation of Pierre Trudeau’s ideological legacy and the way Canada’s elites still “see” China. Molinaro argues that the Hogue Commission hearings themselves became an example of how much Canada’s political class has preferred a comforting story over a harder look at Chinese Communist Party power.The discussion then turns to the Canada–China Business Council, Power Corporation and the Desmarais network of political relationships. I note my own reporting on how Power Corp, the Desmarais family and Jean Chrétien have been intertwined with senior Chinese state–investment bodies. Molinaro adds a deeper origin story, explaining that Paul Lin helped midwife the business council itself and then became a gatekeeper to “curated” deals inside China.For Molinaro, the problem is not legitimate business in 2025, but the origins and intent: “The problem becomes Paul Lin… his central interests were the CCP… it brings into all kinds of questions… mainly, if the government’s getting briefed on this guy… what was done about this?”Winnipeg, Wuhan and the lab-leak debateMidway through the episode, Molinaro and I shift to the Winnipeg Level 4 lab and the contested origins of COVID-19 — a chapter Molinaro says “was all about… Canada being this place where the PRC is just actively somehow operating … as it will.”We walk through the now-public documents on Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, Thousand Talents applications, the transfer of Ebola and other high-consequence pathogens to Wuhan, and the proposed “bat filovirus” gain-of-function project linking Winnipeg and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Molinaro is explicit that the lab-leak hypothesis is not fringe: “I see this as probably more likely than having a virus that emerges so fast, basically overnight, that can infect humans on scale, just on a mass scale.”‘Canada is overrun’: how Washington now sees its northern allyIn the final third of the conversation, Molinaro reveals what senior United States officials told him when he asked how they now view Canada’s China file. One line that stuck with me: “I don’t want to say joke,” one official told him, “but the saying you get a lot of times here is, look to Canada if you want to see what could happen here.”Another was even starker: “Canada is overrun.” Molinaro interprets that as a quiet warning about intelligence sharing: “What they were trying to essentially say as nice as possible was we’re going to have to start thinking about how we share intelligence with you if you don’t clean up your PRC problem.”The episode closes with prescriptions. Molinaro says Canada must finally pass and use a meaningful foreign-agent registry. It needs RICO-style anti-racketeering laws: “You need a structure of laws that will target the people who are running these organizations and tie them to the individual offenses like the Americans are doing.” And the country must overhaul its security culture — including how CSIS, the RCMP and political leaders share and act on intelligence.Above all, he says, this is a leadership question: “If you don’t have good leadership, that’s going to take the lead on these things and solve them… don’t expect any changes.”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

  --------  

  57:54

  --------

  57:54
• Vancouver Real Estate Horror Story: How Author Jesse Ferreras Turned a Broken Housing Market into Gothic Fiction

  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

  --------  

  26:09

  --------

  26:09
• The Bureau Breaks Down Ryan Wedding's Rise With Brian Lilley

  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 conversations between us in the future too.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

  --------  

  41:53

  --------

  41:53
• From “Elbows Up” to “51st State”: How a Psyop-Style Campaign That Delivered Mark Carney’s Win May Extend Into Floor-Crossing Gambits and Trade Talks Shaping China–Canada–US–Mexico Relations

  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 sustained campaign.In this conversation with Jason James, I explain why I’ve come to believe that Canada’s last federal election carries many of the hallmarks of a successful political psyop. Mark Carney’s Liberals didn’t just win on policy; they won by persuading a critical mass of older voters that Donald Trump was determined to turn Canada into the “51st state.” That storyline — Canada as a besieged, decent nation in need of Liberal protection from an unhinged America — operated as an identity script, inviting voters to decide what “people like us” do at the ballot box.If you want visible evidence of behaviour change, look at the “Elbows Up” slogan — a deliberate nod to old-time Canadian hockey players like Gordie Howe, meant to trigger memories of hard-fought victories in Canada’s national game among an aging voter base. We saw Canadian actor Mike Myers seated rinkside with Mark Carney in hockey jerseys, talking through these themes, then later throwing his elbow in the air during a Saturday Night Live cast gathering. After that bombardment of imagery and messaging through the campaign, rallies ended with crowds literally jutting their elbows into the air in awkward, almost chicken-like poses — physically acting out the identity they were being sold.As I tell Jason, we also know from government election-threat disclosures that Chinese propaganda was pushing a parallel line, promoting Carney as the preferred champion to stand up to Trump. And I worry that this campaign hasn’t ended. Carney is now trying to convince Conservative MPs to “cross the floor” so he can secure a majority without going back to voters. I argue that would be dangerous, especially as his government promises deeper ties with Beijing as a “strategic partner” — at the very moment the United States and Japan are drawing closer militarily and politically in response to China’s growing threats against Taiwan.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

  --------  

  1:15:45

  --------

  1:15:45
• “He Certainly Influenced Trudeau”: Charles Burton on Academic Paul Lin and China’s Early Reach into Canada

  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 an alleged senior Chinese agent — “certainly influenced Pierre Trudeau.” Drawing from his own diplomatic experience in Beijing, Burton provides rare context on how Lin’s access to Zhou Enlai and Trudeau shaped Canada’s early China policy, setting patterns of engagement and elite capture that persist to this day.The conversation spans Burton’s personal confrontation with Chinese intelligence, his critique of Ottawa’s complacency in his new book The Beaver and the Dragon, and his warning that the same influence machinery that once shaped Trudeau’s worldview continues to operate across Canada’s political and cultural institutions.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

  --------  

  46:13

  --------

  46:13

More News podcasts

Trending News podcasts

About The Bureau Podcast

The Bureau Podcast: Podcasts in Family