Something is rotten in the state of Canada

Tonight, I ordered Sam Cooper’s book – Willful Blindness: How a network of narco-tycoons and CCP agents have infiltrated the west – after listening to a couple of interviews he gave to YouTube podcasters – one recently given to The Daniela Cambone Show in February 2025, and another that was recorded a year ago with Chek Media.

Cooper is a Canadian investigative reporter, former journalist with the Vancouver Sun and the Vancouver Province, Global News, and founder of thebureau.news

Trump’s 51^st state comments have rattled me as much as any other Canadian, and I figured that the $1.3 billion promised by the federal government to tackle drug smuggling, along with the impressive quick action taken by some premiers, including Danielle Smith of Alberta, should have been enough to satisfy the president and alleviate his concerns.

But no.

Trump keeps hammering away at this idea of Canada being a fentanyl haven. After listening to Sam Cooper, it’s obvious why, but it isn’t obvious why this isn’t a huge part of our public discussion.

If true, this Canadian double-reality reminds me of the Neil Gaiman fantasy novel, Neverwhere, in which a whole other sort of London exists under the actual city of London, an underground full of monsters and murderers.

You and I are peacefully going about our business, raising our children, working at our jobs, saving for vacations, and paying our mortgages, but under our feet, organized crime is making our country unaffordable and unsafe.

And the question in my mind is, do our politicians and our institutions have the will – and the courage, and the integrity – to root out the sophisticated criminal network that enjoys a wide latitude in our country? Or are they enjoying too big a payoff to do so?

The rest of us, the normal people living on “the top world”  are spending our time fighting the wrong enemy, I think. Or at least, not the worst enemy.

“For ten years, I’ve been researching the thesis that Canada has become a node of essentially Chinese infiltration and organized crime activity, especially in Vancouver, and this was hard for people to believe. But Vancouver has become a production hub for China and a shipment hub for fentanyl precursors, to the point where it’s been established that Canada is a fentanyl exporter nation. And so, this gets to what Donald Trump is saying,” Sam Cooper said, in an interview with the Daniela Cambone podcast. “It’s hard for many people to believe that Canada could be put in the same category as Mexico in terms of endangering the U.S. with fentanyl, with illegal immigration, and human trafficking, but my research has shown that this is the fear and concern of US intelligence community and law enforcement, really, for decades.”

His premise is that Canada has weak enforcement against transnational crime, and weak controls of our borders. We have allowed, he says, international crime with linkages to hostile states, most specifically China, and there’s deep concern that China is using Canada in a sophisticated criminal way.

Sam began investigating this story ten years ago when he worked for the Vancouver Sun, and through his research showed that a massive inflow of funds, mysterious money, mostly from China and Hong Kong had about a 30% influence each year on Vancouver’s real estate market. Since China has communist capital controls, this was clearly illegitimate money at work in Vancouver homes, causing prices to skyrocket. He discovered that Canadian regulated casinos, first and foremost, currency shops and real estate development were being used at scale for Chinese money launderers.

He calls it “the Vancouver Model” of money laundering. As he unwound this story, it became front page news in 2017 (Vancouver Sun, September 29, 2017 – How BC casinos are used to launder millions in drug cash). Eventually, Cooper learned that Chinese state-sponsored military intelligence was directly involved with these criminal networks that were facilitating this money laundering tied into fentanyl, and cocaine.

Here’s how the process works, according to Cooper:

1. China ships the precursors of fentanyl (which are not illegal) to the west coast of Mexico and Vancouver (the US has a much stronger control on the American west coast).

2. Fentanyl is created from those materials at “superlabs,” and then shipped around the world.

3. The massive amount of money from drug sales is collected in Vancouver, and then ultra-wealthy Chinese communist officials – gangsters called “Whale Gamblers” fly into Vancouver, take the drug cash, walk into casinos where the money is laundered, and then returned to these factories. The process begins again with a new shipment of precursors.

Cooper names people in his book who have somehow cleared the process in Canada or made it easier for this sophisticated network to establish itself, including Dominic Barton, former Canadian Ambassador to China. He believes not only politicians in several Liberal governments but high-level Canadian industrialists, who push the government for more business dealings with China, are under the table supporting Chinese intelligence operations in Canada.

Do we agree that the only reason for a person in a free country to want to do that is straight up greed? Their corrupt pockets are being lined, and the consequences don’t affect them, because they’re wealthy.

And it doesn’t stop there. The process has evolved from casinos to mortgages. Last year, in an interview with Chek Media, Cooper talked about meeting with an HSBC Canada whistleblower, who presented proof that Canadian banks were allowing fake income mortgages by underground banking networks. The same people who were involved in older styles of money laundering had moved their methods to buying homes with fake incomes.

The whistleblower (a brave person in my opinion) was working at an HSBC Canada branch during the pandemic in Toronto and discovered massive loans given to people who were claiming remote work in China – completely fake jobs. Hundreds of billions of dollars in loans were being handed out based on fake incomes. They would call themselves “housewife,” or “student,” or “scientist,” or “CEO of real estate company,” etc.

The bottom line is that bankers and staffers were working in collusion and approving fraudulent loans on the basis of completely fake documents.

Trudeau recently extended his foreign buyers ban, but this is a useless move in Cooper’s estimation. “These revelations get right to the core of how our banks support Canada’s economy,” Cooper says, “and the level of fraud involved – systemic corruption – I believe will shock people.”

The whole point of Cooper’s revelatory story is that it doesn’t matter if you ban foreign buyers because the whole system has evolved. People in the diaspora are using their accounts in what is called a “money mule,” or a “straw buyer.” People in other countries own homes in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal through people in Canada.

“You can’t stop foreign buying unless you do a full audit on our banking system – how they issue loans, look retrospectively at how many toxic loans on the books exist that have basically priced the young generation out of our cities. Money laundering is like wac-a-mole.”

He says that the policies of the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) should be updated every five years, and they aren’t in Canada. “The number one cause of Vancouver’s housing crisis is underground banking principally from China; hundreds of billions of dollars flowing to Vancouver and Toronto real estate.”

So, after all these revelations, my question is, are we willing to do what is necessary to survive as a country? I look at politicians now – any politician — and I want to believe in their sincerity, their honesty, and their integrity, but I simply don’t.

Perhaps I was naïve and idealistic, but I always believed that corruption was a problem for third world countries and dictatorships, not for Canada.

Canada the good,

Canada the honest,

Canada the polite,

the hardworking.

Yes, we are all those things, but there is an ugly underside to our country – another perverted city bustling under the sidewalk cracks, as it were – that we do not want to see, and it’s enabled by wealthy and influential people in business and government.

We’ve pointed our outrage at “the orange man,” and have promised retribution for his unjustified tariffs, but I’m not sure that he’s the real enemy–or at least, not the only enemy.

I’m deeply afraid that the enemy is within, and we don’t want to admit it.

If Sam Cooper is right (and his life has been threatened because of his breaking stories), then many of our officials are corrupt, our bureaucracy is bloated, and we are comfortable with allowing organized crime in our backyard, as long as it doesn’t affect us personally. The problem is, it is affecting us. Our kids can’t afford to buy a home, people are dying of overdose on the streets in incredible numbers, and our closest neighbour is threatening our very economic survival.

I’m not saying that Trump’s tariffs are justified (please don’t throw any rocks through my windows) only that we absolutely do have a mess to clean up, and for our politicians to make the weak argument that “we don’t let as much fentanyl go over the border as Mexico does” is simply disingenuous. They all know this is going on. They must. They know, and they’re not doing anything about it.

The U.S. is concerned with Justin Trudeau’s funding, making note of a huge China-linked donation to the Trudeau Foundation in 2023. “I don’t have the evidence of bags of money being passed to Trudeau in a back alley,” Cooper says, “but I do have evidence that he’s been funded by people who are connected to organized crime. That is an indisputable fact.”

When asked by the interviewer if he was hopeful that this situation in our country could be rectified, Cooper was reticent, saying, “not unless very forceful actions are taken that will anger a powerful minority.”