How Beijing’s Influence Networks Reached Canada’s Prime Minister

Sam Cooper, Canada’s leading investigative reporter on Communist Party of China interference operations, has spent twenty years documenting how CCP-linked money moves through organized crime, real estate, and political donations into the core of Canadian democratic institutions. His latest reporting targets the commercial network around Prime Minister Mark Carney directly. In January 2026, Carney’s government opened trade negotiations with Beijing while the country’s foreign agent registration law, passed by parliament nearly two years earlier, still has not been brought into force.

In January 2026, the Carney government struck a preliminary trade agreement with Beijing, cutting tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles from 100 percent to 6.1 percent, with a first-year import quota of 49,000 vehicles. The Trump administration responded immediately, threatening 100 percent retaliatory tariffs on Canadian goods if the deal held. The agreement also gave fresh weight to warnings Cooper had been issuing for months: that Ottawa’s tilt toward Beijing was not just commercially reckless but reflected a political system already compromised by decades of CCP influence operations. When Cooper first began tracking unexplained cash moving through Vancouver casinos, he had no idea the trail would eventually lead to senior Chinese military officers, the CCP’s overseas influence arm, and the business circle surrounding a sitting Canadian prime minister.

From Vancouver casino floors to Parliament Hill: twenty years of CCP interference reporting

Sam Cooper is the founder of The Bureau, an independent Canadian investigative news outlet, and one of the country’s most consequential reporters on national security. His career began in community journalism in Vancouver, covering drug addiction in Indigenous communities on the North Shore. It then followed a single thread outward: from money laundering in British Columbia’s provincial government casinos to the systematic penetration of Canada’s political class by CCP-linked networks operating through elite business connections.

“When I arrived in Vancouver, I was struck by the scale of the drug problem,” Cooper has said. “But over time I realized this was about political corruption, foreign influence, and institutional failure.”

His book Wilful Blindness documents what he calls the “Vancouver model:” how CCP-linked transnational organized crime embedded itself in British Columbia’s casino industry, real estate market, and political donation networks. A subsequent public inquiry, the Cullen Commission, validated his core claims. The commission concluded that CAD$1.2 billion had been laundered through British Columbia’s provincial government casinos in 2014 alone, in patterns matching the CCP-linked criminal networks Cooper had spent years mapping.

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The RCMP told Cooper his life was at risk

Two days after Cooper testified before a parliamentary committee on CCP election interference in 2023, officers from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s national security division came to his door. They read him a court-authorized threat warning: as a journalist covering matters related to the People’s Republic of China, he faced what they described as a “serious and credible threat.”

Cooper did not go quiet. “I’ve hired a former special forces officer to give me security training,” he said. “I know how to protect myself. What saddens me is that, as a Canadian journalist, I have to.”

His deeper concern was the government’s response. He said flatly that he had “no confidence” in Ottawa’s ability to protect journalists or overseas Chinese communities facing CCP harassment. He reserved particular criticism for the Carney government’s tilt toward Beijing under pressure from the Trump administration’s trade offensive, and for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s decision to sign a cooperation agreement with Chinese police, which he described as a betrayal of the diaspora communities being harassed by the CCP.

How the CCP linked drug traffickers, ex-military officers, and Canadian politicians

The United Front Work Department is a CCP agency with a global mandate to cultivate pro-Beijing sentiment among overseas Chinese communities, foreign politicians, and business elites, and to suppress dissent abroad. One scene from Cooper’s early Vancouver reporting captures how the whole structure worked. A street-level drug trafficker handed a bag of narcotics proceeds to a well-dressed businessman who had flown in from China. British Columbia’s provincial government casino looked the other way as the money was laundered clean. That businessman was later identified as a former senior Chinese military officer who owned a sprawling estate in the Fraser Valley, with a garage stocked with dozens of luxury vehicles including a Lamborghini. The same man appeared in a Richmond arena’s VIP box alongside China’s consul general in Vancouver and sitting Canadian members of parliament.

“That is how the CCP’s United Front Work Department operates in Vancouver,” Cooper said. “Drug traffickers, former military officers, consular officials, community leaders, business figures: they build commercial, social, and political relationships at different levels, but the strategic objective is singular. It is to advance Xi Jinping’s political agenda.”

Carney’s years at Brookfield Asset Management left him exposed to CCP influence pressure

In a podcast episode recorded in April 2026 and later published by The Bureau, and in a subsequent conversation with former White House national security official Mike Doran at the Hudson Institute in Washington, Cooper turned his attention to Prime Minister Mark Carney and the business network surrounding him.

Cooper’s central argument concerns what he describes as United Front influence tradecraft applied at the elite level. The CCP channels investment into top-tier financial institutions on Wall Street, Bay Street, and in Silicon Valley, building what he calls “bonds of obligation” among the Western business figures with the greatest political access. Those bonds then translate into soft pressure on policy.

In Carney’s case, Cooper points to Brookfield Asset Management, where Carney held a senior role before entering politics. During that period, Brookfield received preferential access to China’s green infrastructure and real estate sectors. Cooper argues this created, at minimum, the appearance of a conflict of interest between Carney’s private commercial history and his government’s policy toward Beijing.

Cooper chose his words carefully, but his position was unambiguous: “At this point, I think it can be said that circumstantially there is reasonable cause to believe Mark Carney is making decisions that benefit himself and the people who elevated him to the Liberal leadership, while placing Canada’s national security, economic sovereignty, and relationship with the United States in a secondary position. Strategically, Carney’s moves to advance a strategic partnership with China are difficult to explain through any other lens.”

He was equally explicit about what he had and had not established: the case rested on circumstantial inference from available evidence, and he drew a deliberate line between that and direct proof. That distinction, he said, separated him from those who make reckless accusations.

A Conservative MP who crossed the floor to join Carney’s Liberals drew foreign interference scrutiny

Among documented cases of CCP interference in Canadian elections, Cooper examined at length the conduct of Michael Ma, a former Conservative member of parliament.

According to documents Cooper obtained from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Canada’s domestic intelligence agency, the CCP mounted a sophisticated interference operation during the 2019 federal election. The strategy was to simultaneously back candidates from multiple parties, maximizing Beijing’s leverage over the Canadian political system. The documents show the CCP supported both Justin Trudeau’s Liberals and certain candidates in the Conservative and New Democratic parties, seeking to pressure Ottawa into releasing Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, who was then under arrest in Vancouver awaiting extradition to the United States.

Ma’s subsequent behavior made him a focal point. After winning election in 2025 as a Conservative, he abruptly crossed the floor to join Carney’s Liberal government, then accompanied Carney on an official visit to Beijing, offering no convincing public explanation for either move. Cooper disclosed that photographs show Ma alongside community figures officially identified as having United Front affiliations, and that video footage shows Ma wearing a red neckerchief, a symbol associated with CCP youth organizations, at an event featuring Chinese national anthem performances and military imagery in the background.

“This does not mean Ma struck any back-channel deal with these United Front figures,” Cooper said. “I have no evidence of that and I am not making that accusation. But in the full context of what I know, it raises a reasonable concern about foreign interference. The picture, as it stands, is very bad.”

Canadian courts threw out major organized crime cases; the foreign agent registry sits unused

Cooper was equally direct about the failures of Canada’s law enforcement and judicial apparatus.

He cited cases where the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was unable to obtain wiretap authorizations against operators linked to the Sinaloa Cartel in Vancouver, authorizations that American and Australian courts would have granted without difficulty. Two features of Canadian law recur in his account. The Stinchcombe disclosure rule requires police to share surveillance material with a suspect’s lawyers within defined time limits. The Jordan rule requires that complex cases be brought to trial within strict deadlines, or be thrown out. Multiple major transnational crime prosecutions have collapsed under these provisions.

“The problem is not the Charter of Rights,” Cooper said. “The problem is that these rules, as they have come to be interpreted and applied, have functioned in practice as a shield for organized crime rather than as protection for ordinary citizens’ rights.”

Australia offers a pointed contrast. After facing comparable scandals involving Chinese political donations, Australia built a far stricter foreign agent registration regime and completed successful prosecutions. Canada’s own foreign agent registry received unanimous passage in parliament. Nearly twenty months later, it has still not been brought into force.

Ottawa is either negligent or corrupt in its approach to Beijing, Cooper says

Cooper’s advice to ordinary Canadians was practical and blunt.

He had started his career in Vancouver watching narcotics consume Indigenous communities. His concern now ran considerably further. “I don’t think I should be receiving RCMP security warnings in Canada,” he said. “And I don’t think my fellow citizens, whatever immigrant community they come from, should be living in fear for geopolitical reasons.”

The first task, he argued, was breaking a widespread misperception. Under pressure from the Trump administration’s trade hostility, many Canadians have come to see the United States as the primary threat to their country, and to look sympathetically on the government’s tilt toward Beijing. Cooper rejected this framing: “If you believe America is the enemy and you don’t need to worry about the CCP, your understanding of the world is wrong. Your vote will harm you and it will harm your children.”

He called on voters to scrutinize candidates’ connections to foreign networks before casting ballots, and to demand that the government activate the foreign agent registry before entering any trade discussions with China. “Carney went to Beijing to negotiate trade while this registry is still not in place,” Cooper said. “That, in my view, is a serious dereliction, because I believe it can be demonstrated that several people with significant influence over the Liberal Party should be on that registry.”

For members of overseas Chinese communities, he urged personal vigilance. More broadly, he encouraged support for independent journalism, arguing that when mainstream outlets have been rendered cautious by government subsidies, independent reporting represents the last check on democratic accountability.

The Pentagon recently suspended the Canada-United States Permanent Joint Board on Defense, a bilateral security body with an 86-year history, citing Ottawa’s failures on national security commitments and defense spending. “The investigative and national security pressure from the United States will only intensify,” Cooper said. “Ottawa’s leadership, in its choices between Washington and Beijing, is either gravely negligent or corrupt. That is the best answer I can currently give.”

Editor’s note: Quotes attributed to Sam Cooper are drawn from his podcast published by The Bureau (April 2026) and his appearance at the Hudson Institute in Washington. Exact wording has not been verified against the original recordings.

By Meng Hao, Vision Times