Wilful Blindness

Reporter Sam Cooper tells a remarkable story of the British Columbia provincial government profiting from Canada’s epidemic of fentanyl deaths in his book Wilful Blindness: How a Network of Narcos, Tycoons and CCP Agents Infiltrated the West.  Cooper’s evidence is strongest for B.C.’s cooperation in laundering money for the drug trade in return for a cut of the profits.  However, he demonstrates connections to trans-national organized crime, Canada’s housing bubble, and China’s communist party.

The book begins by carefully explaining that the evidence presented is not intended as an indictment of the people of Canada or China but rather criminal organizations within these countries and parts of government.

Cooper paints a picture of massive amounts of drug cash being laundered through B.C. casinos, and authorities happy with the huge “gambling profits” thwarting RCMP efforts to stop illegal activity.  There was a “rapidly growing narco-economy that B.C.’s government was taking a cut from.”

Part of the money laundering process involved buying and selling Canadian real estate.  According to a Vancouver developer, “$300,000 of every $1 million spent in Vancouver real estate comes from Mainland China.”  A Global News article proclaimed “Secret Police Study Finds Crime Networks Could Have Laundered Over $1 Billion Through Vancouver Homes in 2016.”

Although Cooper claims that “China’s government is in fact controlling drug cartels,” we can only guess at the extent of the connection.  “David Mulroney, Canada’s former ambassador to Beijing” is quoted as saying “The course of modern Chinese politics, from the earliest days of the Communist Party in Shanghai, has been interrelated with the rise and fall of various crime bosses and triads.”  There’s a wide continuum of possibilities from, at one end, elements within a government forming temporary alliances with criminals and, at the other end, the highest levels of a government forming and directing criminal organizations.  It’s hard to tell where in this continuum Cooper’s evidence points.

I don’t have the knowledge to form an accurate high-level picture given Cooper’s mountain of evidence, but you may be interested in reading this book just for its many wild stories of criminal activity going on inside Canada.