espionage
From Sidewinder to P.E.I.: Are Canada’s Political Elites Benefiting from Beijing’s Real Estate Reach?
Garry Clement: Politicians even appeared to benefit from the relationships cultivated with Chinese officials and members of Bliss and Wisdom
Editor’s Note:
This opinion column by Garry Clement analyzes a deeply reported investigation into the land acquisitions and foreign affiliations of the Bliss and Wisdom Buddhist group in Prince Edward Island. Clement argues that the federal government, law enforcement, and Canadian officials have failed to confront what he sees as a growing national security risk—including strategically significant purchases of critical agricultural land.
His warning is underscored by a recent CBC/Radio-Canada investigation, which examined Bliss and Wisdom’s extensive land holdings, financial networks, and reported ties to the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department—allegations the religious group denies.
That probe featured findings from Clement, former CSIS officer Michel Juneau-Katsuya, and publisher Dean Baxendale—all co-authors of the forthcoming book Canada Under Siege, which devotes entire chapters to these Prince Edward Island land dealings.
Readers should understand a crucial piece of context: Clement, a former senior RCMP officer, and Michel Juneau-Katsuya were central figures in the joint RCMP-CSIS Sidewinder investigation of the 1990s. That probe examined how the Chinese Communist Party was infiltrating Canada’s economy—most notably through massive and suspicious real estate acquisitions in Vancouver and Toronto. Parallel investigations, including the RCMP’s Project Sunset, examined Beijing’s growing influence over Vancouver’s ports and critical infrastructure. Yet despite their explosive findings, these intelligence probes were buried or gutted. Now, more than two decades later, the same warning signs are surfacing in pastoral Prince Edward Island—and once again, the threat is being ignored.
The Bureau is a reader-supported publication.
To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
OTTAWA — When our investigative team began looking into the Bliss and Wisdom Buddhist organization’s activities on Prince Edward Island, we expected a quiet story of land development and foreign investment. What we uncovered instead was a chilling portrait of political complacency, potential foreign influence, and the fragility of democratic accountability in Canada.
Over the course of our work, we tracked millions of dollars in unexplained cash inflows from Taiwan and mainland China, funneled through Canadian banks and into real estate and development projects across PEI. These were not obscure transactions—they were significant and frequent enough to raise alarms in any functioning system of democratic oversight.
And yet, those alarms never sounded.
Neither local politicians nor federal leaders lifted a finger. Some even appeared to benefit from the relationships cultivated with Chinese officials and members of the Bliss and Wisdom organization, whose quiet influence grew in tandem with land purchases and political access. The very leaders entrusted to safeguard transparency and public interest were, at best, disengaged, and at worst, complicit.
The RCMP, for its part, has thus far declined to launch a public investigation—a silence that is deafening, particularly in light of recent national debates about foreign interference in Canadian politics. How can we claim to take such threats seriously if a clear case of questionable foreign financial involvement in one of our provinces is allowed to pass without scrutiny?
What made this investigation even more revealing was the contrast between institutional inaction and the commitment of ordinary citizens. Residents of PEI, concerned about unchecked land acquisitions, foreign influence, and environmental stewardship, were the first to sound the alarm. They provided testimony, documents, and moral courage. They believed that Canada’s democratic institutions should still function as intended—on behalf of the public, not in service to silence or convenience.
In a time when democratic erosion often feels like a faraway problem, PEI is a case study of how it happens at home: not through coups or grand conspiracies, but through the quiet neglect of responsibility, the normalization of secrecy, and the sidelining of civic duty.
Our investigative team did what governments refused to do. We followed the money. We asked hard questions. We connected the dots. And while we do not claim to have all the answers, we believe this is precisely the kind of work that institutions—law enforcement, media, elected officials—should have done long ago.
Democracy doesn’t collapse overnight. It erodes when those in power forget who they serve. But it also endures, stubbornly, through the vigilance of citizens who refuse to look away.
It is time for accountability—not just from those involved with Bliss and Wisdom, but from the public servants who allowed this to happen under their watch.
Former senior RCMP officer Garry Clement consults with corporations on anti-money laundering, contributed to the Canadian academic text Dirty Money, and wrote Canada Under Siege, and Undercover, In the Shady World of Organized Crime and the RCMP
The Bureau is a reader-supported publication.
To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Invite your friends and earn rewards
Daily Caller
Laura Ingraham’s Viral Clash With Trump Prompts Her To Tell Real Reasons China Sends Students To US
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
On Monday, Ingraham pressed Trump on why a plan to admit 600,000 Chinese nationals into U.S. universities qualifies as a “pro-MAGA” move, challenging him directly after he defended the influx as vital to maintaining Washington’s relationship with Beijing. During a Wednesday broadcast, Ingraham said no modern president has fought harder for American workers than Trump and predicted he will “honor that distinction for the next three years.”
“There was also more consternation over the approach to allowing Chinese and other foreign students to take spots at U.S. universities. A lot of MAGA folks didn’t like that at all. And it’s not, by the way, as some Chinese influencers today said on X, I love this, it’s not that the MAGA folks, certainly not myself, dislike the Chinese people. It’s ridiculous,” Ingraham said.
“What they dislike is the Chinese system that represses Chinese people and uses them as human spies and saboteurs. Remember, when the CCP greenlights hundreds of thousands of their people to come study here, they’re not sending them so they can learn about the wonders of Western civilization, Plato and Socrates, Greek history, become champions of individual freedom and take that message back home. They’re sent here to do whatever is necessary to learn how to push the People’s Republic closer to crushing America, to stealing from us, and for spying on us,” Ingraham added.
Ingraham said that people “understandably perplexed by some of the president’s comments, we cannot forget, what American president has ever been tougher on China than Donald Trump? None.”
Ingraham told viewers that Beijing does not send its students to America to study the Western canon or return home as advocates of individual liberty.
WATCH:
Ingraham warned that China’s rise didn’t happen overnight, saying that decades of inattentive presidents allowed Beijing to gain the strength Trump now must confront.
“Given China’s growing strength that’s been amassed over decades of presidents who were out to lunch, President Trump inherited the most challenging situation,” Ingraham said. “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this, that any president has faced in the last 50 years. He and his entire team are dedicated to countering the Chinese aggression that’s building.”
Washington and Beijing struck a deal in June clearing the way for Chinese nationals to enroll in American universities, a shift that followed the administration’s June 5 move blocking Harvard from bringing in additional international students. Officials justified the restriction by pointing to security vulnerabilities and rising campus turmoil, including allegations of antisemitic activity, as reasons to tighten the flow of foreign applicants.
Trump acknowledged at the time that admitting large numbers of students from a country controlled by the Chinese Communist Party carries real intelligence concerns, saying in June that the government “must be vigilant” about who enters U.S. classrooms. National security experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the policy could create openings for the CCP to exploit America’s higher-education system and potentially endanger U.S. interests.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Emily Kopp
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s (ODNI) hub for foreign biological threats dismissed the intelligence pointing to a lab accident in Wuhan as “misinformation” in January 2021, two former government sources who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive internal meetings told the Daily Caller News Foundation. New documents show that intelligence risked implicating ODNI’s own bioengineering advisor — University of North Carolina professor Ralph Baric.
Baric, who engineered novel coronaviruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), advised ODNI four times a year on biological threats, according to documents released Oct. 30 by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.
Dear Readers:
As a nonprofit, we are dependent on the generosity of our readers. \
Please consider making a small donation of any amount here.
Thank you!
Baric did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
The professor’s ties to American intelligence may run even deeper, the documents reveal, as ODNI facilitated a meeting between the CIA and Baric about a project on coronaviruses in September 2015.
The email exchange with the subject line “Request for Your Expertise” shows an unnamed government official with a CIA-affiliated email address pitching a “possible project” to Baric relating to “[c]oronavirus evolution and possible natural human adaptation.”
The new documents shed a bit of light on a question members of Congress have posed for years: Whether our own intelligence agencies knew more about the likelihood of a lab origin of COVID than they told the public.
“Director Ratcliffe has been on the forefront of this issue since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and has been committed to transparency and accountability on this issue,” a CIA spokesperson said in a statement. “In January – as one of the Director’s first actions at Langley – CIA made public its assessment that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin. CIA will continue to evaluate any available credible new intelligence reporting as appropriate.”
Paul is seeking more documents from ODNI on potential ties between U.S. intelligence and the research in Wuhan as part of an ongoing investigation by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and has promised public hearings in the coming months.
Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard disbanded the ODNI biological threats office earlier this year following questions from the DCNF about its suppression of COVID origins intelligence in August. Gabbard and a dedicated working group have also been quietly investigating the origins of COVID.
Protecting Their Own
Baric gave a presentation to the ODNI in January 2020 showing that he advised American intelligence that COVID may have emerged from a lab, the documents also indicate. Baric shared that the WIV had sequenced thousands of SARS-like coronaviruses, including strains capable of epidemics, the slides show.
Baric noted that the Wuhan lab does this work under low biosafety levels despite the ability of some of these viruses to infect and grow in human lung cells.
What Baric omitted: He had submitted a grant application in 2018 with intentions to conduct research to make coronaviruses with the same rare features seen in COVID while concealing the Wuhan lab’s low biosafety level, jotting in the margins of a draft of the grant application that Americans would “freak out” if they knew about the shoddy standards.
One year after Baric’s presentation, ODNI had hardened against the lab leak hypothesis.
When State Department officials pushed to declassify certain intelligence related to a plausible lab leak in January 2021, the ODNI expressed concerns that it would “call out actions that we ourselves are doing.”
Former ODNI National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center (NCBC) Director Kathryn Brinsfield, a medical doctor, also dismissed a January 2021 presentation by government officials about a plausible lab origin of COVID as “misinformation,” two sources told the DCNF. Her top aide Zach Bernstein, who possesses a master’s degree in security studies but no scientific credentials, also dismissed the presentation, according to three sources.
Gabbard disbanded NCBC in August following questions from the DCNF about its role in suppressing COVID origins intelligence.
But in the years preceding Gabbard’s takeover of the intelligence community’s central office, the ODNI’s public reports omitted any analysis of COVID’s viral genome. One intelligence agency filed a formal complaint about this glaring omission, the DCNF reported.
Scientists often received fierce pushback from former National Intelligence Council official Adrienne Keen, who helped steward former President Joe Biden’s 90-day review into COVID’s origins, an official told the DCNF. Paul’s request for records from ODNI includes a request for some of Keen’s communications.
Brinsfield and Keen did not respond to requests for comment.
Unanswered Questions
Despite the new disclosures, the precise nature of the CIA’s interest in Baric’s coronavirus work remains unknown. The documents do not include any further details about the work that the CIA and Baric may or may not have undertaken.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funded the discovery of novel coronaviruses and shipped the samples to Wuhan through a 2009-2020 program called PREDICT, the DCNF reported in July. USAID sometimes acted as a CIA front before Trump dismantled it earlier this year — but no evidence exists that the CIA directed PREDICT.
An unnamed FBI special agent was in communication with Baric about responding to public requests for his research and emails with the Wuhan lab through the North Carolina Freedom of Information Act, according to a 2024 congressional letter, but details about the contact between the FBI and Baric also remain uncertain.
The CIA was slow to acknowledge that a lab was the pandemic’s most likely source, an assessment that the CIA made public more than five years after the pandemic emerged and well after the FBI and the Department of Energy.
In early 2020, when Trump’s Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger tasked CIA analysts to dig into the matter, they came up empty, according to a New York Times report. Instead, anonymous sources smeared Pottinger as having a “conspiratorial view” of the Chinese Communist Party.
Trump’s current CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who served as the DNI from May 2020 to January 2021, revealed in a 2023 Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had pushed for the declassification of COVID origins intelligence as the DNI but that he “faced constant opposition, particularly from Langley.”
Bizarre Decisions about Nicotine Pouches Lead to the Wrong Products on Shelves
Public Execution of Anti-Cartel Mayor in Michoacán Prompts U.S. Offer to Intervene Against Cartels
Canada’s heavy oil finds new fans as global demand rises
Alberta government’s plan will improve access to MRIs and CT scans
-
armed forces2 days agoIt’s time for Canada to remember, the heroes of Kapyong
-
Digital ID2 days agoCanada moves forward with digital identification for federal benefits seekers
-
Daily Caller2 days agoUS Nuclear Bomber Fleet Shares Fence With Trailer Park Linked To Chinese Intel-Tied Fraudster
-
Alberta2 days agoSchool defunding petition in Alberta is a warning to parents
-
espionage2 days agoChinese-Owned Trailer Park Beside U.S. Stealth Bomber Base Linked to Alleged Vancouver Repression Case
-
Daily Caller2 days agoLaura Ingraham Presses Trump On Allowing Flood Of Chinese Students Into US
-
Business2 days agoLiberals refuse to disclose the amount of taxpayer dollars headed to LGBT projects in foreign countries
-
Environment1 day agoThe Myths We’re Told About Climate Change | Michael Shellenberger