Business
Long Ignored Criminal Infiltration of Canadian Ports Lead Straight to Trump Tariffs

Sam Cooper
Briefings to Liberal Government on Chinese Infiltration of Vancouver Port and Canada’s Opioid Scourge Ignored
Trump Tariffs Loom as Critics Decry Ottawa’s “Fox in the Hen House” Approach to Border Security
As President Donald Trump readies sweeping tariffs against Canada on Saturday—citing Ottawa’s failure to secure its shared North American borders from fentanyl originating in China—The Bureau has obtained a remarkable December 1999 document from a senior law enforcement official, revealing Ottawa’s longstanding negligence in securing Vancouver’s port against drug trafficking linked to Chinese shipping entities.
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The letter, drafted by former Crown prosecutor Scott Newark and addressed to Ottawa’s Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC), urged the body to reconsider explosive findings from a leaked RCMP and CSIS report detailing the infiltration of Canada’s “porous” borders by Chinese criminal networks.
Titled “Re: S.I.R.C. Review in relation to Project Sidewinder,” Newark’s letter alleges systemic failures that enabled Chinese State Council owned shipping giant COSCO and Triads with suspected Chinese military ties to penetrate Vancouver’s port system. He further asserts that federal authorities ignored repeated briefings and warnings from Canadian law enforcement—warnings based on intelligence gathered by Canadian officials in Hong Kong, who initiated the Sidewinder review.
Newark also warned that Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s decision to dismantle Canada’s specialized Ports Police and privatize national port control had left the country dangerously exposed to foreign criminal networks, noting he had personally briefed the Canadian government on these concerns as early as 1996.
Addressing his letter to SIRC’s chair, Quebec lawyer Paule Gauthier, Newark wrote:
“As the former (1994-98) Executive Officer of the Canadian Police Association, I was assigned responsibility for dealing with the issue of the federal government’s changes to control of the national ports and policing therein.”
“This involved close examination of matters such as drug, weapon, and people smuggling through the national ports and, in particular, both the growing presence of organized criminal groups at ports and the ominous hazard control of those ports by such groups represented.”
Newark’s letter goes on to allege widespread failures in Ottawa that facilitated Chinese Triad infiltration of Vancouver’s port, revealing federal authorities’ reluctance to act on warnings from RCMP officer Garry Clement and immigration control officer Brian McAdam—former Canadian officials based in Hong Kong who had sounded the alarm, prompting the Sidewinder review.
Newark explained to SIRC’s chair that, during his tenure as Executive Officer of the Canadian Police Association, he prepared approximately fifty detailed policy briefs for the government and regularly appeared before parliamentary committees and in private ministerial briefings.
“I can assure you that in all of that time, no clearer warning was ever given by Canada’s rank and file police officers to the national government than what was done in our unsuccessful attempt to prevent the disbandment of the specialized Canada Ports Police in combination with the privatization of the ports themselves,” Newark’s letter to SIRC states.
The letter continues, noting that in October 1996, Newark met with Chrétien’s Transport Minister David Anderson—later addressing the Transport Committee—to highlight the imminent threat posed by Asian organized crime’s infiltration of port operations. Newark’s written briefing to the Minister underscored the gravity of the situation with a blunt question:
“Who exactly are the commercial port operators?”
Citing the Anderson briefing document, Newark’s letter to SIRC states that Anderson had been warned:
“We are, for example, aware of serious concerns amongst the international law enforcement community surrounding the ownership of ports and container industries in Asia and, in particular, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the People’s Republic of China. There is simply no longer any doubt that drugs like heroin are coming from these destinations through the Port of Vancouver, moved by organized criminal gangs whose assets include ‘legitimate’ properties.”
The Anderson briefing also referenced a British Columbia anti-gang unit report, titled “Organized Crime on Vancouver Waterfront,” which made clear that the Longshoreman’s Union had been infiltrated by the Hells Angels.
“The movement of goods through Canada’s ports requires an independence in policing that is impossible without public control,” the report warned.
It concluded:
“This report should be taken as a specific warning to this Government that, prior to downloading operational control over the ports themselves to private interests, Government be absolutely certain as to who owns what—and that it can continue that certainty with power to refuse acquisition of port assets in the future.”
Scott Newark’s letter to SIRC then turns to new intelligence—gathered from Canadian and U.S. officials—that further underscored the vulnerability created by Chrétien’s border policies.
“To now learn that law enforcement and public officials in Canada and the United States have linked a company (COSCO), granted docking and other facilities in Vancouver, to Asian organized crime, arms and drug smuggling is, to say the least, disturbing,” Newark’s December 1999 letter states.
“That this company, its principals, subsidiaries, and partners have been associated with various military agencies of a foreign government—agencies themselves identified by Canadian and American officials as having unhealthy connections to Triad groups—makes a bad situation even worse.”
Newark next addressed the broader implications of Canada’s failure to enforce border security, particularly in relation to the deportation of foreign criminals—a process he had sought to reform while serving with the Canadian Police Association.
Drawing on his experience, he described a deeply flawed immigration enforcement system, one that allowed individuals with serious criminal records to remain in Canada indefinitely. The problem, he wrote, was twofold: not only were foreign criminals able to enter Canada with ease, but authorities also failed to deport those with outstanding arrest warrants.
Newark recounted how, in 1996, a Cabinet Minister requested that he meet with Brian McAdam, a former senior foreign service officer in Hong Kong who had spent years uncovering organized crime’s grip on Canada’s immigration system. McAdam’s detailed revelations, he wrote, had directly led to the launch of Project Sidewinder.
Newark told SIRC that even after leaving the Canadian Police Association in 1998, he remained in contact with McAdam and other officials working to expose this vast and complex national security risk posed by foreign criminal networks.
It was this ongoing communication that led to an even more alarming discovery. Newark wrote that he was stunned to learn that Canada’s government had not only terminated Project Sidewinder but had gone so far as to destroy some related files.
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Newark suggests SIRC’s chair, in her review of Sidewinder, should determine whether “Sidewinder should not have been cancelled … why such inappropriate action was taken and at whose direction this was done.”
He concludes that SIRC should also freshly examine why intelligence reporting from the Canadian officials in Hong Kong, Brian McAdam and Garry Clement had been ignored in Ottawa.
Newark’s letter to SIRC says these failures to act on intelligence included the “Inappropriate granting of visas to Triad members or associates” and “Granting of docking facilities with attendant consequences to COSCO”—and “Failure of CIC and Foreign Affairs to respond appropriately to the various information supplied by McAdam and Clement in relation to material pertaining to Sidewinder.”
In an exclusive interview with The Bureau, Garry Clement, who contributed to investigations referenced in Newark’s letter, corroborated many of its claims and provided further insight. Clement recalled his role in Project Sunset, a 1990s investigation into Chinese Triads’ efforts to gain control over Vancouver’s ports.
“I can remember having a discussion with Scott when he wrote that to SIRC because Scott and I go back a long time,” Clement said. “I knew about him writing on it, but I knew it was also buried.”
He described his own intelligence work during the same period:
“I wrote in the nineties when I was the liaison officer in Hong Kong, a very long intelligence brief on the Chinese wanting to basically acquire or build out a port at the Surrey Fraser Docks area. And it was going to be completely controlled by that time, with Triad influence, but it was going to be controlled by China.”
Clement expressed frustration that decades of warnings had gone unheeded:
“The bottom line is that here we are almost 40 years later, talking about an issue that was identified in the ‘90s about our ports and allowing China to have free access—and nothing has been done over that period of time.”
Newark’s urgent recommendation for SIRC to reconsider Sidewinder’s warnings on Vancouver’s ports was never acted upon.
“We still don’t have Port Police. We got nobody overseeing them,” Clement added. “The ports themselves, it’s sort of like putting a fox in the hen house and saying, ‘Behave yourself.’”
Finally, when asked about the Trudeau government’s claim this week that Canada is responsible for only one percent of the fentanyl entering the United States—a figure reported widely in Canadian media—Clement’s response was unequivocal.
“The fact that we’ve become a haven for transnational organized crime, it’s internationally known,” he said. “So when I read that, with the fentanyl—Trump is wrong in that there’s less than 1% of our fentanyl going to the United States. That’s a crock of shit. If you look at the two super labs that were taken down in British Columbia—I think there’s three now—the amount they were capable of producing was more than the whole Vancouver population could have used in 10 years. So we know that Vancouver has become a transshipment point to North America for opiates and cocaine and other drugs because it’s a weak link, and enforcement is not capable of keeping up with transnational organized crime.”
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That opinion is evidently acknowledged by British Columbia Premier David Eby, according to documents from Canada’s Foreign Interference Commission that say Eby sought meetings with Justin Trudeau’s National Security Advisor.
A record from the Hogue Commission, sanitized for public release, outlines the “context and drivers” behind Eby’s concerns, including “foreign interference; election security; countering fentanyl, organized crime, money laundering, corruption.”
The documents state Ottawa’s Privy Council Office—which provides advice to Justin Trudeau’s cabinet—had recommended that British Columbia continue to work with the federal government on initiatives like the establishment of a new Canada Financial Crimes Agency to bolster the nation’s ability to respond swiftly to complex financial crimes.
Additionally, the PCO highlighted that Canada, the United States, and Mexico were supposedly collaborating on strategies to reduce the supply of fentanyl, including addressing precursor chemicals and preventing the exploitation of commercial shipping channels—a critical area where British Columbia, and specifically the Port of Vancouver, plays a significant role.
Eby acknowledged the concerns again this week in an interview with Macleans.
“I understood Trump’s concerns about drugs coming in. We’ve got a serious fentanyl problem in B.C.; we see the precursor chemicals coming into B.C. from China and Mexico. We see ties to Asian and Mexican organized crime groups. We’d been discussing all of that with the American ambassador and fellow governors. That’s why it was such a strange turnaround, from ‘Hey, we’re working together on this!’ to suddenly finding ourselves in the crosshairs.”
Yet, despite Eby’s claims of intergovernmental efforts, critics—including Garry Clement—argue that nothing has changed. Vancouver’s port remains alarmingly vulnerable, a decades-old concern that continues to resurface as fentanyl and other illicit drugs flood North American markets.
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Business
Mark Carney’s carbon tax plan hurts farmers

From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
Liberal leadership front-runner Mark Carney recently announced his carbon tax plan and here are some key points.
It’s expensive for Canadians.
It’s even more expensive for farmers.
Carney announced he would immediately remove the consumer carbon tax if he became prime minister.
That sounds like good news, but it’s important to read the fine print.
Carney went on and announced that he would be “integrating a new consumer carbon credit market into the industrial pricing system.” Carney also said he would “improve and tighten” the industrial carbon tax and impose carbon tax tariffs on imports into Canada.
If that sounds like Carney isn’t getting rid of the carbon tax, that’s because he isn’t. He’s trying to hide the costs from Canadians by imposing higher carbon taxes on businesses.
What that means is that Carney’s plan would tax businesses and then businesses will pass those costs onto consumers.
That also means farmers.
Under the current carbon tax, farmers have an exemption from the carbon tax on the gas and diesel they use on their farm. The hidden industrial carbon tax is applied directly to industry. Businesses are forced to pay the carbon tax if they emit above the government’s prescribed limit.
But businesses don’t just swallow those costs. They pass them on. The trucking industry is a great example.
“Due to razor thin margins in the trucking industry, these added costs cannot be absorbed and must be passed on to customers,” said the Canadian Trucking Alliance when analyzing the current Trudeau carbon tax.
The same concept applies to the Carney scheme.
If Carney removes the consumer carbon tax and replaces it with a higher tax on businesses under the hidden industrial carbon tax, that means more costs for farmers.
There isn’t any exemption for farmers under the industrial carbon tax. Oil and gas refineries will be paying a higher carbon tax and they will be forced to pass that cost onto their consumers. Farmers use a lot of fuel.
The pain doesn’t stop there. Farmers also use a lot of fertilizer and Carney’s carbon tax means higher costs for fertilizer plants. Then farmers will be stuck paying more for fertilizer.
Some businesses, like those fertilizer plants, could pack up and move production south. But farmers are still going to need fertilizer. Carney’s plan compounds the pain with carbon tax tariffs.
Fertilizer is only one example. If Canadian farmers need to buy a part to fix equipment that can only come from the U.S., it could be more expensive because of Carney’s carbon tax tariffs.
This will hurt Canadian farmers when they’re buying supplies. But it’ll also hurt when farmers when they go to market. Canadian farmers compete with farmers around the world and majority of them aren’t paying carbon taxes.
Farmers wouldn’t be at a disadvantage because American farmers are smarter or farm better, but because, under Carney’s carbon tax, they would be stuck paying costs competitors don’t have to pay. And farmers know this all too well.
“My competitors to the south of me in the United States do not pay that [carbon] tax, so now my cost goes up and I have no alternative,” said Jeff Barlow, a corn, wheat and soybean farmer in Ontario. “By penalizing me there’s nothing else that I can do but just be penalized.”
And if farmers won’t be the only ones hurt.
Families across Canada are struggling with grocery prices and increasing the cost of production for farmers certainly won’t lower those prices.
Carney says that he wants to cancel the consumer tax because it’s too “divisive.” That statement misses the nail completely and hammers the thumb. Canadians don’t want to get rid of the carbon tax because of perception, they want to get rid of it because it makes life more expensive.
Carney needs to commit to getting rid of carbon taxes, not rebranding the failed policy into something that could end up costing Canadians and farmers even more.
Business
Do Minimum Wage Laws Accomplish Anything?

David Clinton
All the smart people tell us that, one way or another, increasing the minimum wage will change society. Proponents claim raising pay at the low end of the economy will help low-income working families survive in hyper-expensive communities. Opponents claim that artificially increasing employment costs will either drive employers towards adopting innovative automation integrations or to shut down their businesses altogether. Either way, goes the anti-intervention narrative, there will be fewer jobs available.
Well, what’ll it be? Canadian provinces have been experimenting with minimum wage laws for many years. And since 2021, the federal government has imposed its own rate for employees of all federally regulated industries. There should be plenty of good data out there by now indicating who was right.
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Historical records on provincial rates going back decades is available from Statistics Canada. For this research, I used data starting in 2011. Since new rates often come into effect mid-year, I only applied a year’s latest rate to the start of the following year. 2022 itself, for simplicity, was measured by the new federal rate, with the exception of British Columbia who’s rate was $0.10 higher than the federal rate.
My goal was to look for evidence that increasing statutory wage rates impacted these areas:
- Earnings among workers in full-service restaurants
- Operating profit margins for full-service restaurants
- Total numbers of active businesses in the accommodation and food services industries
I chose to focus on the food service industry because it’s particularly dependent on low-wage workers and particularly sensitive to labour costs. Outcomes here should tell us a lot about the impact such government policies are having.
Restaurant worker income is reported as total numbers. In other words, we can see how much all of, say, Manitoba’s workers combined took home in a given year. For those numbers to make sense, I adjusted them using overall provincial populations.
Income in British Columbia and PEI showed a strong correlation to increasing minimum wages. Interestingly, BC has consistently had the highest of all provinces’ minimum wage while PEI’s has mostly hung around the middle of the pack. Besides a weak negative correlation in Saskatchewan, there was no indication that income in other provinces either dropped or grew in sync with increases to the minimum wage.
Nation-wide, by weighting results by population numbers, we got a Pearson coefficient 0.30. That means it’s unlikely that wage rate changes had any impact on take-home income.
Did increases harm restaurants? It doesn’t look like it. I used data measuring active employer businesses in the accommodation and food services industries. No provinces showed any impact on business startups and exits that could be connected to minimum wage laws. Overall, Canada’s coefficient value was 0.29 – again a very weak positive relationship.
So restaurants haven’t been collapsing at epic, extinction-level rates. But do government minimums cause a reduction in their operating profit margins? Apparently not. If anything, they’ve become more profitable!
The nation-wide coefficient between minimum wages and restaurant profitability was 0.88 – suggesting a strong correlation. But how could that be happening? Don’t labour costs make up a major chunk of food service operating expenses? Here are a few possible explanations:
- Perhaps many restaurants respond to rising costs by increasing their menu prices. This can work out well if market demand turns out to be relatively inelastic and people continue eating out despite higher prices.
- Higher wages might lead to lower employee turnover, reducing hiring and training costs.
- A higher minimum wage boosts worker incomes, leading to more disposable income in the economy. Although the flip-side is that we can’t see strong evidence of higher worker income.
- Higher wages can force unprofitable, inefficient restaurants to close, leaving stronger businesses with higher market share.
In any case, my big-picture verdict on government intervention into private sector wage rates is: thanks but don’t bother. All that effort doesn’t seem to have improved actual incomes on a population scale. At the same time, it also hasn’t driven industries with workers at the low-end of the pay scale to devastating collapse.
But I’m sure it has taken up enormous amounts of public service time and resources that could undoubtedly have been more gainfully spent elsewhere. More important, as the economist Alex Tabarrok recently pointed out, minimum wage laws have been shown to reduce employment for the disabled and measurably increase both consumer prices and workplace injuries.
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