From Resource Works

By Tom Fletcher

Crude oil tankers have sailed and docked on the British Columbia coast for more than 70 years, with no spills

BC Premier David Eby staged a big media event on Nov. 6 to once again restate his opposition to an oil pipeline from Alberta to the Prince Rupert area.

The elaborate ceremony to sign a poster-sized document called the “North Coast Protection Declaration” was dutifully covered by provincial and national media, despite having no actual news content. It is not a response to Alberta’s plan to finance preliminary work on a new oil pipeline, Eby insisted. It’s to confirm the direction of growing the BC economy without, you know, any more oil pipelines.

The event at the opulent Vancouver Convention Centre West was timed to coincide with the annual BC Cabinet and First Nations Leaders Gathering, a diplomatic effort set up 10 years ago by former premier Christy Clark. This year’s event featured more than 1,300 delegates from 200 First Nations and every BC government ministry.

A high-profile event with little real news

The two-day gathering features 1,300 meetings, “plus plenary and discussion sessions on a variety of topics, including major projects, responding to racism, implementation of the Declaration Act, and more,” the premier’s office announced.

Everyone’s taxpayer-funded hotels and expense accounts alone are an impressive boost to the economy. Aside from an opening news conference and the declaration event at the end, the whole thing is closed to the public.

The protection declaration is a partnership between the BC government and the Coastal First Nations, Eby said. As I mentioned in my Oct. 15 commentary, Coastal First Nations sounds like a tribal council, but it isn’t. It’s an environmental group started in the late 1990s by the David Suzuki Foundation, with international eco-foundation funding over the years that led to the current name, Coastal First Nations Great Bear Initiative.

The evolution of the Coastal First Nations initiative

Their current project is the Great Bear Sea, funded by $200 million from the federal government, $60 million from BC, and $75 million from “philanthropic investors.” This is similar to the Great Bear Rainforest conservation project, backed by mostly US billionaire charity funds, that persuaded Justin Trudeau to turn the voluntary tanker exclusion zone into Canadian law.

Leadoff speaker in Vancouver was the current Coastal First Nations president, Heiltsuk Chief Marilyn Slett. She repeated a well-worn story about her remote Central Coast community of Bella Bella still struggling with the effects of an “oil spill” in 2016.

In fact, the 2016 event was the sinking of a tugboat that ran aground while pushing an empty fuel barge back down from Alaska to a refinery in Washington to be refilled. The “oil spill” was the diesel fuel powering the tugboat, which basic chemistry suggests would have evaporated long ago.

Fuel dependence on the remote BC coast

Remote coastal settlements are entirely dependent on fuel shipments, and Bella Bella is no different. It has no road or power grid connections, and the little seaside village is dominated by large fuel tanks that have to be refilled regularly by barge to keep the lights on.

Alaska North Slope crude has been shipped by tanker to Washington and beyond for more than 60 years. Yes, there’s a North Coast “exclusion zone” where US-bound tankers go west around Haida Gwaii rather than down the Inside Passage, but once the ships reach Vancouver Island, they sail inside right past Victoria to refineries at Cherry Point, March Point, and other US stops.

Through the tall windows of the Vancouver convention centre, you can watch Aframax crude tankers sail past under the Second Narrows and Lions Gate bridges, after loading diluted bitumen crude from the expanded Westridge Terminal in Burnaby. That is, of course, the west end of the Trans Mountain Pipeline, which has operated since 1954 with no spills, including the branch line down to the Cherry Point complex.

There are many more crude tankers exiting Vancouver now that the TMX expansion is complete, but they aren’t filled all the way because the Second Narrows is too shallow to allow that. A dredging project is in the works to allow Aframax-sized tankers to fill up.

A global market for Alberta crude emerges

They enter and exit Burrard Inlet surrounded by tethered tugboats to prevent grounding, even if the tanker loses power in this brief stretch of a long voyage that now takes Alberta crude around the world. Since the TMX expansion, shipments that used to go mostly to California now are reaching Korea, Japan, China, Hong Kong, and Singapore as well.

The US captive discount has shrunk, the tripled pipeline capacity is rapidly filling up, and pumping stations are being added. This is the very definition of Mark Carney’s nation-building projects to get Canada out of the red.

The idea that the North Coast can host fuel barges, LNG tankers, bunker-fired cruise ships, and freighters but can’t tolerate Canadian crude along with the US tankers is a silly urban myth.

Tom Fletcher has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984. [email protected]. X: @tomfletcherbc

From Caledon to Mecca and Medellín: U.S. Says Toronto ‘Cocaine Lawyer’ Used Encrypted Chats Inside Wedding’s Murder Conspiracies

U.S. indictment says Toronto defence lawyer obtained Ontario Provincial Police evidence from the Caledon family shooting investigation and relayed it via encrypted app to Wedding’s cartel command.

On the path to becoming the first Canadian of genuine Latin American cartel stature — a man the FBI has likened to a “modern-day iteration of Pablo Escobar” — Ryan Wedding did not simply exploit Canada’s borders, ports and highways to move cocaine, methamphetamine and fentanyl.

Prosecutors say he became the single largest cocaine importer into Canada, building a billion-dollar enterprise by mastering cryptocurrency money-laundering, legal strategy, paramilitary training and the kind of hardened operational security usually associated with state intelligence agencies.

It was an operation, U.S. authorities now allege, in which a brash Toronto criminal lawyer not only counselled murder and helped arrange bribes, but also tapped into Canadian police evidence to glean information about a contracted assassination that collapsed into tragedy — the killing of innocent people mistaken for the family of an Indo-Canadian narco-trucker.

A stunning 50-page indictment unsealed in California this week explains how Wedding allegedly discovered that a trusted associate in both cocaine trafficking and crypto-based money-laundering — identified only as “Victim A” in the document — had quietly become a federal informant. The murdered government witness is Jonathan Acebedo-Garcia, a Colombian-Canadian who appears in prosecutors’ Tether-crypto flow chart as a key node in Wedding’s KuCoin-centred laundering network.

According to the indictment, Wedding then turned to Toronto lawyer Deepak Balwant Paradkar — “a dual Indian-Canadian citizen” listed under aliases including “cocaine_lawyer” — and, together with his top lieutenant Andrew Clark, used encrypted Threema chats to plan Acebedo-Garcia’s murder in Medellín. For Paradkar, now under arrest in Canada and facing extradition, the brutality alleged in the filing is not confined to a distant Colombian restaurant. The indictment also places him at the centre of two other crises in Wedding’s empire: a 521-kilogram cocaine seizure in Arkansas, and a botched assassination in Caledon, Ontario, that left an innocent Indo-Canadian family dead.

The Arkansas strand starts on October 1, 2024, when Canadian truckers Maninderjit Singh Dhillon and Ranjodh Singh were stopped in Hazen, Arkansas, with “approximately 521 kilograms” of cocaine. That same day, Wedding told Clark on Threema that their load had been seized and sent Dhillon’s name. Clark then asked — in coded language — if Wedding wanted Paradkar “to monitor Dhillon and Singh’s arrests,” and Wedding agreed, suggesting that an American lawyer be used to obfuscate the Toronto lawyer’s role.

In a Threema group chat with Clark and a transport co-conspirator, Paradkar allegedly asked for the drivers’ names and licences, said he would “look into it,” and asked if there were “any relatives” he could contact. The key line in the indictment states:

“On October 1, 2024, in the Threema group chat and using coded language, defendant PARADKAR advised that he was calling law enforcement to obtain information about Dhillon and Singh’s arrests.”

Prosecutors say Paradkar later reported that he had located Singh in prison but not Dhillon, directed that Singh’s brother be told he was Singh’s lawyer so he could get the arrest report, and called Singh about his arrest “while Clark covertly listened in.”

When Clark and the co-conspirator began “discussing murdering Dhillon” on October 3, Paradkar allegedly told them “to discuss the matter on a different chat without him present and to delete any and all discussion of the murder plot.”

He is also accused of sending Clark discovery on the Arkansas case, drafting questions over WhatsApp, then deleting the messages and turning on disappearing-message settings before calling Dhillon again with Clark listening.

The same document links Wedding and Clark to an earlier hit order on another truck driver, CC-1, a driver they believed had stolen a massive load. Under a section headed “Victims B, C, and D,” prosecutors write that: “On or before November 20, 2023, defendant Wedding and Clark issued an order to kill a driver co-conspirator whom they believed stole 300 kilograms of cocaine from them.”

According to the indictment, members of a Canadian-based assassin crew then “broke into a rental property in Caledon inhabited by Victims B, C, and D” and “shot and killed Victims B and C and shot and wounded Victim D, mistakenly believing that they were CC-1’s family members.”

Local coverage at the time identified the slain couple as Jagtar Sidhu, 57, and his wife, Harbhajan Sidhu, 57, both killed by gunshot wounds after officers were called to a late-night shooting. Their daughter was rushed to hospital in serious but stable condition. In an interview, the couple’s son — speaking on condition of anonymity — said he had been at work when the shooting took place and that his parents and sister were shot multiple times. He said his parents had travelled from India to visit him and his sister, who had come to Canada as international students.

Nearly ten months later, Paradkar is again alleged to have somehow obtained sensitive information and channelled it from Canadian police back to cartel command:

Before turning back to the Medellín murder allegedly counselled by Paradkar, the indictment sets out the staggering scale of the enterprise that made Acebedo-Garcia so valuable — and, allegedly, so expendable.

Prosecutors describe the Wedding Criminal Enterprise as “a billion-dollar drug trafficking organization and the largest supplier of cocaine to Canada,” operating simultaneously in “Mexico, Colombia, Canada, and the United States, among other countries.” They say the group sourced cocaine from Colombia, “cooking and testing it in ‘cocaine kitchens’ run collaboratively with a Colombian neo-paramilitary group and drug cartel,” then working “in conjunction with members and associates of prominent Mexican drug cartels” to move “hundreds of kilograms of cocaine from Colombia to Mexico at a time” by boat and plane.

In this telling, Southern California is the hub between Latin coca fields and Canadian and American drug dens.

“The Southern California Counties of Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and Riverside generally served as the ‘hub’ where the Wedding Criminal Enterprise’s cocaine was stored before being conveyed by Canadian drug transportation networks to final destinations in Canada and other American states, with the cocaine predominantly being distributed in Canada.”

The indictment says the enterprise’s purposes included “establishing control over the Canadian drug trade” and “violently retaliating” against anyone perceived to be co-operating with law enforcement.

As reported previously by The Bureau, the trucks and routes tasked by Wedding were controlled by Indo-Canadian crime networks. The U.S. government says that the Toronto lawyer Paradkar “introduced Wedding to the drug traffickers that have been moving Wedding’s cocaine and has also helped Wedding with bribery and murder.”

In late summer 2024, Acebedo-Garcia — Victim A — was still a trusted intermediary inside that system. Prosecutors allege that: “Between August 15, 2024, and September 6, 2024, using Victim A as an intermediary, defendant WEDDING purchased 300 kilograms of cocaine to be shipped from Colombia to Mexico.”

A Colombian lab manager, Carlos Eduardo Riascos, is then said to have received the order “for 300 kilograms of cocaine” from Wedding, and on September 11, 2024, to have been paid about two billion Colombian pesos which “had been converted from cryptocurrency” for “approximately 300 kilograms of cocaine.” Within weeks, Riascos allegedly launched a shipment of “approximately 240 bricks containing cocaine” out of Cali.

In parallel, U.S. authorities say they were mapping the Tether flows linked to this cargo. The truncated flow chart in the indictment shows large transfers moving from KuCoin accounts associated with financier Rasheed Pascua Hossain of Vancouver, and others into a hub wallet tied to Wedding — including a 564,571-USDT transfer directly from Wedding to Victim A. Those arrows, prosecutors argue, capture the way Acebedo-Garcia sat at the intersection of Wedding’s cocaine supply and his crypto-laundering machine.

On October 17, 2024, that world was exposed. A first superseding indictment, “Wedding I,” was unsealed in the same federal court, charging Wedding and Clark in a continuing-criminal-enterprise case. According to the new filing, it was in the aftermath of that disclosure — once it was clear that Victim A had become a co-operating witness — that the Toronto lawyer allegedly proposed killing him as a legal strategy.

“On or after October 17, 2024, defendant Paradkar advised defendant Wedding and Clark that if Victim A was killed, the charges against them in Wedding I and related extradition proceedings would necessarily be dismissed,” the record says.

In a prior exclusive report, sourced from U.S. law enforcement, The Bureau revealed that some American investigators believed Canadian police provided little assistance as bodies mounted.

From Mecca to Medellín

Prosecutors say Wedding responded by placing “a bounty of up to $5 million USD on Victim A in exchange for any person locating and killing Victim A.” He allegedly enlisted a Laval, Que., hitman, Atna Ohna, described as “a hired sicario”; a Colombian madame, Carmen Yelinet Valoyes Florez, who “operated a network of commercial sex workers”; a Colombian sex worker, Daniela Alejandra Tejeda, who provided Victim A’s personal information; and a cluster of Canadian intermediaries and unidentified locals in Colombia and Saudi Arabia.

Once the U.S. government’s first indictment against Wedding was unsealed and Paradkar allegedly advised that killing Victim A would “necessarily” collapse the case, the manhunt for Acebedo-Garcia moved quickly. Florez, operating a Medellín-based commercial sex-work network that included Tejeda, allegedly used that network to track Acebedo-Garcia’s movements and glean intimate details — addresses, routines, contacts — that could be passed back to Mexico.

Canadian associates, meanwhile, were allegedly funnelling information from home. Defendant Ramon Basilio Demorizi, a Canadian resident, is accused of trying to locate Victim A through Edwin Basora-Hernandez, a Montréal-based reggaeton artist. Basora-Hernandez is alleged to have supplied Victim A’s contact information and to have told Demorizi — and, indirectly, Wedding and Paradkar — that Canadian law enforcement had approached him seeking Victim A’s whereabouts. According to one overt act, it was at this point that Wedding himself stepped into the hunt.

Assuming the persona of a lawyer, he allegedly arranged a conference call with Basora-Hernandez and his real-life legal counsel, Deepak Paradkar, during which Basora-Hernandez revealed that Canadian law-enforcement officers had approached him for information about the fugitive witness’s whereabouts.

In January 2025, Clark allegedly hired a Canadian associate, Ahmad Nabil Zitoun, to physically hunt Acebedo-Garcia for “approximately $10,000 CAD plus expenses.” Zitoun is accused of travelling to Medellín and then to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, trying to spot the fugitive witness. While he was in Mecca, the indictment says, Clark offered him the actual murder contract. Zitoun declined — but still received “approximately $40,000 CAD for attempting to locate Victim A” once he returned.

Throughout these weeks, the document alleges, the conspirators were sending each other surveillance pictures of Acebedo-Garcia.

The assassination itself, on January 31, 2025, reads like a textbook cartel hit. One unidentified conspirator, LNU 1, is described as a motorcyclist who “conducted reconnaissance of Victim A by following Victim A to a restaurant in Medellín before Victim A was murdered.” Another, LNU 2, is said to have been the shooter: “Defendant LNU 2, a motorcyclist, shot Victim A approximately five times in the head while he was eating at the Restaurant.”

A third, LNU 3, allegedly ferried the gunman away; a fourth, LNU 4, is described as a photographer who “cased the Restaurant” beforehand and “photographed Victim A’s dead body” afterwards; and a fifth, LNU 5, picked the photographer up and helped him flee along the same escape route as the shooter.

Within minutes, prosecutors say, images of the killing were being sent back up the chain. On January 31, Wedding allegedly used Threema to inform Clark that “Victim A was dead” and to send a photograph of his corpse.

And then the murder became content. Defendant Gursewak Singh Bal, a Mississauga man described as the founder of “the Dirty News” urban news outlet, is accused of posting a celebratory Instagram story showing the restaurant and the lower half of a body, with the caption: “[Victim A] down…” and “BOOM! Headshot.” A longer Dirty News post, quoted in the indictment, called Acebedo-Garcia “one of the informants involved in dismantling Ryan ‘Snowboarder aka SB’ Wedding’s transnational organization/criminal network” and claimed “there were bounties being placed on every individual involved in ‘snitching’ on the kingpins operations,” including seven-figure “hits.”

more to come on this breaking story