Category: Claws of the Panda

Our Chinese-Installed Government In Ottawa

Chinada Shiny Pony The Libranos 35 Comments


The system is working as intended.

Chinese migrants living across Toronto were obtaining mortgages from HSBC while supposedly earning extravagant salaries from remote-work jobs in China. In one example, an Ontario casino worker that owned three homes also claimed to earn $345,000 in 2020 analyzing data remotely for a Beijing company.

Before joining HSBC Canada, the whistleblower had studied fake-income mortgage frauds for his Business Masters degree at Vancouver Island University. After arriving at Aurora in February 2022, while digging into the branch’s loan books and interrogating his colleagues, he made mind-blowing assessments.

Since 2015, the whistleblower concluded, more than 10 Toronto-area HSBC branches had issued at least $500-million in home loans to diaspora buyers claiming exaggerated incomes or non-existent jobs in China.

These foreign-income scams spiked during the pandemic, the whistleblower believed, because borrowers could somewhat plausibly claim to be working remotely in other countries while riding out Covid-19 in Canada.

While a small bank of Aurora’s size was expected to issue about $23-million in residential loans every year, this branch had shovelled out $88-million in mortgages in 2020, according to the whistleblower, and over $50-million in 2021. […]

The Bureau’s seven-month investigation into D.M.’s allegations suggests HSBC Canada and other Canadian banks could have issued many billions of dollars in questionable mortgages to Chinese diaspora buyers, and a significant cause of Canada’s real estate bubble is hundreds of billions in illicit fund transfers from China into Canada, and bank lending that amplifies its impacts, especially in Toronto and Vancouver home prices.

“There are thousands of these cases, large scale,” D.M. said in an interview. “Hardworking Canadians are denied mortgages and these Chinese residents forge documents and get mortgages approved, heating up the already hot Ontario real estate markets.”

Closing the Stable Door after the Dragon is Already Inside

Chinada The Libranos 13 Comments

Corruption or incompetence?

The federal government will stop funding grant applications if the researchers working on them are affiliated with a foreign military, state security entities or certain foreign state actors, citing a need to protect Canadian national security.

Ottawa made the announcement Tuesday evening, and following a report from The Globe and Mail last month that since 2005, 50 Canadian universities have had extensive research collaborations with China’s military. The projects with China’s National University of Defence Technology included areas like quantum cryptography, photonics and space science, the newspaper reported.

Now, Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne says protecting Canadian research is a matter of national security and cited “recent events” when asked about the decision.

h/t James MacMaster

Our Chinese-Installed Government In Ottawa

Chinada Shiny Pony The Libranos 11 Comments

Toothless by design.

On Jan. 1, the Forced Labour and Supply Chain Reporting Law, which aims to curb the importation of goods made through forced labour, came into effect. The law is toothless. It merely requires companies to report on their efforts to keep forced labour out of their supply chains.

The U.S. Congress and the Biden administration, in contrast, passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act in 2021. That law compels anyone wishing to import products from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region to prove that forced labour was not used.

Since its implementation in June, 2022, more than 6,000 shipments entering the United States have been reviewed under the new law, and more than 2,500 denied entry.

But according to Mehmet Tohti, executive director of the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, not one shipment from China has been denied entry into Canada on the same grounds.

Our Chinese-Installed Government In Ottawa

Chinada Green Police Not Our Plastic The Libranos 13 Comments

Dan Knight;

Let’s start with the laughable irony of the Liberal government’s latest bureaucratic endeavor – a registry on plastics. Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, in a tweet as tone-deaf as it is revealing, boasted about this registry saving Canadians money and creating a “more circular economy.” But when has expanding bureaucracy ever led to cost savings for the common man? This move reeks of hypocrisy and misplaced priorities. While Guilbeault and his colleagues pat themselves on the back for such trivial pursuits, they blatantly ignore the elephant in the room – foreign interference in Canada’s democracy.

Meanwhile, as this farce unfolds, genuine threats to our democracy are being swept under the rug. Blacklock’s Reporter reveals a startling truth: Attorney General Arif Virani has dismissed all-party demands to unmask agents of foreign influence. The Commons committee’s call for a registry of these agents is buried until after the next election. Why the delay? Could it be that the Liberals, embroiled in their own scandalous dance, find it convenient to postpone addressing these threats?

The Libranos: Business As Usual

Chinada The Libranos 15 Comments

The system is working as designed.

A vast “financial underworld” is operating in Canada whose members commit fraud and other financial crimes without punishment, corroding communities, undermining democratic institutions and even the country’s prosperity, the authors of a new book say.

That’s because elected leaders at all levels are enabling and emboldening financial criminals by failing to fight them or even try to hamper their lawbreaking efforts, according to the co-authors of Dirty Money: Financial Crime in Canada.

“Canada is a preferred destination to launder ill-gotten gains with impunity,” say Jamie Ferrill and Christian Leuprecht, the co-editors of Dirty Money. They also wrote some of its 16 chapters. […]

One chapter examines the mysterious workings of the country’s super-secret financial intelligence agency, the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada, known as FINTRAC.

Katarzyna McNaughton, a visiting post-doctoral fellow at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ont., reveals that FINTRAC produces and delivers a large volume of proactive disclosures about potential major financial crimes to police agencies.

However, the intelligence disclosures often sit unused or acted upon inside police services because investigators are already overwhelmed with their own mountain of cases, McNaughton writes, quoting an unidentified former FINTRAC worker as her source.

(h/t David M)

Le Chien and Shiny Pony Show

Chinada Claws of the Panda The Libranos 30 Comments

Tasha Kheiriddin;

Is Judge Marie-Josée Hogue the new David Johnston? The Quebec Court of Appeals judge was appointed in early September to head the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions, months after “special rapporteur” Johnston had concluded that an inquiry wasn’t necessary.

Sadly, Hogue now seems determined to follow in Johnston’s tarnished footsteps, using accusations of partisanship to deny standing in the first phase of the inquiry to both the Conservative party and the NDP, preventing them from questioning witnesses or seeing all the evidence presented.

Justice Hogue practiced at the same law firm as Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chretien.

The Most Interesting Man In The World

Claws of the Panda CreepyJoeBiden Democrats 19 Comments

Hunter Biden Indicted on New Criminal Charges

The indictment says Biden spent millions on an “extravagant lifestyle” – including membership to sex clubs and more than $188,000 on adult entertainment – rather than paying his taxes.

Special Counsel David Weiss has been using a federal grand jury in Los Angeles to gather evidence of possible criminal tax charges against Hunter Biden.

Hunter Biden pleaded not guilty in October to federal gun charges in U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware after being charged out of Weiss’ years-long investigation.

Fox News Digital has reached out to Hunter Biden’s legal team for comment. A spokesperson for Special Counsel Weiss declined to comment.

Questions conveniently not asked: Where did that money come from?

Jim Jordan To CIA: How Many Hunter Biden Laptop Letter Signatories Were On Your Payroll?

Our Chinese-Installed Government In Ottawa

Basic Dictatorship Chinada Claws of the Panda The Libranos 8 Comments

Sam Cooper;

In the most compelling evidence yet to emerge regarding Beijing’s meddling in Canada’s 2021 election, CSIS intercepted phone calls between a Consul General and the middleman for a federal candidate that was clandestinely supported by a “loyal” Chinese Canadian community group.

The case is detailed in a “Canadian Eyes Only” report containing intelligence on China’s sprawling efforts to boost candidates in recent Canadian municipal, provincial and federal elections — often using the same local cells of influence against multiple levels of government.

The Bureau previously reported three alarming cases detailed in CSIS’s October 31, 2022 “Intelligence Assessment” — including a Chinese Consulate’s clandestine meeting in 2022 with its preferred leadership candidate for a provincial party, and also a Beijing agent’s scheme last year, to elect a federal party leader by covertly purchasing party memberships.

Two new cases examined in this story point to unaddressed gaps in Canada’s foreign interference laws, such as the inability to convert CSIS evidence into prosecutions.

Not by accident.

How Deeply Has China Penetrated into Canada?

Baiting The Left Chinada 13 Comments

Ottawa dragon boat festival apologizes for telling man to remove Falun Gong shirt

It took four years, but a retired Ottawa man has finally received an apology from Ottawa’s dragon-boat festival over an incident he considered an insidious example of the Chinese government’s influence in Canada.

The festival’s CEO had persuaded Gerry Smith to remove a Falun Gong T-shirt while at the event, mentioning the Chinese embassy’s sponsorship of the festival. The spiritual movement — a target of longstanding repression by the Chinese government — says the incident was just one part of an ongoing campaign of interference and intimidation against the Falun Gong here in Canada.

h/t James MacMaster

When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal

Claws of the Panda Drain The Swamp 18 Comments

Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose.

January, 2023: The Justice Department’s probe into the Capitol attack is entering its third year, with hundreds more arrests in the pipeline.

November, 2023: Thousands of vials of biological substances — including some labeled “HIV” — and a freezer marked “Ebola” were found inside a secret Chinese-owned biolab in California which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and FBI initially refused to investigate, according to a House committee report released Wednesday.

  • The illegal biolab was run by a PRC citizen who is a wanted fugitive from Canada with a $330 million Canadian dollar judgment against him for stealing American intellectual property.
  • This PRC citizen was a top official at a PRC-state-controlled company and had links to military-civil fusion entities.
  • The illegal biolab received millions of dollars in unexplained payments from PRC banks while running the illegal biolab.
  • The illegal biolab contained thousands of samples of labeled, unlabeled, and encoded potential pathogens, including HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, and Covid.
  • The illegal biolab also contained a freezer labeled “Ebola,” which contained unlabeled, sealed silver bags consistent with how the lab stored high risk biological materials. Ebola is a Select Agent with a lethality rate between 25-90%.
  • The biolab contained nearly a thousand transgenic mice, genetically engineered to mimic the human immune system. Lab workers said that the mice were designed “to catch and carry the COVID-19 virus.”
  • After local officials who discovered the lab sought help from the CDC and others, the CDC refused to test any of the samples.

    •  

    Huh. Maybe the Chinese knew more than they were letting on when they alleged Wuhan flu originated in the US.

    Canadian Detainee in China Accuses Fellow Prisoner of Espionage

    Claws of the Panda Shiny Pony 10 Comments

    And now we hear, the rest of the story…

    In a turn of events that has cast a fresh perspective on a high-profile diplomatic tussle, Michael Spavor, a Canadian detained in China, has publicly accused his fellow prisoner, Michael Kovrig, of espionage. Spavor alleges that Kovrig’s intelligence gathering activities led to their arrest by Chinese authorities, a claim that hints at a potential fracture in their relationship and raises questions about the role Kovrig played while in China.

    According to Spavor, he was ensnared into providing intelligence on North Korea to Canada and its allied spy services. He alleges that this entrapment was orchestrated by Kovrig, a fellow Canadian prisoner. This accusation slants a new light on the prolonged incarceration of Spavor and Kovrig and brings Kovrig’s undertakings in China under scrutiny.

    Confidential negotiations are currently underway between Toronto lawyer, John K Phillips, who represents Spavor, and Global Affairs Canada. These discussions are of significant importance as they could potentially impact the diplomatic relations between Canada and China, already strained due to the detention of the two Canadian.

    I did kind of wonder why Kovrig had been dicking around in North Korea.

    The Children Are Our Future

    Children R Our Future Claws of the Panda Tech 32 Comments

    And that’s why my retirement plan includes collecting useful recipes.

    Something strange is happening with teenagers’ mental health. In the US, Britain, Australia and beyond, the same trend can be seen: around the middle of the last decade, the number of young people with anxiety, depression and even suicidal tendencies started to rise sharply. Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, noticed a change when students who were brought up with smartphones started to arrive on campus. They were angrier. More fragile. More likely to take offense.[…]

    “It’s what I’ve been calling the phone-based child,” he says. “For all human history, millions of years, all mammals play. Anyone who has had a puppy knows it’s all about play. So we had play dates in childhood, up until around 2010.” In Britain, he says, the number of children who went on real-life playdates then fell sharply. Lockdown, needless to say, didn’t help.

    “I’m calling it the great rewiring of childhood… It hit the US, Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand in exactly the same way.” Social media is a bit of a misnomer, he says. It’s no longer about connecting people, but “performing on a platform.” Perhaps this is fine for grown-ups, but not for children, “where they can say things in public, including to strangers, and then be publicly shamed by potentially millions of people… Children should not be on social networks. They should be playing in person. Social media platforms should never be accessed by children until they’re eighteen. It’s just insane that we let kids do these things.”

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