The Libranos: Call The Bookkeeper
It’s a 3B$ bailout of BC developers, and even the CBC is mad about it.
B.C. is facing a glut of empty condos. Thousands of Metro Vancouver units are sitting empty and some developers are facing insolvency.
Now, some housing experts are questioning a plan by the federal and provincial governments to buy some of those vacant units and turn them into affordable housing.
They say it amounts to a multi-billion dollar bail out for developers who refuse to lower prices to reflect a sluggish real estate market.[…]
Yan has a lot of questions about the plan by Mark Carney and David Eby to spend up to $3 billion to buy vacant condos in “priority growth areas” and turn them into affordable housing.
Recent data from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation shows that as of last month, there were 4,376 completed condos sitting empty in Metro Vancouver, a 76 per cent increase from the year before.
Yan has crunched the numbers, with his analysis showing that a third of all condos without owners in Metro Vancouver cost over $1 million.
He questions how deep a discount the governments can get to make those units truly affordable.
Wrong question.
Our Chinese-Installed Government In Ottawa
A chill is roiling Ottawa’s bureaucracy after the woman who crafted Canada’s policy to defend the North with American allies was fired, she alleges, after criticizing the government’s anti-American rhetoric — and shortly after Mark Carney’s government declared Beijing a strategic partner, The Bureau has been informed.
Raquel Garbers spent 28 years in Canada’s public service and helped write the country’s current defence policy. On October 15, 2025, she published an opinion piece warning that Ottawa’s growing anti-American rhetoric was splitting the Western alliance and handing a gift to the country’s real adversaries, Beijing and Moscow. Two days later, according to the statement of claim in her wrongful-dismissal suit, Canada’s foreign minister stood in Beijing and signaled a shift toward a “strategic partnership” with China — a sharp reversal of Ottawa’s own recent posture toward Beijing. Weeks after that, she was fired.
Garbers, 57, filed her claim this month in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Ottawa, seeking about $2 million from the federal government. She is not a junior official, and her stature, and questions about whether Mark Carney’s government is trying to enforce a silence over the public service as Ottawa pivots closer to Beijing, are topics of conversation in Ottawa, Garbers’s legal team told The Bureau today.
He, Too, Admires Their Basic Dictatorship
An Act to Fortify The Surveillance State;
The Liberals are gearing up to force Bill C-22 through committee and the House of Commons in just days.
This is an insane abuse of parliament to ram through a bill fraught with privacy, security, and civil liberties concerns.
This motion curtails committee scrutiny, limits MPs’ ability to debate and amend the bill, and rushes Bill C-22 through Parliament on the government’s timetable rather than allowing full parliamentary review.
Michael Geist unpacks.
Buried in the second half of Bill C-22 is a provision granting the government the power to require “core providers” to retain categories of metadata, including transmission data, for up to one year. This is mandatory metadata retention that would require telecom and electronic service providers to store information about the communications of all their users, regardless of whether those users are suspected of anything. It is one of the most privacy invasive tools a government can deploy and the international experience suggests that there are major privacy risks.
This Is The Time At SDA When We Refresh Our Memories (Again)
Food Professor: Remember that Chinese-owned infant formula manufacturing plant in Kingston? Canada Royal Milk?
(h/t Marc)
Welcome To Chinada
@glen_mcgregor – According to PMMC’s itinerary, only official photographers — not the usual press gallery pool — will be allowed in when [Carney] meets Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi on Parliament Hill this morning. This is unusual and, likely, at the request of the PRC.
Our Chinese-Installed Governor In Ottawa
Important to note regarding Mark Carney’s renewal of a law enforcement agreement with China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS):
A document from August of 2023 states that the RCMP did not want to renew the agreement with the MPS after it expired.
“While the RCMP continues to seek ways to mitigate and navigate the current reality of the Canada-China bilateral relationship, in order to progress on law enforcement issues of mutual concern, it does not envision renewing its expired Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) in the immediate future.”
A Speech In Davos
Turns out, cheap talk has a price;
On Monday morning, the Pentagon’s senior defense strategist suspended the oldest bilateral defense institution in North American history and pointed the announcement at Mark Carney’s Davos speech — a four-month-old address the Canadian prime minister’s admirers had called Churchillian, and that Washington now treats as a case study in the gap between rhetoric and reality.
Elbridge Colby, Under Secretary of War for Policy and the principal architect of American defense strategy under the Trump administration, announced that the Department of War is pausing the Permanent Joint Board on Defense to “reassess how this forum benefits shared North American defense.” The board was established by Franklin Roosevelt and Mackenzie King at Ogdensburg, New York in 1940 and has operated continuously for 86 years.
“A strong Canada that prioritizes hard power over rhetoric benefits us all,” Colby wrote. “Unfortunately, Canada has failed to make credible progress on its defense commitments.” In a subsequent post, Colby attached a map of North America and wrote that “delivering on shared continental defense begins by recognizing our shared geography.” A third post revealed that Colby had recently hosted US Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra at the Pentagon, and that the two are “working closely” to ensure Canada reaches the Hague Summit’s 3.5% of gross domestic product defense spending target.
The implications for Canada are potentially generational.
China Is Asshole
The verdict delivers the first American conviction in what investigators and prosecutors describe as a sprawling global infrastructure operated by Beijing to monitor, intimidate and silence Chinese nationals living abroad — a network that researchers have documented across North America, Europe and beyond.
According to prosecutors, Lu and co-defendant Chen Jinping established the Chinatown outpost in 2022 after Lu attended a ceremony in his native Fujian province where China’s Ministry of Public Security announced it was opening 30 such secret police stations around the world. The station was open for less than nine months — opening in mid-February 2022 and closing October 3, 2022. In September 2022, the non-governmental organization Safeguard Defenders published a report on the 30 overseas Chinese police service stations operating around the world; the FBI saw the report and took action.
A banner displayed to jurors during the weeklong trial in Brooklyn federal court carried text that left little ambiguity about the site’s function: “Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station, New York USA.” […]
Among the most significant evidence presented was testimony from an FBI computer analyst who recovered data from Lu’s deleted files. What that data revealed went well beyond a single Manhattan storefront. The deleted files contained WeChat groups drawing members from overseas police-service stations across multiple countries, and plans for Chinese technicians to install a Huawei cloud system connecting the New York operation directly to the Fuzhou Public Security Bureau — within an overseas police-station architecture that also encompassed Toronto, Spain, France and the Netherlands.
Related: Eileen Wang, 58 – the mayor of Arcadia – agreed to plead guilty to the felony count and Arcadia City Council said she resigned from her post on Monday.
Stiff Upper Elbows, Mate
Canada’s auto industry, based largely in Ontario, could disappear by 2040 unless the country regains duty-free access to the U.S. market or finds other ways to keep the sector afloat, one of Canada’s biggest banks warns.
At an industry conference in Toronto focused on the auto sector’s future, RBC Thought Leadership managing director Jordan Brennan said industry leaders and governments must do what they can to avoid the worst-case scenario.
“It’s the scenario where Canada is being heavily tariffed, customs are unviable, and export economics are dead. What does that look like in practice? Governments have to subsidize the industry to the point where it becomes politically unpeaceful,” Brennan said.
Our Chinese-Installed Governor In Ottawa
The Mounties will not assure MPs a confidential partnership agreement with Chinese police signed by the Prime Minister excludes “transfer of personal information of Canadians or permanent residents,” records show. Pro-democracy activists cite Chinese police for atrocities including torture: “Police routinely arrest, detain and harass leaders and members of various ‘illegal’ religious groups.”
Indeed: In America, a mayor gets charged for acting as a Chinese spy for the CCP. In Canada, we get twelve panels, three experts, and a CBC segment about “Racism & Xenophobia” and the RCMP doing ongoing investigations until everyone forgets!
New Governor, Same As The Old Governor
Mark Warner explains how Canadian taxpayers are subsidizing Air Asia's planes… we just dont know how much! "And I guess it turns out that a lot of the financing is coming from Export Development Canada."
"But I think if you look at the comments from the Air Asia CEO, it would… pic.twitter.com/TIWc5vJpwn
— cbcwatcher (@cbcwatcher) May 9, 2026
We’re so hooped.
Our Chinese-Installed Governor In Ottawa
“Just in case any of you were wondering who is really sponsoring Mark Carney’s event tonight with Barack Obama…”
Our Chinese-Installed Government In Ottawa
Never trust anything where “human rights” appears as an adjective.
They Admire Our Basic Dictatorship
Prime minister can limit free speech in Parliament in narrow circumstances, Supreme Court rules https://t.co/LW8K0KB0U3
— The Globe and Mail (@globeandmail) May 1, 2026
They’ll become broader.
Markham Man
Toronto Police have made three arrests and seized several “SMS blasters,” a sophisticated cybercrime weapon not previously seen in Canada.
In a news conference on Thursday morning, Deputy Chief Robert Johnson and Detective Sergeant Lindsay Riddell said three men are facing a total of 44 charges in what they described as a first-of-its-kind cybercrime investigation in Canada. […]
SMS stands for Short Message Service. An SMS blaster mimics a legitimate cell tower, but when nearby phones connect to it, users receive fraudulent text messages that appear to come from trusted organizations.
These messages prompt recipients to click on links that lead to fake websites designed to capture personal information, a tactic known as SMS phishing or “smishing.”
This marks the first known instance of this technology being used in Canada and highlights an emerging threat to both public safety and financial security, police said in a news release.
Our Chinese-Installed Government In Ottawa
China Is Asshole
Eh… how bad must it be for the RCMP to get involved?
Alberta RCMP is investigating major international construction equipment company XCMG as part of a fraud investigation, searching the Canadian headquarters in Edmonton Tuesday morning.
Police were seen outside the XCMG Canada building in northwest Edmonton off the Yellowhead and 184 Street, the headquarters for the Chinese company’s Canadian arm in Western Canada. XCMG is the fourth-largest heavy equipment manufacturer in the world, according to the company’s website.
A drone hovered behind the office building where heavy equipment the company makes — excavators, mining, drilling, forestry, and general construction equipment — is stored.
Officers wearing plain clothes entered and left the building throughout the morning and in the afternoon. When CityNews approached the entrance, a police officer said the building was closed.
Related history, according to Grok;
1. Canadian civil fraud allegations and asset freeze (March 2026)
In Wild Timber Industries Ltd. et al. v. XCMG Canada Ltd. et al., plaintiffs (including Wild Timber and related entities) filed suit in the Supreme Court of British Columbia. They allege fraudulent schemes involving serial-plate tampering on heavy equipment (used in forestry and mining) and related financial improprieties, including fraudulent inducements to investors.
On March 11, 2026, the court granted a Canada-wide Mareva injunction (asset-freezing order) worth approximately $32.5 million. This prevents XCMG Canada and affiliated entities from dissipating assets (including inventory) anywhere in Canada, to preserve value pending the lawsuit. The order also binds other XCMG affiliates.
These claims remain unproven in court. The RCMP’s recent fraud probe (by the auto theft unit, which often handles equipment-related tampering) appears potentially connected in timing and theme, but the civil case predates the April search warrant by about a month. XCMG Canada has previously described related matters as financial disputes with no determined liability.
2. U.S. Customs investigation into duty evasion (initiated October 2025)
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) opened EAPA Case 8133 against XCMG North America Corporation on October 10, 2025.
The agency is investigating alleged evasion of antidumping (AD) and countervailing duty (CVD) orders on certain mobile access equipment (e.g., scissor lifts and subassemblies) originating from China. The probe focuses on whether goods were transshipped through Mexico to avoid duties.
CBP imposed interim measures due to “reasonable suspicion” of evasion. No final determination has been publicly issued yet (as of available records).This is a regulatory/trade enforcement matter, not a criminal fraud case, but duty evasion is a form of questionable import practice that can carry significant penalties.
3. Historical/internal issues with the parent company (pre-2020s)XCMG’s early history (1990s–2010s) included references to management corruption that was reportedly addressed internally during restructuring. One account notes a leader who “eliminated corruption among XCMG’s management personnel” while consolidating unprofitable operations.
What Would We Do Without China?
Research papers that list Chinese institutions account for more than half of the retractions across 10 academic publishers, according to a new large-scale analysis.
The study, which has not been peer reviewed yet, was published on arXiv last month and examined 46,000 retractions issued by scholarly journals between 1997 and 2026 that were indexed by the Retraction Watch Database.
According to the study, there were 29,867 Chinese affiliations listed on these retractions – more than 91% of which don’t list international collaborators. Researchers in China produced 16.5% of all research output during that time period, the study found, despite the country’s institutions being listed on more than 52% of retracted papers in the sample.
Following China, institutions based in India, the US and Saudi Arabia feature on 7.25%, 5.72% and 2.83% of retractions, respectively.
“The timing is extraordinary.”
While China was busy shipping missile chemicals to Iran and collecting yuan tolls at Hormuz, someone was inside its most sensitive supercomputer stealing everything.
CNN reports that a hacker group calling itself FlamingChina breached the China National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin and exfiltrated up to 10 petabytes of classified defence data. The samples posted on dark web forums include bomb and missile designs, animated explosion simulations, structural integrity tests, renderings of the J-20 stealth fighter, sixth-generation aircraft concepts, nuclear submarine schematics, hypersonic weapons systems, and target analyses for American assets including HIMARS launchers and carrier strike groups.
Ten petabytes. For context, the entire printed collection of the US Library of Congress is approximately 10 terabytes. This breach is one thousand times that volume. It is being sold for cryptocurrency on Breach Forums. Cybersecurity experts who reviewed the previews told CNN the data appears genuine, matching known output patterns from the NSCC Tianjin facility, which serves over 6,000 clients including defence agencies and aviation firms across China.