[In an interview with ProPublica, Sam Cooper describes how he
unearthed scandals that have shaken the Canadian political system.]
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TALKING TO AN INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER WHO EXPOSED CHINESE INFLUENCE IN
CANADA  
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Sebastian Rotella, Sam Cooper
January 6, 2023
ProPublica
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_ In an interview with ProPublica, Sam Cooper describes how he
unearthed scandals that have shaken the Canadian political system. _

Investigative journalist Sam Cooper at his home in Ottawa, Ontario,
Shelby Lisk, special to ProPublica

 

Talking to an Investigative Reporter Who Exposed Chinese Influence in
Canada
by Sebastian Rotella

_ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign
up for The Big Story newsletter
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to receive stories like this one in your inbox_.

An exclusive news report dominated the headlines in Canada in recent
weeks: Canadian intelligence had warned Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
about a vast campaign of political interference by China
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The Canadian Security Intelligence Service had learned that Chinese
consulate officials in Toronto had covertly funded a network of at
least 11 political candidates in federal elections in 2019, the report
said. The Chinese operation had also targeted Canadian political
figures and immigrant leaders seen as opponents of the regime in
Beijing, subjecting them to surveillance, harassment and attacks in
the media, the report said. Trudeau responded with promises of action
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and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said they were investigating
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the alleged foreign interference. The Chinese foreign ministry denied
the allegations.

Not surprisingly, the report’s author was Sam Cooper. An
investigative journalist for Global News, a private Canadian media
organization, the 48-year-old Cooper has done hard-hitting work about
a surprisingly active criminal underworld rooted in a large diaspora
from Hong Kong, a bastion of the mafias known as triads. His
best-selling 2021 book
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“Wilful Blindness: How a Network of Narcos, Tycoons and CCP Agents
Infiltrated the West,” examines violent international gangs involved
in drug trafficking, money laundering, corruption and, most
alarmingly, Chinese espionage and influence activity in Canada.

Cooper and other experts (including U.S. national security officials
interviewed by ProPublica) say Canadian political leaders have ignored
or minimized the extent of the threat from China. Cooper has received
criticism from pro-Beijing figures in the Chinese-Canadian community
and is fighting two defamation lawsuits from subjects of his coverage.
But his reporting has drawn praise from national security officials,
dissidents of Chinese origin and academics in Canada, the United
States and elsewhere. It helped spur a governmental inquiry known as
the Cullen Commission
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which recently concluded that organized crime had laundered billions
of dollars in the province of British Columbia. And the latest
revelations of Chinese interference are having a potentially dramatic
impact
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on the political debate in Canada.

ProPublica’s conversation with Cooper has been edited for clarity
and brevity.

I wanted to ask you first, in terms of your background, how you got
involved in this topic.

I went to University of Toronto. I ended up traveling to Japan for
some post-university work and culture. And so I really became enamored
and fascinated with East Asian culture.

As a young reporter in Vancouver, and also a young family guy, there
were things that I noticed. I started to break ground on how
influential money from Hong Kong and mainland China was in Vancouver
real estate, how it appeared to be driving prices incredibly high in
comparison to local incomes. And that led to finally understanding or
digging into the underground casino and underground banking nodes and
networks that have been feeding Vancouver.

I recognized pretty early there was a huge, high-level pushback on the
reporting to dig into the roots of what I eventually found were
extremely high-level tycoons from Hong Kong with triad connections
[who] had been developing big portions of Vancouver since the 1980s.
And this led to a lot of discoveries.

What's remarkable about the history of this issue in Canada in the
past decades is that there’s this prophecy that is rejected or
ignored. What was your assessment of Project Sidewinder [a Canadian
intelligence report leaked in 1999 that warned of the threat from
China-connected tycoons, gangsters and spies] when you were looking at
this stuff?

Sidewinder
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for let’s just call it the Western or Canadian mind, it was too much
too early to understand what they were alleging and pointing to. It
just was hard to believe. And so … I took the report with a grain of
salt. I didn’t swallow it as truth. And there had been a huge
pushback on that report from Ottawa, so I was cautious. But you’re
absolutely right. This was basically raw intelligence, it was leaked.
So people were able to point to a few flaws, or maybe even the odd
overreach. But it is absolutely confirmed and true based on my current
work, and my book, that the basic elements of what's alleged — that
is, that Chinese intelligence and foreign influence operations use
high-level gang bosses to both send money abroad and to corrupt
Western societies — is absolutely true and confirmed.

In U.S. press and politics, there’s this ongoing focus on Mexico:
drugs in Mexico, corruption in Mexico. There’s very little attention
paid to national security issues related to Canada. If you read your
book, one has to wonder why there hasn’t been more focus on Canada
and the extent to which there is a crisis in Canada that just
doesn’t get the attention it should in the United States.

Yeah, that’s right. In some ways, Canada makes the perfect host for
very sophisticated, powerful, transnational organized crime that
doesn’t typically hang bodies from overpasses. The level of
sophistication of Asian organized crime is that people that would
appear to be gentleman bankers or stockbrokers can be the leaders of
transnational drug trafficking gangs. And further than that, people
that are respected officials in the Chinese Communist Party at the end
of the day are the handlers and bosses of these elite, transnational
Asian gangs. Canada as a G-7 nation, as a banking economy that is tied
in at the highest levels of respect with the other leading industrial
nations, makes a perfect disguise and host for very sophisticated
transnational crime.

There is concern in the U.S. government about some of these structural
weaknesses in Canadian legislation and the Canadian law enforcement
and judicial culture. You give the example that it takes seven months
to get a warrant for a wiretap on Sinaloa cartel guys that would take
a couple of days in the U.S. or Australia.

I, like many Canadians, you know, just have the innate sense that
Canada’s such a stable, well-ordered, law-abiding society. And often
that’s true. But what is missed by so many people is that the laws
that … prevent overreach into the lives of law-abiding citizens have
been exploited, really, by transnational gangs that have so much cover
in Canada.

The perfect example of this is Tse Chi Lop
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the Canadian citizen who I and others have reported was at the top of
this network of networks of the highest triad bosses, The Company. I
reported that there clearly are interconnections with Chinese state
police and intelligence agencies. This man, this Canadian, was about
to fly from Asia to Toronto. And I understand there was some sort of
international police operation to divert his flight away from Canada
because Australian and United States police did not have the trust
that if Mr. Tse landed in Toronto he would be able to be prosecuted
and extradited. The concerns there are that Canada’s legal system is
just full of holes. It is much too difficult to prosecute powerful
criminals. One of the other issues is the lack of an anti-racketeering
law to deal with real organized crime. [ProPublica note: During an
extradition hearing in the Netherlands last year, Tse told a judge he
was innocent of drug trafficking charges.]

But another huge one … is a growing sense that elite capture, and
even corruption, within [the] Canadian government, could be an
inhibition to tackling people like Mr. Tse. The questions are: Do Mr.
Tse and his network, in a roundabout or even a direct way, have hooks
into people like Cameron Ortis
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the former Canadian RCMP intelligence boss, who fell in a massive
corruption case that I wrote about? Beyond Mr. Ortis, could powerful
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be linked to powerful triad members
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or triad leaders in Canada? [ProPublica note: Ortis is awaiting trial
and has not yet entered a plea, according to press reports. His
attorney did not return a request for comment.]

Your book really lays out your focus on organized crime and the
casinos. And that underworld then takes you into the question of
political influence and how aggressive the People’s Republic of
China has been in political influence operations in Canada, with
organized crime as a weapon in that. Why do you think that the PRC has
been able to do that?

Australia has been … pretty much a perfect analogue of the PRC
methods of infiltration and corruption. Australia and Canada [are]
very similar societies. Australia and Canada were in the same dire
straits in 2015 when, as we know, [Chinese President] Xi Jinping
elevated his United Front [the Communist Party’s overseas influence
arm] interference networks. But the response since 2015 has been very
different. Australia rightly responded with foreign interference laws
around 2017, 2018. And we’ve seen some very, very powerful people
now implicated in investigations.

In contrast, in Canada, nothing has been done for the similar threat.
We have a bipartisan Parliament group of senior officials with access
to intelligence reports, sensitive reports, they make recommendations
to government. For several years now, they’ve been asking the
Liberal government to follow Australia’s example. And there has
really been no change.

And what justification do opponents of something as basic as a foreign
agent registration act give for opposing it?

I can't find a good justification. Unfortunately, I think we can look
at news circumstances such as when Canadian parliamentarians were
debating whether to declare China’s actions in Xinxiang a genocide
in 2021. Some Canadian senators … went on the record saying that
these kinds of discussions would fan anti-Asian racism.

I probed very deeply [former Canadian legislator] Kenny Chiu’s case
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The evidence at the time came from what he told me himself, what I had
heard about Canadian intelligence’s deep concerns with what happened
to Kenny Chiu and others in the 2021 federal election. And also open
source reports at the time that said that clearly Mandarin-language
media, which is influenced by the Chinese Communist Party and WeChat
networks, attacked Kenny first and foremost ahead of the 2021
election, smearing him as an anti-Asian racist. Again, this is a Hong
Kong-born Canadian. They call him a racist because he suggested a
foreign influence registry. He did not even name China in the bill. He
lost his seat.

So that’s what I call a two-pronged attack on Canadian democracy.
Beijing is seeking, I have reported, based on Canadian intelligence,
to in corrupt ways fund and advance its interests in candidates. And
it is seeking to attack Canadian members of Parliament that it would
see as threats to Chinese Communist Party objectives.

The response to your latest reports about a Chinese political
influence campaign in Canadian politics seems to be unprecedented.

We can see there’s a very robust debate now about what is lacking in
Canada’s foreign interference laws. How deep could this corruption
go? How aggressive are China’s actions? Could they turn elections in
their favor? These questions are now being debated almost every day in
Canada’s Parliament. And I can say we’ve never seen that level of
attention before.

And in your case, personally, there must be some sense of vindication.

Now I have access to the intelligence that can’t be refuted that
exactly what I was reporting was happening. And not only do I believe,
I’ve been told my reporting has been [the] subject of
counternarratives from Chinese espionage and intelligence networks who
are very uncomfortable and angry about my reporting. So I don’t know
that vindication is the word more than I just, I deeply believe, and
I’m told by a lot of people, that really this could be
precedent-setting historic work for helping us support Canada's
democracy.

People in Canadian police and intelligence, and in other countries,
those communities are starting to share information because they see
that I’ve got it right, because they see that it’s making a
difference in areas where it needs to make a difference.

And even more importantly, my sourcing comes from the communities that
are most directly impacted by these networks: Chinese-Canadian, Hong
Kong-Canadian, Taiwanese, Uighur communities. And certainly not to
suggest that they’re victims without agency. They have great agency,
they are some of the best sources to police and intelligence
themselves.

And I would add that people inside United Front criminal networks are
some of my best sources. And how could that be? Well, China rules by
fear, and also inducements and greed. And there are people that could
fall out of favor, and people that have consciences, and yet maybe we
could say they’re trapped within those networks, that are very eager
to share information. They don’t want to see criminal thugs holding
a lot of power in the broad community or just in the Asian community
in Canada.

_SEBASTIAN ROTELLA is a senior reporter at ProPublica. An
award-winning foreign correspondent and investigative reporter, he
worked for almost 23 years for the Los Angeles Times before joining
ProPublica in 2010. He covers international security issues including
terrorism, intelligence, organized crime, human rights and migration.
His reporting has taken him across the Americas and Europe, and to the
Middle East, South Asia and North Africa._

_In 2020, Sebastian was part of the ProPublica team whose coverage of
the pandemic and the CDC was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
for public service. The Association of Health Care Journalists gave
that coverage the Award for Excellence in Health Care Journalism in
the investigative category._

_In 2016, he was co-writer and correspondent for Terror in Europe, a
Frontline documentary that was a finalist for the Investigative
Reporters and Editors broadcast/video award. In 2013, his Finding
Oscar investigation with This American Life won a Peabody Award, a
Dart Center Award, and two awards from the Overseas Press Club. In
2012, he was recognized with Italy’s Urbino Press Award for
excellence in American journalism. His A Perfect Terrorist
investigation of the Mumbai attacks (with Frontline) was nominated for
an Emmy, and the online version of the story got an Overseas Press
Club Award in 2011._

_In 2006, he was named a Pulitzer finalist for international reporting
for his L.A. Times coverage of terrorism and Muslim communities in
Europe, which won the German Marshall Fund’s senior award for
excellence in European reporting. He was part of a team whose coverage
of al-Qaida received an Overseas Press Club award and finalist honors
for Harvard University’s Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting
in 2002. In 2001, he won Columbia University’s Maria Moors Cabot
Prize for his career coverage of Latin America. His work in Latin
America also won honors from the Overseas Press Club, Inter-American
Press Association and the American Society of Newspaper Editors._

_At the L.A. Times, Sebastian served as a correspondent at the Mexican
border, in South America and in Europe. His border reporting inspired
two songs on Bruce Springsteen’s album The Ghost of Tom Joad
(1995)._

_Sebastian is the author of three novels: Rip Crew (2018), The
Convert’s Song (2014), and Triple Crossing (2011).He is also the
author of Twilight on the Line: Underworlds and Politics at the
U.S.-Mexico Border (1998). He speaks Spanish, French and Italian. He
is a graduate of the University of Michigan, studied at the University
of Barcelona, and was born in Chicago._

_PROPUBLICA is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.
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* Canada
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* China
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* Politics
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* covert operations
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* organized crime
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* intelligence
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