Juno News - June 24, 2026


Investigative journalist EXPOSES Carney’s condo bailout

Mentioned
Mark Carney Gregor Robertson Justin Trudeau Brookfield Willful Blindness Pierre Poilievre David Evie Bob Mackin Sam Cooper David Eby Vancouver Kearney
Carney hands out BILLIONS in bailouts to condo developers CSIS warned refugee flow could be exploited by Islamic extremists

Episode Stats


Length

19 minutes

Words per minute

154.15

Word count

2,973

Sentence count

88

Harmful content

Hate speech

11

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Mark Carney is offering $3.2 billion to bail out Vancouver developers and bankers stuck with overpriced condos, but what does that mean for the rest of Canada's housing market? Our guest Sam Cooper, author of Willful Blindness, tells us why this is a bad idea.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Conservative leader Pierre Polyev is calling on the Kearney government to scrap its Vancouver
00:00:09.760 condo bailout. Prime Minister Kearney has pledged $3.2 billion to bailout developers and bankers
00:00:17.540 stuck with 2,200 overpriced BC condos. Polyev says Kearney is trying to reinflate the housing
00:00:25.540 bubble at taxpayers expense having created the housing bubble and now bursting that bubble now
00:00:32.660 they want to come and bail out the bankers and developers who profited from it and this is
00:00:39.220 another example of a tiny club of liberal elites billionaires and insiders getting rich by making
00:00:48.500 hard-working Canadians poor and so I would I'm calling for the Carney condo
00:00:55.940 bailout of developers and bankers to be cancelled as for the condos themselves
00:01:02.900 you know what the solution is for them to become affordable the developers need
00:01:07.880 to lower the sale price well that would mean that developers would end up losing
00:01:13.340 money here now is Prime Minister Carney's explanation this was last week
00:01:18.080 about why the government should buy overpriced condos from developers stuck
00:01:23.240 with bad investments and at the same time there's too many completed condos
00:01:28.700 sitting empty Metro Vancouver alone around 2,500 finished units are standing
00:01:34.520 vacant with no buyers with higher interest rates weaker investment demand
00:01:40.200 developers are stuck they don't want to sell at a loss they can't afford to hold
00:01:44.540 those empty units indefinitely and the problem is that those empty homes don't just sit idle
00:01:50.380 they also disincentivize new construction unsettled lenders and investors create a
00:01:55.260 housing market that in effect feels frozen result too many british colombians still can't find the
00:02:02.220 homes that they can afford our guest today is journalist sam cooper author of willful blindness 0.77
00:02:08.940 how a network of narcos tycoons and ccp agents infiltrated the west welcome to the show once
00:02:15.660 again sam great to be with you mark what do you make of the vancouver condo bailout and could 0.62
00:02:21.900 toronto be next well focusing on vancouver it's just a wild story in so many ways we could start
00:02:30.540 with mark carney the superstar central banker he is an expert on the concept called moral hazard
00:02:37.580 and that is when financially you encourage bad behavior and capitalism by bailing out
00:02:44.540 private businesses that have made very bad investment decisions so that's where to start
00:02:49.900 you know i think this story of uh carney and bc premier david evey offering you know up to over
00:02:56.140 3.2 billion for some still to be developed innovative financial plan to take the take off
00:03:03.580 the books of these private developers, some 2000 units or something like that, that are deeply
00:03:10.120 overpriced. No one wants them. And I say no one wants them, Mark, because as my book, you know,
00:03:16.620 that you read the title shows Vancouver's market has been driven by mystery money from China,
00:03:22.620 underground banking from China, and speculation driven by private developers, and sketchy,
00:03:29.560 know foreign investors that have basically used vancouver unfortunately as a money laundering
00:03:35.160 tool this is very well documented so mark carney the central banker should know that he's rewarding
00:03:42.040 people that have profited massively for over two decades on selling essentially condos to chinese
00:03:49.880 buyers uh you know up zoning single family land turning condo you know towers into 300 400 square
00:03:58.280 foot boxes that no one lives in they're sold offshore in china and hong kong everyone knows
00:04:03.400 this and now because china's market has taken a deep dive because it's the same sort of speculative
00:04:09.800 criminal driven market there uh that's what's happening in vancouver and mark carney is about
00:04:15.400 to bail them out and mark i'll add this there's so many more things i could say yes i do think
00:04:20.920 the same thing is going on in toronto my work for the bureau has has has shown how chinese
00:04:28.840 underground banking driven mortgage fraud is a major factor in canada's banks and the toronto
00:04:34.200 market i've assessed that about a trillion dollars in shady banking largely driven by chinese
00:04:43.400 underground banking and organized crime and what's called chinese capital flight other nations too
00:04:49.400 That's happened in Vancouver and Toronto for the past decade, and this is pretty well-sourced
00:04:54.880 investigative research.
00:04:56.860 So Mark Carney, as a central banker both in Canada and the United Kingdom, he knows
00:05:02.020 that foreign bad actors have infiltrated Canada's banking and real estate system, and I say
00:05:07.860 he's rewarding them with this bailout, and I think there's probably a lot of landmines 0.52
00:05:12.760 in that deal if it goes forward.
00:05:14.420 But, yeah, it makes you wonder who his carny is beholden to most, whether it's Chinese or whether it's his liberal friends, you know, in the condo developing business in Vancouver.
00:05:29.260 But clearly, I guess he's owing somebody.
00:05:33.100 And I guess this is payback time, but just the ugliness of it just looks, the optics of it are horrible.
00:05:39.300 And I mean, to think that the premier of British Columbia signed on to it, the whole thing
00:05:46.020 just looks very ugly, doesn't it?
00:05:48.940 It's terrible, Mark.
00:05:49.960 You know, my book, a national bestseller, still selling well to this day, Willful Blindness,
00:05:56.800 published in 2021, it dove into the history of real estate speculation and massive transnational
00:06:05.560 casino money laundering in Vancouver British Columbia all driven by Chinese organized crime
00:06:12.760 essentially and Mark this has been going on as my book detailed back to the late 1980s where
00:06:18.960 developers from Hong Kong uh you know after Expo 86 in Vancouver developed major portions of
00:06:26.240 downtown Vancouver and Mark you know I would draw a through line directly to this bailout that Mr
00:06:32.660 Carney announced last week because those same major developers their successor companies are
00:06:39.140 the ones that sell condos directly to China and Hong Kong and buyers my book shows how they were
00:06:46.340 connected to senior levels of foreign organized crime some of these major developers
00:06:53.060 connected to the CCP and this is open source records certainly you won't find many people
00:06:58.820 in canadian reporting it but i've reported it based on documents and so you mentioned who
00:07:04.180 carney's beholden to i say absolutely the ccp and chinese organized crime connected to it
00:07:10.260 will have some skin in the game with this bailout and have had skin in bc's real estate game for
00:07:15.780 decades but you also mentioned liberal fundraisers mark i mean i don't want to name names today but
00:07:22.340 There's been fundraisers for Mark Carney over the past two years, for Justin Trudeau for years before they were held, you know, brokered by the major real estate developers who will be involved in this bailout, who are also kingmakers in B.C. politics and major backers of Mark Carney and Justin Trudeau.
00:07:43.880 And I've even seen the donation records. Those people were at the table for the past two years for major fundraisers for Mark Carney.
00:07:53.300 And they're the same ones that were lobbying him to open up to the foreign market again.
00:07:58.000 And I would say they're probably behind the scenes the ones asking for this bailout.
00:08:02.300 Do they have something on Carney? And I'm talking about the Chinese here. I mean, could the prime minister be compromised? 0.78
00:08:07.760 Well, my work, Mark, has pointed to how Mark Carney, as the former head of Brookfield, was doing a lot of traveling to Beijing and Shanghai and China in 2024, you know, before he stepped into Justin Trudeau's chair in a pretty neat switcheroo, as I call it.
00:08:29.580 you know he was over in for Brookfield he secured a 250 million dollar bailout from the Bank of
00:08:40.380 China for Brookfield's high-end real estate holdings in Shanghai in 2024 so I mean do I
00:08:47.720 is there any known connection to you know Chinese investors somehow in the background getting a
00:08:53.800 bailout in Vancouver I don't know about that but Brookfield is in Mark Carney's background
00:08:59.220 They're a real estate investor in Canada.
00:09:01.480 Apparently, they're a real estate investor in Vancouver.
00:09:04.640 Look, Mark Carney has done a lot of dealings privately with China before, as you know,
00:09:10.620 I've reported and detailed very clearly.
00:09:12.420 He becomes prime minister.
00:09:14.440 And what do you know?
00:09:15.440 Suddenly, Canada is now a strategic partner with China again in everything from, you know,
00:09:20.800 EV deals to I am very sure if Justin Trudeau's history is instructive that China,
00:09:28.660 Chinese investors and real estate developers were lobbying Justin Trudeau to flood money in from
00:09:33.860 China to Canada. It would make sense if those same type of people are lobbying Mark Carney.
00:09:39.500 Yeah, that's what it gets really terrifying. I mean, for one thing, if the bailout is fine for
00:09:46.200 Vancouver, well, that sets a precedent, right? I mean, why just Vancouver then? You've got to
00:09:51.760 look at other cities. Look at Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa. They all have issues. They all have
00:09:58.020 toxic assets. They all have developers left holding the bag on a number of condos. I mean,
00:10:04.180 and Toronto's double, probably twice as many as in Vancouver that are completed, but remain
00:10:11.440 unsold and many under construction that are almost finished. I mean, by the time they're done
00:10:17.060 bailing out the real estate sector, we could be spending tens of billions of dollars in order to
00:10:22.520 do that. All of that is very dangerous. I mean, is it possible that this is almost a trial balloon
00:10:29.300 and let's see if it flies in Vancouver and if we're sort of able to get away with it over the
00:10:35.260 summer when a good chunk of the media is not even paying attention, maybe we can, you know, do it in
00:10:41.080 other cities. What do you think? That's a great point because that's exactly, in my experience,
00:10:45.820 how the Prime Minister's office of Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney work. They float trial balloons.
00:10:51.040 as you said they they uh they rammed this omnibus canada surveillance bill through you know on on
00:10:58.960 the eve of going off for for summer break you know that that's exactly the type of thing that it seems
00:11:05.280 that the mark carney government is trying to do to catch the media sleeping and much of the media in
00:11:10.720 ottawa is already asleep so that your point about the precedent in toronto and politicians in toronto
00:11:18.560 saying hey what about what about us i think that's dead on the point and i'll tell you why because
00:11:24.800 you know i reported for the bureau on i got a leak from an hsb whistleblower that was reporting on how
00:11:31.200 their banking branches in the toronto area were writing massive known fraudulent mortgage loans
00:11:39.680 to uh chinese individual individuals that were claiming during the coveted pandemic
00:11:45.360 to be working these remote jobs in china for insane amounts five hundred thousand dollars you
00:11:51.840 know fake data management job during covet when everyone was locked down and there were a lot of
00:11:57.440 mortgages issued in toronto to these very that bank had you know they i got the internal documents
00:12:05.120 that showed people knew this was fraudulent and i widened out my investigation to show that fin
00:12:10.880 trap canada's financial watchdog has studied 48 000 diaspora banking transactions and pointed
00:12:18.320 to that same type of fraud running into canada's big banks and going into real estate development
00:12:24.400 going into law firms going into mortgages so i do think i'll tell you at a granular level while i
00:12:30.720 won't say names today i know that real estate developers very active in vancouver are the same
00:12:37.680 ones from the chinese uh communities that are developing in toronto and these would be mark 0.78
00:12:44.240 the type of people that the title of my book addresses so ccp connected narcos and money 0.70
00:12:51.120 launders these are people involved in election interference they're people probably donating
00:12:56.240 to mark carney and his party i know they are and they are real estate developing in toronto for
00:13:01.840 sure so that's a concern i do believe yeah i mean this relationship is getting more incestuous all
00:13:07.120 the time. And you raise the issue of election tampering. All that was done for the liberals
00:13:13.680 benefit, really. That's probably why nothing was really done to stop it. And you've also linked in
00:13:20.640 the Chinese EVs as possibly another bargaining chip. And then you've got the real estate empire.
00:13:26.620 It just seems like all of this is aiming towards a closer link, economic ties with China, which 0.99
00:13:36.200 many Canadians are not very comfortable with, and for good reason. On top of all that, we've got our 1.00
00:13:41.640 negotiating team down in Washington, D.C., and the CUSMA deal very much on the rocks. So there's a lot
00:13:48.780 of plates in the air right now in terms of our relationship with the Chinese and possibly at 0.65
00:13:54.540 the expense of our relationship with the United States. I do believe that's the case. And, you 0.99
00:14:00.380 know, to your point that there's probably a lot more going on, I can point to something concrete
00:14:05.220 in sort of this Vancouver real estate bailout that struck me, you know, I noticed among the
00:14:11.340 real estate developers and marketers that were at this big sort of fundraiser for Mark Carney in
00:14:19.000 February 2026, my colleague Bob Mackin has covered it. You know, in the crowd there is a First Nations
00:14:26.580 leader who's now on the Canada Infrastructure Investment Bank. This is the very same infrastructure
00:14:32.180 Bank that we're told is behind this $1 billion British Columbia government BC Ferries deal
00:14:39.680 that's going straight to China. And again, from Ottawa, who's in charge? Gregor Robertson,
00:14:46.460 the same one who's also behind the housing minister for this bailout. And I could go even
00:14:51.480 further. This First Nations chief seems to be one of the ones that, you know, their lands have in a
00:14:57.740 treaty deal you know soon after there's a major mall being sold to a Chinese developer group
00:15:03.940 that I won't go too far into the weeds here but that I know people involved in that are certainly
00:15:09.120 I say of concern to the U.S. government and to some good police officers and intelligence
00:15:15.080 agents in Canada so absolutely it's the type of facts and documented narrative I've covered in
00:15:21.980 Willful Blindness I'm seeing it just bursting out of British Columbia right now with the players
00:15:26.460 involved. Yeah, it's an interesting, you raised this issue of this very uncomfortable mix of
00:15:33.120 business and political interests. You're talking about people like Gregor Robertson and Mark Carney
00:15:39.360 who had his dealings with Brookfield and the Chinese. And these people seem to be pretty 1.00
00:15:45.460 comfortable with the idea that they could have their political interests as well as their business
00:15:50.720 in you know business interests and that somehow they can exist uh you know comfortably when in
00:15:56.960 fact you've got these massive conflicts of interest i mean and they're it's blatant
00:16:03.280 really i mean does that bother you well there's a good clip circulating online where one of the
00:16:09.840 conservative mps asks housing minister gregor robertson repeatedly in parliament how many
00:16:16.720 investment properties that he owns. Mr. Robertson can't answer the question. You know, as a Vancouver
00:16:24.320 City Hall reporter, I started my career reporting on Gregor Robertson's mayoralty in Vancouver.
00:16:31.840 And I quickly learned and documented as I did in my book, Willful Blindness, that the real
00:16:36.480 estate developers were not only major donors, but were brokers of, you know, getting fundraising
00:16:42.640 tables together with major fees. I covered one where each developer that would sit down for lunch
00:16:49.060 with Gregor Robertson before, you know, his reelection bid, and I think it was, you know,
00:16:53.620 around 2016, 2017, had to pay $25,000 for the privilege of sitting down. So you call that in
00:17:00.260 my world a cash for access or potential influence peddling event. And what do you know, people at
00:17:07.120 that table would be the same ones now sort of you know fundraising for Mark Carney and I say
00:17:12.800 probably lined up to benefit from this bailout so look uh I would not put Gregor Robertson in
00:17:19.120 the class of of a Mark Carney in terms of um financial uh wherewithal and knowledge of
00:17:26.660 international banking systems and how a bailout of the type of people involved would expose Canada
00:17:31.880 probably to financial, I say, integrity risk with our worldwide partners, including in Washington.
00:17:39.960 But I do see, I mean, that the appearance of conflicts and potential self-dealing are emerging
00:17:48.600 very quickly within days of this announcement by Robertson, Carney, and Premier David Eby in the
00:17:55.200 South Vancouver area, where I noted in my op-ed for the Bureau about a 10-minute drive from the
00:18:00.840 River Rock Casino that gave Canada, you know, the worldwide moniker of the Vancouver model of
00:18:06.880 Chinese money laundering. I think there needs to be some kind of parliamentary investigation on
00:18:12.960 all of this. I mean, I don't know the degree to which this is going to blow up in Carney's face.
00:18:19.060 We'll have to see in the days ahead. Last word to you, Sam.
00:18:22.120 uh well thank you and uh i'll keep digging into this story because i i see that it is
00:18:30.220 it's only starting to get legs but it is only getting legs with independent analysts and media
00:18:36.560 so far so yeah you need to make sure that canadians and parliamentarians are paying
00:18:41.500 attention yeah it's funny you know organizations like the globe and mail have shown very little
00:18:46.340 interest in this story. How do people find you online? They can find me at thebureau.news. I've
00:18:53.160 been up and running as an independent investigative platform for three years now. Sam Cooper, thank you
00:18:58.160 so much for coming on the show. We appreciate it. Thanks, Mark. If you enjoyed this show,
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00:19:14.760 Thank you so much for tuning in. We'll see you next time.