Happy New Year. Or not, depending on where you find yourself these days. If you’re deposed Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, that’s in a cell in Brooklyn, N.Y. If you’re U.S. President Donald Trump, that’s on the catbird seat in Washington, D.C. And if you’re Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, that’s on a tightrope in Ottawa, trying to strike the right note with an ally that looks more like an aggressor every day.
Editor’s Note: The Bureau is publishing the following testimony to Canada’s House of Commons committee on International Human Rights from Dimon Liu, a China-born, Washington, D.C.-based democracy advocate who testified in Parliament on December 8, 2025, about the human cost of China’s economic rise. Submitted to The Bureau as an op-ed, Liu’s testimony argues that the Canadian government should tighten scrutiny of high-risk trade and investment, and ensure Canada’s foreign policy does not inadvertently reward coercion. Liu also warns that the Chinese Communist Party could gain leverage over Canadians and treat them as it has done to its own subjugated population—an implied message to Prime Minister Mark Carney, who has pledged to engage China as a strategic partner without making that position clear to Canadians during his election campaign.
This is what Carney wants for Canada.
OTTAWA — For The Bureau’s 2025 Holiday Special, I sat down once again with Jason James for a long-form, two-hour conversation—our second holiday edition—to answer his questions about the elite networks surrounding Prime Minister Mark Carney and the China connections that have quietly defined his ascent.
BRITISH COLUMBIA — It begins, as so many Vancouver real estate stories do, with a fortune that defies the logic of lawful wealth creation—too sudden, too large, too well-traveled, and too entangled with the machinery of China’s one-party state to feel like ordinary success—and hints at the familial web that would later unravel across the Pacific, after duffle bags of Chinese currency were converted into Canadian dollars to fund condo developments in Vancouver.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has begun to lay out publicly what he sees as boundaries when dealing with China, as his government wades into a new relationship with the economic giant.
Carney, who earlier this year called China one of Canada’s biggest security threats, has more recently spoken openly about resetting the relationship with Beijing as the Liberal government seeks more trading partners in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war.
In a year-end interview with CBC News, he was asked by chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton if he sees risks in Canada aligning economically with China.
I spent years in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police learning a simple rule. You assess risk based on capability, intent, and opportunity — not on hope or assumptions. When those three factors align, ignoring them is negligence.
That framework applies directly to Canada’s relationship with the People’s Republic of China — and to recent political events that deserve far more scrutiny than they have received.
OTTAWA — U.S. President Donald Trump wants the relationship with Canada to be one of “dependence” on the United States, and is not talking about ripping up the trilateral free trade pact but renegotiating it, says Prime Minister Mark Carney.
In a pair of French-language interviews marking the year’s end, Carney revealed for the first time details of his private conversation earlier this month with Trump and Mexican President Claudia
Sheinbaum on the sidelines of the World Cup soccer draw in Washington — which came following a stormy six-week hiatus after Trump cut off bilateral trade talks on sectoral tariffs.
TORONTO — Michael Ma, the Conservative MP who crossed the floor last week to bring Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals one seat short of a majority, was part of a controversial diaspora organization that urged former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole to resign after the 2021 election over what it described as his “anti-China” stance, told Chinese Canadians to “vote carefully” ahead of the 2025 election, and later called for Pierre Poilievre to step down, according to Chinese-language records reviewed by The Bureau.
The Chinese Communist Party is threatening Canadian democracy by influencing politicians, business leaders, and community influencers, and suppressing those who speak out against China, says a former national director of the RCMP’s proceeds-of-crime program.
“The PRC government, Chinese Communist Party, is the biggest transnational organized crime group ever seen in the world today, bar none,” former RCMP investigator and chief anti-money laundering officer Garry Clement said during a Dec. 6 forum event at Toronto City Hall. Clement was joined by a panel of experts who spoke about foreign interference and transnational repression in Canada by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
A new report warns that prominent Western universities, including Canadian institutions, have collaborated with Chinese artificial-intelligence labs on research that could advance Beijing’s mass-surveillance apparatus and other tools tied to human rights abuses.
The Dec. 8 report, authored by the New York-based business intelligence firm Strategy Risks in partnership with the non-profit Human Rights Foundation, outlines how leading Western institutions in countries such as the United States, Canada, and others in Europe have collaborated with Chinese AI labs that are part of, or closely connected to, Beijing’s surveillance and security apparatus.
We would like to begin, if we could, with a question of scale. Think for a moment of the sheer vastness of this land. Try to picture it all. The impossible greatness: from the Pacific forests, dense with unspeakable trees, to the grey greens of the Newfoundland coast.
Now look at a map. Think of what you see: A country so large it can at times seem more geological than political, like a fact written into the earth. Let the natural thought come then: Nothing this large could ever go away. And yet, we know now that it could, all of it, at any time.
Two-thousand twenty five was the year the inevitable died in Canada. Thanks to Donald Trump, we know that nothing about our country is guaranteed anymore, not our sovereignty, our democracy, our prosperity.
It seems the folks who most benefited when their “free trade” deals off-shored our jobs, fattened themselves on tax payer funded Net-Zero subsidies, imported cheap labour to feather their nests, and shamelessly discriminated against us because we were white are traumatized Trump has upset their apple cart. I could not care less for the fate of their Canada.
OTTAWA — Mark Carney’s minority government is now one seat shy of a House of Commons majority—not because Canadians changed their minds in an election, but because a newly elected Conservative member of Parliament, Michael Ma, has crossed the floor to join the Liberal caucus.
Floor crossing is legal. It is also one of those Westminster quirks that can be permissible while still corroding public trust—especially when it is used to rewire the meaning of an election after the ballots are counted.
So this happened.
I was Michael Ma’s Secret Santa. 🎅
I gave him an Amazon Fire Stick just hours before he crossed the floor. 🎄
Now I want my gift back, just like the people of Markham—Unionville want their votes back! 🗳️ pic.twitter.com/3f6EWgTwq1
— Kurt Holman MP (@KurtHolmanMP) December 12, 2025
h/t Mauser
OTTAWA — Radio-Canada, drawing on digital records first disclosed to Australian media in 2024 by an alleged Chinese spy, has reported new evidence suggesting that a Chinese dissident who died in a mysterious kayaking accident near Vancouver was being targeted for elimination by Chinese secret police and agents embedded in a Chinese conglomerate that the U.S. Treasury now accuses of running a multibillion-dollar organised-crime, money-laundering and modern-slavery empire out of Cambodia.
It should be obvious by now that the world order that has sustained prosperity in the northern hemisphere in a mostly uninterrupted epoch of peace over the past 80 years is dramatically unravelling. It just might take a while yet before we can definitively pinpoint the moment or the event that caused everything to finally fall apart.
Chinese immigrants struggling to obtain security clearances for government jobs, senator says
A senator told a parliamentary committee that he’s hearing of immigrants from China, with marginal connections to the ruling Chinese Communist Party or other government bodies, who are finding it difficult to obtain security clearances for Canadian public-sector jobs.
Senator Yuen Pau Woo raised the matter during a meeting of the Senate committee on foreign affairs and international trade Thursday, where he asked officials from the Department of Global Affairs to address it.
I bet it’s easier for a ChiCom to land a Government job than a White Canadian.
