MY GREATEST HITS: ONE MILLION Clicks From STARDOM

Dreaming, circa 1990

Why do I write? Why do we create? A vast question. We even write to answer that question. What I am sure of is: art creates a bridge between strangers because we’re not actually strangers at all. We're stubbornly, collectively, sometimes wonderfully human.

A friend once told me: “Anybody over 50 still writing songs has a mental illness.” He might be right. Maybe it’s neurotic compulsion. But maybe what appears to be madness is actually devotion.

This human has written songs for decades. I marvel at how the person I used to be, excited and lost in writing—and just plain lost—is still here with me, right now in the warm light of this Vancouver morning, thinking about songs.

I’ve spent my adult life chasing songs I hope are beautiful—an elastic, subjective word—while staying true in sound, and honest in my lyrics; psychologically, politically, sexually, spiritually. 

“A Different Kind of Freedom” is a recent song about being a dad today, reflecting on being a kid in the ‘70s. “Little Dreamer” is about sailing on despite rocks in the water. “Shine” is about trying to let go with grace. “The Woman I Love is Crazy” is about projecting my own craziness onto someone else. “Stay With Me” is about a kid in his twenties who couldn’t be vulnerable enough to say what his heart needed.

I’ve written about my mental suffering, for sure. “Waiting” is about waiting for depression to lift. “Yeah” is about rising from it. “Be Brave Tonight” is about staring it down and not doing something tragic. It's a song to encourage push onwards, to believe, to comfort tragic impulses.

There’s a physical thrill in the flow of zeroing in on the ideal chord progression, and matching the right word or syllable with the right melodic phrase. When the alchemy creates something that didn't exist, it’s invigorating. It’s bliss. It feels like magic. The same high I feel when fine tuning a scene in a documentary, or chiseling a paragraph in a novel. 

I’ve just finished my third novel: My Last Friends on Earth. Might be my last novel on Earth. Who knows? It was hard to finish. What kept me going? Not an advance. An eagerly awaiting fan base? Hardly.

The kids in the story. That's what.

I came to adore them. They believe in friendship, positivity, courage, and honesty. Their resilience inspired me to be resilient enough to finish. I could hear them: "Shut up and rewrite!" I'm not kidding. How fortunate is that?

What else am I looking for in the journey? Something—when I sing it or read it—I believe in. Hope. Redemption. Love. Desire. Sadness. Connection. That's not about talent. We can all do that for ourselves. A word, a line, a melody that hints at who we are or who we could be; a bridge that reminds us we are walking this journey together, across a river that we know flows so far away, the bridge becomes, at best, a footnote—if we're lucky. But we're still lucky to have crossed it. 

Is it enough to write, if nobody hears or reads the result? Sometimes it has to be. You can't pay someone to love you, though paying for promotion has proved effective from time to time.

Sometimes the bridge we cross leads to a bigger bridge. Strangers have told me Understanding Ken is their favourite novel; Facing Ali their favourite documentary; The Woman I Love Is Crazy their favourite song. When it happens? It’s shocking. Also thrilling. 

Too much praise might make an artist lose her mind; too little probably does the same. In the end, you accept either, or both, and carry on, word by word, dream by dream.

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Press play and may you find a bridge, a wave, or even that eternal spark in yourself. I was going for that.

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Check my youtube channel to see videos for a few of these songs.

WEAPONS OF MASS DIVISION: How Binary Thinking Can Kill Us

“There's no need for formal conspiracies when all of these economic and political elites share the same ideology.”

—George Carlin

“We’re not polarized because we hate each other. We hate each other because we’re polarized.”

— Lilliana Mason

“Everybody’s so busy wanting to be down with a gang—‘I’m conservative’, ‘I’m liberal.’ Bullshit! Be a fucking person!”

—Chris Rock

“The political system is not designed to represent the public. It is designed to marginalize and control them.”

— Noam Chomsky

In Western democracies, “Left Wing” and “Right Wing” are the labels of choice for categorizing the political views of an entire nation. You’ll read them in your newsfeed, see them on bumper stickers, hear them in conversation, and relish—or resent—them pouring from the mouths of pundits, politicians, and opinionated relatives. They’re spoken like gospel, as if they define two eternal, opposing forces.

They do not.

In reality, “Left Wing” and “Right Wing” have become marketing slogans—shorthand slurs spun by pundits and politicians to divide us into warring tribes. Listen to Fox News, CNN, the Daily Wire, Joe Rogan, MSNBC or Donald Trump and count how often the terms are used to smear a faceless mass of people. You’ll need a calculator. Framed as pejoratives, the “other side” becomes a clear and present danger to your values, your identity, your country—even your life. 

Here’s some truth: most of us move through life barely noticing this supposed divide. Meanwhile, media and politicians at the highest levels religiously promote this binary as reality. Corporate and social media reveal and stoke the polarization—and profit from it. Division spreads, an insidious cancer that hits Stage 4 before we know it exists. Comment by comment, more and more people—against their own interests—are taken in.

History shows, when nuanced ideas and solidarity are lacking, brutality can march in and fill the space, first with propaganda, then with violence. Are we today, with the explosion of divisive rhetoric and digital echo chambers, returning to a tribal, fundamentalist mindset? Or have we never truly left the past behind?

The Origin of Left and Right: From the Gallery to the Guillotine

The terms “Left” and “Right” were first used during the French Revolution in 1789, when delegates in the National Assembly physically divided themselves: revolutionaries to the left of the chamber, defenders of the monarchy to the right. What began as geography soon became ideology. Ideology hardened into identity.

The revolution began with noble and new ideals: liberty, equality, fraternity. As the binary deepened between “us and them,” suspicion turned to paranoia. Moderates were cast out. Dissenters became enemies. The political divide morphed into a moral, hellish absolute. Bring in the guillotine.

During the nine months of the Reign of Terror in France, tens of thousands were executed—not just aristocrats, but former allies, and those guilty of, yes, moderation and nuance. The revolutionaries, demanding freedom, consumed their own. Division as a weapon reached its bloody conclusion.

This history is not ancient irrelevance. It’s a reminder and a warning.

The Modern Use of Left and Right

The terms Left Wing and Right Wing didn’t gain traction in the U.S. until the 1920s—starting with the Communist Red Scare, growing under FDR’s New Deal and the rise of fascism in WWII before going full-blaze during the Cold War. The labels got red hot again with anti-Vietnam War protests and stayed busy under Reagan with his undemocratic support of Central American death squads and the fantastic fall of the Berlin Wall. Then came the neo-conservatives—a new level of hawkish Right, faithful devotees of foreign interventions.

Today the neo-cons are anti-Trump. Or are they? Who can tell? Marco Rubio—a long-time supporter of the neo-con playbook—is Secretary of State under Trump.

Neo-con Republican Liz Cheney—daughter of Iraq War architect Dick Cheney—was courted by Democrats. And the Democrat elites wonder why they lost the working-class vote.

In Canada, the labels Left and Right Wing flew in with less—but still real—vigour, often reacting to similar pressures. Canada had a World War I Red Scare with deportations and internments. The Gouzenko Affair in 1945, exposing Soviet espionage in the government, was headline news.

The rise of Tommy Douglas’s Saskatchewan-based, socialist CCF party in the '30s—which helped usher in universal health care—was a uniquely Canadian trigger. In 1962, most physicians did not support the first plan in North America to publicly fund medical care. Thousands of doctors in Saskatchewan went on strike, refusing to work under the new rules. A compromise—what a beautiful word—led to their return. A single-payer system where doctors could bill the government for their work instead of accepting a salary. Today, no conservative could get elected Prime Minister wanting to abolish socialized medicine.

That moment remains instructive. It speaks to the tension between fear and progress, ideals and opportunism, not to mention what's actually needed. That battle is experienced today by the majority of Americans who still yearn for universal health care, despite what many pundits and politicians, media companies, and corporations would have us believe—using Left-Right rhetoric as a weapon to yet again pit us against our own interests.

A closer look reveals the Left Wing-Right Wing labels repeatedly and shamelessly shift principles—unlike well-defined political philosophies. In woke parlance, they're fluid. Trump's tariff fanaticism would make protectionist Democrat President FDR declare a national emergency. Republicans once freed the enslaved; Democrats once defended Jim Crow, and filibustered against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. I'm generalizing because the Left and Right elites are almost always pro-war in America, but in the '70s, the Left appeared to be pro-civil rights, anti-war and anti-Intelligence.

During Biden's presidency, the Right appeared to be anti-war and anti-Intelligence. Free speech was once a liberal hill to die on. With censorship around Covid issues and so-called wokeism, free speech became a conservative cause célèbre—until, that is, it came to criticism of Israel. On that front, many on "the Right" abandoned the First Amendment, passing legislation or resolutions that categorize certain critiques of Zionism as antisemitic—despite the fact that it remains perfectly legal for Americans to harshly condemn their own country’s history, accusing it of colonization, the genocide of Native Americans, or anything else.

In other words, the application of the Left and Right labels is not about principle. It is about manipulation, profit and opportunism. It is about what serves the brand in the moment. Anti-war, pro-corporate, anti-censorship or pro-surveillance? It doesn’t matter. Ideas leap back and forth across the Left and Right Wing divide like a deranged pogo stick, as required.

Common Good, Common Ground

The myth of some impenetrable Left Wing-Right Wing division collapses further with a cursory glance at what the majority of people actually agree on.

A 2024 Gallup poll found that 62% of Americans support a federally funded health care system that guarantees coverage for all. That’s not fringe opinion. That’s a political landslide.

In a 2019 Hill-HarrisX poll, 58% of respondents supported tuition-free public college and forgiving student loan debt. That includes strong support from younger Republicans as well as Democrats.

A Knight Foundation study showed 91% of Americans believe protecting free speech is essential. 90% defend the right to express unpopular opinions.

Surveys also show that a vast majority of working people across the spectrum want fair, livable wages. They want dignity and safety at work, equitable pay, and protection of their rights. In the richest societies in the world, the desire for a living wage is not controversial.

Even on divisive issues like abortion and gun control, people in both the U.S. and Canada hold more nuanced, middle-ground views than political pundits admit.

Who Benefits from the Great Divide?

The old saying goes, to see who benefits, follow the money. So it goes with Left-Right politicking.

Politicians profit. Divisive outrage raises money, energizes the base and creates an enemy.

Media companies profit. Conflict fuels engagement. Consider the irony: America comes together on line to hate each other because polarization has torn us apart—fuelling more divisions and more delusions.

Social media algorithms amplify divisive comments—and profit from them. Nuance, on the other hand, could be a code word for "digital graveyard."

Transnational corporations and lobbyists profit. It's their reason for working together.

A polarized public is more easily manipulated into supporting policies that serve massive corporate interests, but not our own. When we’re busy fighting each other, we don’t notice who’s robbing us in broad daylight. This division is not accidental. It may not even be conspiratorial. But it is business. And business is booming.

Refuse to Give Up

Common truths that run counter to the propaganda machine reveal the real divide—not Left versus Right, but top versus bottom. The people versus power. The many versus the few. The everyday human, in crushing ways, is trapped in a class war disguised as a culture war. This is, for so many, self-evident in their insufficient paycheques and day-to-day struggle to pay bills. Economic inequality is expanding faster than the Universe. Homelessness is epidemic. Salaries are no match for housing prices. Elite power structures rely on a rigged ideological debate to keep us too divided to unite.

And let’s be clear: the so-called “1%” isn’t limited to the ultra-wealthy and powerful. It’s a metaphor for those—rich or not—who feel no solidarity or empathy with the rest of us. That includes extremists, fundamentalists, and racists who reject shared humanity, though they may one day need it.

But there remains an internal barrier dividing the majority of us, reinforced by polarizing language.

In conversations with friends and strangers, it’s undeniable that many everyday people do not feel aligned with others in this loosely related group I'm attempting to convince you is real.

But hear me out. Let's say the real percentage of those who disdain democracy and solidarity—be it powerful elites or extremists, fundamentalists, or unabashed racists—is much larger than the familiar 1%? Let's say it's 19%? Or 31%?  That still leaves 81% or 69% of us capable of empathy, decency and change, together. That's a huge and powerful group. Landslide victory numbers in any democracy.

If it's possible we could believe that most of us share so much in common, imagine the new friends to be made just by breaking out of our own echo chambers and conversing, listening and laughing. I'd take a kind Right Winger over a cruel Left Winger any day—and vice-versa. But it's not about friends. It's about decent people with common interests being relentlessly polarized by lies.

With an intelligent commitment to solidarity and freedom—and a willingness to confront our own assumptions about the "them" within this group—we could steer this earthly ship to follow that moral arc of the universe that Martin Luther King once suggested bends toward justice and love. Individually, we can start now. Open up. Solidarity grows instantly with a choice to see it. Collectively, we can rein in the atrocities of weaponized political rhetoric, and even limit social collapse, civil war, or genocide.

If we could all see the Right-Left con for what it is, we could also imagine ourselves an unstoppable, reality-based, loosely affiliated movement for good. Don't give up.

The Division is the Distraction

Power thrives in distraction and division. To improve most people’s lives, we have to expose the lie—and confront the power behind it.

The first step? Turn the noise off. Refuse to parrot their language. What could annoy a propagandist more? Call out polarizing Left-Right framing when it diminishes human richness and possibility—which it always does. Stop using the Left and Right labels. It’s hard. I’m writing the essay, and I use them. Start demanding and conversing with more nuance. Start demanding our collective needs be the centre of debate, not fringe topics of distraction that never help pay the food bill.

Most importantly? Let them know we see what they are doing. We see through the manipulation. We see through the performance. And we refuse to destroy ourselves for their profit.

Calling the divide a lie isn’t hyperbole or theoretical. It’s real. It is a lie. But is it lethal?

In Rwanda, colonial divide-and-conquer tactics laid a foundation of tribal inequality. After Rwandan independence, broadcast radio propaganda picked up the torch. Ethnic labels—Hutu and Tutsi—became slurs. Over radio and in print, the Tutsi minority was dehumanized as “cockroaches” and “snakes.” Genocide erupted, killing 800,000 people in 100 days. Relatives killed relatives. That genocide didn’t start with machetes. It started with language—broadcasts, newspapers, slurs. Words that made murder seem righteous.

In Nazi Germany, antisemitic propaganda and nationalist binaries created an “us vs. them” narrative that ended in the extermination of six million Jews—and up to twelve million human civilians in all.

This isn’t ancient history. That was 1945. Rwanda was 1994.

We see words turn deadly again in the devastating onslaught in Gaza. Here in North America—as anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish incidents rise—the so-called Left and Right both fund the horror, arguing with loose facts, lies and shifting views—while tens of thousands of innocent civilians are killed, maimed, starving.

Language shapes reality. Binaries kill nuance, and stop coalition building. When people and their complexities are distilled into pejorative categories, lies and cruelty pounce. Nobody knows the tipping point. But can we learn from these horrors?

Let us stop it before we tip. Let us call out the lie now, clearly and publicly. Let us be so brilliant, so brave, that we see something stunningly beautiful through the toxic smoke: all we share in common. Life. Love. And hopefully the pursuit of happiness.

The Hidden Danger of Belonging

It feels good to belong. Kinships. Friendships. Clubs. Churches. Sports teams. To know who your people are. To share a common cause. Or to feel superior. Focusing on an enemy has certain psychological benefits. Needing to belong is natural.

But the benefits can come at the cost of curiosity and compassion. The cost of truth.  Within the spectrum of belonging, we find at the murky edges, the cult, the secret society, the gang, led by figures who lie shamelessly, with a smile, or a snarl. We have to believe character has greater value than charisma. We have to call out cruelty against the oppressed, everywhere. We’re not wrong to care about our side. But we’ve been misled about who is on our side.

In politics, the Left-Right divide is the big lie.

In the early 1930s, German priest Martin Niemöller was an anti-semite and supporter of the Nazi Party. After the war, after witnessing the horror, he wrote these famous words: “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out…"

Today, we might add: “Then they came for the Left Wing... then the Right Wing... and still, I did not speak out—and then they came for me.”

This sentiment has been embodied recently with shocking and disturbing images of ICE agents in the U.S.—in masks and lacking visible warrants—storming mostly Latino neighbourhoods and workplaces to seize and deport immigrants.

Beyond the Lie

History shows us, in the extreme, where binary thinking leads: censorship, purges, civil war. When people become categories, laws collapse, cruelty follows.

We don’t need a new political ideology. We need a new cultural honesty. 

Nearly everybody wants effective healthcare that doesn’t leave us homeless. We want education that uplifts, not impoverishes. We want clean air, safe communities, and free speech—with enough nuance to fend off ignorant, hateful speech. We want our kids to grow up in a better world.

We want dignity. Equal rights. Enlightening conversation and debate. For everyone.

We don’t want to be divided by lies. The Left-Right lie divides us. Consider seeing what we share in common. If you start loving (or even liking) your conservative neighbour or hippie colleague, but miss the passion of blind allegiance? Channel it into your sports teams. They can take it.

When the game is over, though, the majority of us want to go back to a job that, after a hell of a day, month or year, at least provides a dignified working wage. Who doesn’t hope for that for their fellow human being?

We want civil liberties protected—not negotiated away by stoking fear, false labels and fake divisions.

We are not enemies. We are neighbours. We are the 99%, and we deserve better than a rigged debate. More importantly, we need to stop reinforcing it.

It’s not easy to love the loudest voices to death. Let alone change the algorithm. But it’s come to that. We can reject manipulation, cultish obedience, extremism, and a media that thrives on fear. We need to disrupt the elitist status quo.

There is no revolutionary answer, unless love, honesty, courage and community are revolutionary. Maybe it's getting that way.

As conservative economist Thomas Sowell—a human too often captured by ideological framing himself—once said with piercing honesty: “There are no solutions—only trade-offs.”

May some trade-offs become fantastic solutions, open to new ideas and solidarity based on reason and compassion.

Whether we are an evolving species or children of God—or both—we are in this human journey together. Inspire yourself with clarity. Inspire each other with kindness. Could it begin by talking? By Learning? By seeking out points of connections? By remembering all we have in common?

Let our trade-offs be shaped by truth, not cowardly tribalism. Let our compromises be courageous.

Let our politics reflect our complexity—and our deep capacity to care.

We are only divided if we fall for the Big Lie.

We can do better. We are better.

Together.

Note:

This essay is a bird’s-eye, philosophical, and historical reflection—meant to pierce elite propaganda and expose our collective blind spots. I cannot speak for those living the daily realities of this binary—marginalized by income, race, opportunity, historical or ongoing injustice, or the absence of citizenship. But I believe that empathy, the continual rediscovery of our shared humanity, and the fight for strong communities and greater access to justice are essential steps forward.

Pete McCormack

FENTANYL: Who Gains from all this Death?

“We are famous internationally—or, more accurately, we have become infamous—for money laundering. The sheer volume and the size of these transactions on a regular basis in casinos is just astounding.”

                                                    —David Eby, B.C. Premier

“Canada’s legal framework is designed for a domestic, rule-of-law environment. It’s ill-suited to confront global adversaries who don’t play by those rules.” 

—Cal Chrustie, former RCMP senior intelligence officer

“Canada has excellent criminal intelligence. But what RCMP and CSIs know about the CCP’s collusion with the Big Circle Boys and Chil Lop Tse’s super cartel never make it to trial.”

—Sam Cooper, journalist and author, Wilful Blindness

“Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death for people aged 10 to 59 in British Columbia, and account for more deaths than homicides, suicides, accidents, and natural diseases combined. Last year [2024], 2,253 people died from overdose, up from 334 in 2013, giving the province the fifth highest overdose mortality rates of any North American state or province, at 45.7 deaths per 100,000 residents.”

—Nancy MacDonald, the Globe and Mail

My way of explaining the tragic cost of fentanyl begins on two different paths.

One path has US President Donald Trump in full bulldog, threatening punitive tariffs on Canada if the Great White North doesn’t shore up its borders and stop the flow of fentanyl from here into America. 

Two, in contrast to the bluster, we zoom in on the celebrated city of Vancouver, Canada, my hometown. Nestled in the corner of beautiful British Columbia, Vancouver is surrounded by majestic mountains, rain forests and the Pacific Ocean. The city is annually ranked as one of the ten best places in the world to live. 

But not so fast. Inside the borders of Vancouver proper lies a ten-block-corridor known as the Downtown Eastside. This battered burrow is also highly ranked, as one of the most concentrated areas of mass drug addiction in North America. It is a glaring microcosm of what unfolds in cities and towns across Canada and the United States. 

To fight the physical and emotional disarray of the Downtown Eastside, hundreds of millions of tax-paying dollars for both aid and expertise have, for decades, poured into the area. Nonetheless, overdoses have increased alarmingly in recent years. To witness the Downtown Eastside is to get a vision of what a post-apocalyptic metropolis might look like if the only food left was a pool of the most dangerous drugs on the planet. Cocaine. Heroin. Huge amounts of meth amphetamines. And the present king killer…?

Fentanyl. Mixed with whatever.

Developed in 1959, fentanyl is to this day regularly used in anaesthesia and as a frontline painkiller. Fentanyl has also been a street drug for decades. But as a street drug, fentanyl brings maximum destruction only after the Big Pharma tsunami of Oxycontin—from Purdue Pharma mostly—is finally stopped by massive lawsuits and public outrage. With that opiate supply now limited, and countless communities decimated by opioid addiction, old and new addicts alike are jonesing for a new drug to kill the hurt.  This outcome is unintended but predictable—and celebrated by narco-traffickers everywhere. It has a name: The Iron Law of Prohibition. By not managing the removal of an addictive drug, the void is filled with something worse.

Enter a full invasion of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid thirty to fifty times more potent than heroin, and infinitely easier to produce and traffic.

Most discussions about the fentanyl epidemic key on “who loses?” in this horrific scourge; the desperate addicts, struggling tax-payers footing the bill, handcuffed police forces, overwhelmed justice systems and so on. Most proposals focus on drug addicts and gathering politicians, activists, addicts, police chiefs and government officials to debate the pros and cons of select interventions implemented to limit the carnage: do we need more or less drug legalization? More or less policing? More or less housing? More treatment centres? More or less government investment? These are valid questions whose answers for decades have proven to be ideologically led, and for complex reasons and despite good intentions, palpably contentious and insufficient.

As you will see, how could they not be?

I want to ask a different question about fentanyl and its ilk. A question that is almost never asked. A question Donald Trump didn’t specifically ask, and Canada’s leaders rarely touch on, though the evidence is rife. A question whose answer reveals a (not so) hidden, murderous transnational network of criminal organizations that fuels the killing of hundreds of thousands of our sisters and brothers (disproportionately First Nations), overwhelms the justice and medical systems, sharpens social inequality and undermines Canada’s sovereignty and democratic values. Sometimes implicitly backed by dictatorships, these criminal organizations relentlessly entangle themselves in the economy at a level that pushes Canada closer to becoming its own compartmentalized, well-manicured narco state.

So no, the question of our time is not simply, Who loses in this epidemic of drug-addicted death? The question is, Who gains? 

The answer is found using a procedural approach as old as civilization: follow the money. 

For a moment, try this thought experiment. Don’t think of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside as a social catastrophe with many great people trying to make it better. Think of it instead as an unstoppable, super-charged economic engine that would make any Gordon Gekko capitalist blush green. I apologize if this seems cold, but how else would you describe a business that pulls in from one little bedraggled area, hundreds of thousands of dollars of dirty money, every day? Money raised by unpaid, abused and abusing addicts via welfare cheques, selling government-supplied opiates, petty crime, breaking and entering, and much, much worse (drug-dealing and sex work), 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Across the United States, between two and four billion dollars are squeezed from the blood of drug addicts every week. Worldwide, the illegal drug market is worth a half trillion dollars a year.

So where do these illegal dollars go? That is seldom asked. How are these billions of dirty dollars “cleaned” and deposited back into mainstream circulation? The answers are compelling and terrifying.

To provide context, let’s begin with a few jaw-dropping facts. 

In 2017, it was estimated 97% of all fentanyl precursor chemicals were manufactured in and shipped out of China thanks to massive criminal organizations and a wink (and subsidies and/or other incentives) from the Chinese Communist Party.

Oh, and if that 97% number has since dropped, criminal organizations out of India, the Middle East (Iran), and other players enthusiastically create supply for any demand. 

Most of the chemicals and pill presses from China are shipped to Mexico, where major cartels and independent dealers find ingenious ways to refine and ship the product to the rest of North America and beyond: drug mules, U.S postal, airports, you name it.

Some of this murderous cargo also enters Canada and the US through vulnerable and compromised west coast ports, from San Diego to Vancouver. In these cities, Chinese triads, Hells Angels, Mexican cartels, South Asian gangs, Iranian and Middle Eastern criminal networks and other local dealers, lay in wait. Meanwhile, producers of fentanyl and fentanyl-laced drugs are scattered in secret labs all across the Fraser Valley, the interior of the province and beyond. Anybody fancy a trip to the Great Lakes Region?

To launder the billions of dollars of dirty money raised from drug trafficking, the criminals employ banking institutions (Toronto Dominion recently made mega-headlines), flashy casinos (the River Rock Casino in Richmond has been a laundering force of nature), and the strategic purchasing of high end and low end real estate and luxury goods. These massive real estate purchases have, over decades, helped price out the new middle-class from even living in Vancouver, let alone owning a house. To hammer home the degree of criminal activity, the style of money laundering used here in Vancouver is known world-wide as the Vancouver Model. I’m not kidding.

Let’s move on to the illegal underground casinos found in mansions and Vancouver specials bought with Canadian narco-dollars, and underground money laundering banks (look up Richmond’s Silver International and the billions it laundered). These underground enterprises exist above ground, hinting at the syphilitic sores of a burgeoning narco state threatening to become full blown. 

How is this laundering done? Using China as the best example—because it is—a Chinese citizen can take a maximum $50,000 out of the country per year. If that citizen wants to take out, say, $500,000, there is a way. A visit to an “underground” bank in China. The fella deposits the five hundred grand into the underground bank, and hops a plane to Vancouver. This underground bank in China makes cyber-contact with a connected narco-criminal organization in Vancouver. That criminal organization fills a hockey bag with money gathered from desperate addicts on the Downtown Eastside (or wherever), and delivers that bag to, for example, a parking lot at the River Rock Casino in Richmond. The Chinese citizen gets a bag filled with close to $500,000 of dirty money, minus a percentage of the cost of business. It’s baccarat time. The Chinese citizen (possibly with a Canadian passport) walks into the casino, and buys hundreds of thousands in gambling chips. Voila, the money is laundered. The high-rolling gambler—known as a whale—plays a few hands and cashes out. Now it’s even cleaner. Physical money never crosses the Pacific Ocean. This is the Vancouver Model.

With casinos in British Columbia, something like a billion dollars a year funnels back legally into government coffers. Who can say no, despite a significant portion of that pay-out coming from laundered drug money, injected back into pot holes on the Downtown Eastside and a desperate universal health care system? The Robin Hood ghost of Pablo Escobar lives. The money is useful. The irony is sickening.

So the answer to the question, Who gains in this war-by-other-means? is what I’ve tried to clarify for people like myself who, before a research deep dive, knew next to nothing about this deadly state of play. Thank you to journalists like Sam Cooper, Kim Bolan and many others—RCMP officers, many writers and filmmakers, American and Canadian government papers/pdfs, activists, legal cases etc., for the real work—and often significant courage. Also, I want to be crystal clear here: when we talk of China exporting fentanyl precursors or the Chinese Communist Party etc., this has nothing to do with our Asian-Canadian sisters and brothers. They should not be linked in any way, anymore than a South Asian Canadian should be linked to South Asian gangs or a European Canadian to the Hells Angels. That would be preposterous. We are Canadian, and in this fight together.

As for narco-trafficking, money laundering and foreign interference in Canada? What I’ve learned is a wake up scream, a revelation, a call to action to non-partisan leaders—in other words, leaders with moral integrity—to stop this murderous web of violent, high-tech, local and transnational corruption. This “business” is profit-at-any-cost, and the collective death of countless people, not to mention the rule of law and democracy, are nothing more than what economists call an externality—an unfortunate by-product of business as usual. 

This deadly, cold-hearted business must be revealed, and limited. When will foreign narco-trafficking in Canada be taken seriously by the Canadian government? If politicians won’t even say, let alone do something, and the RCMP, Intelligence Services and the law courts aren’t empowered enough to make a real difference, maybe public outrage is the needed catalyst and last hope. We are not just witnessing a crisis, we are witnessing a multinational crime scene.

For anybody who cares about our children now, or the future of democracy, an informed call to action cannot be made soon enough.

Selected Further reading:

Sam Cooper: Wilful Blindness: How a Criminal Network of Narcos, Tycoons and CCP Agents Infiltrated the West

Sam Cooper: The Bureau

Ben Westhoff: Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic

Kim Bolan (Journalist) See, for example Why Canada is a a Global Refuge for Hells Angels and other Gangs

Scott McGregor, Ina Mitchell: The Mosaic Effect: How the Chinese Communist Party Started a Hybrid War in America’s Backyard

Gary Clement: Under Cover: Inside the Shady World of Organized Crime and the R.C.M.P.

The Cullen Commision: Commission of Inquiry Into Money Laundering in British Columbia

Peter German: Dirty Money

Cal Chrustie: MLI: Hybrid threats, broken borders, and organized chaos—transnational organized crime in Canada: Inside Policy Q&A with Cal Chrustie

Pete McCormack