We Don't Have to Trade With China, Part Deux

But I repeat myself:

The whistleblower, a Canadian business school graduate, was staggered by the suspicious home loans he discovered in 2022 when he joined a mortgage approval team in a small HSBC branch on the outskirts of Toronto. 

He knew of suspicions surrounding Chinese capital in British Columbia real estate, but had never witnessed shady lending while working at an HSBC branch in Campbell River, a bucolic town on the coast of Vancouver Island.

When he arrived at HSBC’s bank in Aurora, an affluent suburb north of Toronto, he discovered explosive growth in home loans to Chinese diaspora buyers during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Chinese migrants living across Toronto were obtaining mortgages from HSBC while supposedly earning extravagant salaries from remote-work jobs in China. In one example, an Ontario casino worker that owned three homes also claimed to earn $345,000 in 2020 analyzing data remotely for a Beijing company. 

Before joining HSBC Canada, the whistleblower had studied fake-income mortgage frauds for his Business Masters degree at Vancouver Island University. After arriving at Aurora in February 2022, while digging into the branch’s loan books and interrogating his colleagues, he made mind-blowing assessments.

Since 2015, the whistleblower concluded, more than 10 Toronto-area HSBC branches had issued at least $500-million in home loans to diaspora buyers claiming exaggerated incomes or non-existent jobs in China. 

These foreign-income scams spiked during the pandemic, the whistleblower believed, because borrowers could somewhat plausibly claim to be working remotely in other countries while riding out Covid-19 in Canada.

While a small bank of Aurora’s size was expected to issue about $23-million in residential loans every year, this branch had shovelled out $88-million in mortgages in 2020, according to the whistleblower, and over $50-million in 2021.

The whistleblower, whomThe Bureau is calling D.M., immigrated to Canada as an international student from India, making him a minority among mostly Chinese-Canadian co-workers at the Aurora branch. 

As D.M. probed his colleagues, his belief gained conviction, that HSBC Canada and other Canadian banks including CIBC had systemic problems with highly questionable mortgages issued to diaspora buyers with unverified sources of wealth in China.

Losing sleep, in April 2022, D.M. sent an audacious email to senior bank executives: “I am going to reveal potential mortgage fraud at HSBC Bank Canada and possibly some employees benefited from the fraud, financially pocketing thousands of dollars, which I call the proceeds of crime.”

 **

The verdict has already been decided, Pierre:

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said Canada’s public inquiry into foreign interference had gotten off to “a very bad start” as a human rights group withdrew its participation and the Tories were denied full standing.

The inquiry, focused on probing alleged election meddling, concluded its first set of public hearings last week.

Mr. Poilievre referenced the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project’s (URAP) withdrawal from participation in the inquiry on the third day of public hearings on Jan. 31. The human rights group, representing ethnic minorities targeted by Beijing, protested the commission’s granting of full standing to politicians accused of ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which would allow them to question witnesses.

**

No one wants EVs.

This isn't a boast. 

It's an admission of idiocy:

Canada has overtaken China for the first time in BloombergNEF’s global lithium-ion battery supply chain ranking, claiming the top spot among 30 nations.

China fell to second place in 2024 after dominating the annual analysis for the past three years. Canada rose from second place last year to claim the top spot for the first time. The United States ranked third this year.

While Canada produces only a tiny fraction of China’s lithium-ion battery output today, the BloombergNEF analysis is focused on future battery supply chains.

“Canada’s consistent manufacturing and production advances, and strong ESG credentials, have helped it become a leader in forming the battery supply chains of the future,” BloombergNEF wrote in a summary of the results published on Monday.

The win for Canada in 2024 comes as the federal government pours billions of dollars into support programs to expand domestic electric vehicle battery manufacturing.