Money-laundering report paints ugly picture of B.C.
Attorney General connects dots between drugs, casinos and soaring housing costs
It’s an ugly picture of British Columbia twisted and transformed into a gangster’s paradise.
Unchecked criminal money-laundering in B.C. casinos. Scores of drug users killed by deadly opioids peddled by ruthless dealers.
And the crooks pouring their dirty money into the Metro Vancouver housing market, inflating the price of homes beyond reach of people in their own city.
Attorney General David Eby connected all three points in a dark devil’s triangle of crime at a remarkable news conference on Wednesday.
“This is serious crime with serious consequences,” Eby said, as he released a bombshell report entitled Dirty Money, by former RCMP deputy commissioner Peter German.
“Money laundering in casinos is linked to the real-estate market and housing prices here that have made life unaffordable,” Eby said.
“It is tied to the opioid crisis that has taken thousands of people from their families.”
The report was not supposed to find blame. German was asked to sift through the mess and recommend ways to clean it up, not point out those responsible.
But then Eby did just that anyway, thrusting an accusatory finger at the previous Liberal government.
“The German report paints a troubling picture of a government that didn’t respond effectively to pervasive money laundering,” Eby said.
“They didn’t effectively detect, prevent or prosecute it. They turned a blind eye to it.”
As Eby laid out his evidence — complete with shocking surveillance video of shady characters unpacking bags of money in casinos — the NDP spin machine sprang into action on social media.
“Fentanyl trafficking. Money laundering. Skyrocketing housing prices. It’s all connected,” the New Democrats posted on Twitter over a picture of Liberal Leader Andrew Wilkinson and former premier Christy Clark.
The Liberals were furious. “He is sensationalizing the issue,” fumed Liberal MLA Jas Johal, who desperately demanded to know why no money launderers were arrested and charged if things were so bad.
“Where’s the beef?” Johal asked. “Now that David Eby has made this public, where are the arrests?”
But it came off as an unconvincing plea for mercy from a political party that ruled for 16 years, but did little to stop the madness.
In fact, there’s plenty of evidence that the Liberals did lots to encourage it.
Back in 2015 — when the Liberals were in power and money laundering reached its zenith in the casinos — the
government openly bragged about luring high-rolling gamblers from China.
“They do come in with bags full of money for their buy-ins,” Jim Lightbody, the president of the B.C. Lottery Corp., told Victoria Times Colonist reporter Lindsay Kines at the time.
Part of the corporation’s strategy to bring in big-betting foreigners: they set up 135 private “salons” in the casinos and raised the betting limit to $100,000 on a hand of baccarat.
As the casino cashiers kept busy snapping rubber bands off all those gangster rolls of cash, the price of Metro Vancouver housing was soaring through the stratosphere.
But the Liberal government’s initial reaction on the housing affordability crisis was to ignore it. They didn’t want to mess around with the soaring equity enjoyed by homeowners, many of them Liberal voters.
All the while, the body count from drug overdoses got higher and higher.
Is it unfair to pin this unholy trinity of troubles exclusively on the deposed Liberal government? Perhaps. But that won’t stop the New Democrats from heaping the blame anyway.
Now Eby is launching a second phase of money-laundering investigation, this one into the real-estate sector. You can bet another probe will uncover more dirty deeds. And the blame game against the Liberals will continue.
The Liberals will fire back. They will say they tried their best to keep the gangsters out of the casinos and the foreign loot out of the grotesquely distorted housing market.
But the NDP will say it was B.C. voters who decided last year that they had seen enough.
“The responsibility lies with government and the government has been removed,” Eby said. “The era of inaction and denial is over.”
It’s a brutal political indictment. Eby is showing a rare skill at prosecuting it. The Liberals will have a tough time defending it.