Wilful Blindness by Sam Cooper

Author:Sam Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2021-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

My investigative mindset starts with the mode of questioning known as Ockham’s Razor. Often the simplest explanation is the right one.

In 2015 Vancouver real estate was skyrocketing. And all indications pointed to capital flight from China. And yet, China had strict export controls of $50,000 per person. Chinese citizens could take no more than $50,000 outside the country each year. So how was all this money ending up in Vancouver? My instinct was to follow the big money and the big players.

In private, big developers told me about 30 cents of every real estate dollar in B.C. came from Mainland China. The realtors in Vancouver were aiming all their marketing at Chinese investors. There was a speculative frenzy. In private, realtors would talk about buyers with suitcases of cash.

But when they were quoted in newspaper stories most B.C. developers and big politicians denied offshore investment was a factor in Vancouver real estate prices. The vehement denials tended to make you think offshore money was actually the primary factor driving prices. You only had to look at a historical price chart for Vancouver homes. Clearly, prices started to curve above trend line in 1988. And they never came back. This was right around the time of Expo 86, when big chunks of downtown Vancouver were sold to the Hong Kong tycoons Stanley Ho, Cheng Yu Tung and Li Ka Shing. At the time, most in Vancouver acted like pennies were raining from heaven.

But a Vancouver professor named Donald Gutstein found the Social Credit government of the day had sold Expo 86 lands for pennies on the dollar. This was about one-sixth of downtown Vancouver. The Washington Post did a story called “The New Hongs of Vancouver.” The reporters detailed how Canada was courting big money from Asia, and Toronto and Vancouver were being transformed, but in different ways. Toronto was drawing mostly middle-class migrants from Hong Kong. But Vancouver was welcoming Hong Kong’s old money. Fortunes that in some cases could be traced all the way back to the days of Jardine and Matheson.

“Foremost among the wealthy arrivals is Li Ka-shing,” the Post reported, in 1992. “Other big-name Chinese investors in Vancouver include Stanley Ho Hungsun, a Macau gambling and real estate magnate said to be worth $1.2 billion; Cheng Yu-tung, Hong Kong’s largest diamond dealer, who owns the sprawling Ramada hotel chain and Vancouver’s Meridien and New World Harborside hotels.”

This was fine for United States reporters to write. But my Vancouver Sun colleague Doug Todd told me that Canadian reporters of the era were called xenophobes or worse for daring to write about Hong Kong money. And the pushback, Todd told me, was directed by Vancouver developers. And it goes without saying. No one was writing about the uncomfortable proximity of Triads and the Chinese state to the New Hongs of Vancouver.

And 25 years later, when I really started drilling down into the story, the money was flowing straight from the river’s head: Mainland China. But unlike the Hong Kong tycoons, the Mainland China players had little or no public profile.

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