Welcome back to the podcast, bribes, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogge.

Today I'm speaking with Bob Mackin in Vancouver.

Bob is a multimedia journalist and the author of a three-part case study produced for Trace

on the occasionally shady influence of Chinese money in Canada.

Bob, thank you for joining me.

Thank you.

Why don't we start by having you set the scene a little bit on the ties between Beijing and Vancouver?

Well, here we are in Vancouver, the west coast of Canada.

For several decades, governments as well as businesses

have been encouraging greater ties, cultural ties, trade ties with other Asian-Pacific countries.

Vancouver has a long, colorful history of Chinese immigration, immigration from Hong Kong

and Taiwan, too, that goes back to the 19th century and in recent years we

had World's Fair back in 1986 exploity-6 and one of the reasons for that was to put Vancouver

on the map for tourism trade real estate especially with Asia Pacific and then we had the 2010 Winter Olympics, which wasn't just a sporting event.

It was really a business event, a political event.

It was an event that also promoted Vancouver to the wider world.

It happened an interesting time in history.

It was a couple of years after the 2008 world economic crisis and also a couple years after the Beijing Olympics.

It was at a period of time when Canada was selling a lot of natural resources to China so it could go through a major infrastructure building binge, you could say.

And Olympics, a mega event was the common denominator for

Beijing. And the one right after that was here in Vancouver in the winter of 2010.

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