Sam Cooper

Vancouver police say they have seized a grenade launcher, four guns, and nearly 500 grams of fentanyl and other hard drugs from a fortified Downtown Eastside rooming house that was allegedly feeding a synthetic opioid supply line through the city’s most drug-ravaged blocks.

“Task Force Barrage has come to an end, but our work to curb violence and disrupt organized crime in the Downtown Eastside continues,” Sergeant Steve Addison said, adding “the proliferation of violence and weapons in some residential buildings continues to put the neighbourhood at risk.”

The latest investigation began November 13, when a 42-year-old man suffered serious injuries in an assault near Carrall Street and East Cordova and was taken to hospital. Officers followed leads to a rooming house at 50 East Cordova Street, in the heart of a street-level open drug market that has become notorious in photos and news clips around the world.

On November 18, police say they uncovered a stockpile of illicit drugs, guns and weapons in three rooms of the East Cordova building. According to Addison, there are signs that parts of the property, which is supposed to house low-income residents, were repurposed as a hub to store weapons and distribute contraband throughout the neighbourhood, with some areas “fortified with countersurveillance measures to avoid detection from law enforcement.”

Items seized include four firearms, two imitation guns, a grenade launcher, a firearm suppressor, seven machetes, four flare guns, bullwhips, baseball bats, body armour, handcuffs and ammunition. Officers also seized 486 grams of fentanyl, cannabis, Dilaudid pills and methamphetamine – a quantity police say represents more than 2,500 single doses.

Meanwhile, in a separate update posted November 26 — the day before VPD announced the Cordova Street raid — Vancouver Fire Rescue Services said that on Tuesday, November 21, firefighters responded to 54 overdoses, the highest single-day total in the department’s history. The service said it averaged about 16 overdose calls per day in May, but that figure has surged in recent weeks, and during the most recent income-assistance week, firefighters were averaging roughly 45 overdose responses per day.

While police have not publicly linked the East Cordova seizure to any specific cartel, the mix of fentanyl, fortified real estate and a small armoury of weapons closely tracks the profile of a separate, high-profile British Columbia case in which provincial authorities say a Sinaloa Cartel–aligned cell embedded itself just south of Vancouver.

In that case, a civil forfeiture lawsuit alleged a Sinaloa Cartel–linked fentanyl and cocaine trafficking group set up in a multi-million-dollar mansion near the U.S. border, capable of negotiating major cocaine import deals with Ismael Garcia—known as “El Mayo”—the reputed Sinaloa Cartel chief. According to the filings, the Canada-based syndicate involved at least three men, and belonged to a violent drug trafficking organization that “used and continues to use violence, or threats of violence, to achieve its aims.”

Investigators alleged the Surrey-based group trafficked ketamine, methamphetamine, Xanax, oxycodone, MDMA and fentanyl. “As part of these efforts, the drug trafficking organization has agreed to, and made arrangements to, purchase cocaine from the Cártel de Sinaloa in Mexico,” the filings stated. They added: “the Sinaloa Cartel is a terrorist entity, and the government of Canada listed it as such on February 20, 2025.”

RCMP said they uncovered a substantial cache of weapons and narcotics during a search of the Surrey property on 77th Avenue on September 23, 2024. Opioids seized from the mansion included 400 grams of counterfeit Xanax, 810 oxycodone pills, 5.5 grams of fentanyl and nearly a kilogram of Ecstasy. The province is now seeking forfeiture of the house, which sits about 20 minutes from the Peace Arch border crossing north of Seattle.

Court submissions detailed an arsenal of 23 weapons – ten handguns, two sawed-off shotguns, two hunting rifles, seven assault rifles (two reportedly fitted with screw-on suppressors), and a speargun – alongside about 3.5 kilograms of ketamine and methamphetamine hidden in a compartment in one suspect’s room, hundreds of counterfeit alprazolam pills, a stash of oxycodone, and nearly CAD 15,000 in bundled cash “not consistent with standard banking practices.”

Viewed together, the Downtown Eastside raid and the Surrey mansion case sketch out different ends of what appears to be the same continuum, ultimately pointing to senior criminal leaders in Mexico and China.

Probe of membership drives and cash “rewards” echo patterns flagged years ago — in the Liberal Party and beyond. The system still invites abuse.

An alleged vote-buying scandal in Quebec’s Liberal Party is dredging up the same vulnerabilities that two landmark inquiries – one federal, one provincial – have already warned Canadians about.

The new crisis engulfing the Quebec Liberals focuses on Justin Trudeau’s former Quebec lieutenant and long-time Liberal MP Pablo Rodriguez, a heavyweight organizer within Canada’s most successful political machine, going back to his days in the Liberal youth wing.

The latest escalation – including early “validations” by Quebec’s anti-corruption unit, UPAC – comes in the wake of a journalistic investigation by Quebecor’s Bureau d’enquête revealing that Élections Québec is in possession of text messages between two people who allegedly worked to elect Rodriguez as Liberal leader last spring. According to those reports, the messages suggest that some party members who supported Rodriguez were “rewarded with money” in connection with their votes and membership cards. A follow-up explainer says the exchanges involved campaigners discussing sums spent so people would vote for him.

On Thursday, the Quebecor outlet reported that two UPAC investigators had visited the home of Marwah Rizqy – the party’s former parliamentary leader, recently ousted from caucus after a clash with Rodriguez – to take her statement, opening an early-stage probe that could touch on corruption, breach of trust, collusion, fraud, influence-peddling and related offences. On X, Rodriguez asked the force to “shed full light” on the affair and “lay the appropriate charges” if any illegal or unethical acts are confirmed.

Rodriguez’s response has followed a now-familiar Liberal crisis pattern. The Quebec Liberals have sent a formal legal notice to Le Journal de Montréal, whose Bureau d’enquête team broke the story, demanding the names of the people involved, the phone numbers linked to the texts, and an explanation of how the newspaper verified their authenticity – a move that has drawn a sharp defence of source protection from the paper’s editor. At the same time, the party has mandated former Quebec Superior Court chief justice Jacques R. Fournier to conduct what it says will be an independent investigation into the messages.

At the federal level, the Hogue Commission on foreign interference focused on Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, probing whether Ottawa had downplayed interference from hostile states, including China and India, for partisan reasons.

Evidence before the inquiry also showed that the Conservative Party and the NDP faced their own vulnerabilities in internal leadership and nomination races.

Justice Marie-Josée Hogue warned that party nomination contests and leadership races can be “gateways” for foreign interference – vulnerable points where hostile states can tilt our democracy out of public view. A decade earlier, the Charbonneau Commission – launched under then-premier Jean Charest’s Liberal government – concluded that illegal political financing was a key mechanism that allowed corruption and, in some cases, organized crime to penetrate Quebec’s construction sector, public contracts and party machines.

Taken together, these inquiries should have made one lesson unavoidable: the moments when parties quietly decide who gets to run, and how they are chosen, are not private-club rituals. They are national-security vulnerabilities.

Élections Québec has also confirmed something shocking, but not surprising for anyone who followed the Hogue hearings: under the current provincial Election Act, it is not explicitly illegal to pay someone in exchange for their vote in a party leadership race.

Hogue’s foreign interference inquiry also showed that Liberal Party nomination rules allowed non-citizens, including international students as young as 14, to sign up as members and vote in candidate nomination contests. Élections Québec has explained that, in the context of a leadership contest, the law does not create an offence for a person who offers money to an elector to vote a certain way – whereas in a general election or by-election, such conduct is banned and punishable by hefty fines. The same statute that rightly criminalizes vote-buying in public elections says nothing when the vote is inside a party – even when the contest is to select a potential premier.

Another strand concerns the role of federal Liberal MP Fayçal El-Khoury. As first reported in La Presse, Élections Québec is examining a conversation between El-Khoury and Marwah Rizqy at a November 14 event, because of a possible link to Rodriguez’s leadership bid. Initially, El-Khoury told La Presse he had no involvement in the race. Subsequent Quebecor reporting showed he in fact held a solicitor’s certificate – and had been authorized to collect donations for Rodriguez’s campaign, a role Rodriguez later confirmed.

Here again, the structural vulnerability matters as much as the individuals. Solicitor certificates are recorded with Élections Québec, but the lists of who holds them are not public. Only the party and the elections authority know who is empowered to raise money for leadership candidates. Without investigative reporting, the fact that a federal MP was fundraising for a provincial leadership contender – one who, like Rodriguez, is also a former federal Liberal minister – would likely never have surfaced.

Much of the evidence in the early days of the Rodriguez affair is contested, and all parties are entitled to a presumption of innocence.

But the established facts already suggest a textbook example of how poorly Canada’s laws and institutions have internalized past lessons: party nominations and leadership races remain black boxes for potential corruption, yet are still not treated like election-day voting in legal or regulatory terms.

While federal Liberals now seek to draw a hard line between themselves and their provincial cousins, the overlap of political machinery between the two parties in Quebec is hard to deny, and it points back to Rodriguez’s central role in Trudeau’s government.

Rodriguez, a former transport minister for Trudeau, was part of a government still haunted by ethical questions over Trudeau’s alleged pressure on former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould to defer a prosecution against Quebec-based engineering giant SNC-Lavalin.

Wilson-Raybould later testified that the prime minister and senior officials repeatedly raised electoral considerations in Quebec when urging her to revisit the SNC-Lavalin file – including Trudeau’s remark, in a key September 2018 meeting, that there was an election coming up and that he was “an MP in Quebec.”

As The Hill Times put it in 2024, “Rodriguez’s potential departure would leave a huge gap in [the] Liberal electoral machine in Quebec,” and the same column described him as deeply embedded in Quebec’s political world and widely regarded as a highly effective organizer across the province.

There are no allegations, at this stage, of foreign interference or corrupt actors in the Rodriguez leadership race. But the developing facts lay bare exactly the kind of weakly regulated, low-visibility contests that Hogue singled out, and they show that, roughly a decade after Charbonneau’s final report in 2015, Quebec still tolerates a culture of what francophone media call “fling-flang” – loosely translated as backroom shenanigans – around political money that erodes public confidence and leaves the door open to serious threats.