Sam Cooper was asked a short question on The Really Big Show. Are we at war with China? He said yes. He said the war has run for more than ten years. He listed election interference, crime sponsored inside Canada, cyber attacks, and the theft of Nortel’s intellectual property, later tied in his telling to Huawei. Then he drew the line that the headline usually drops. It is hybrid war. It stops short of kinetic war. Kinetic means bullets, bombs, and troops. He thinks that line is getting closer. He does not think it has been crossed.
This piece has one idea. The danger Cooper is naming is not an American march north. It is a public argument that teaches Canadians to fear the wrong border. In his view, that fear helps the hybrid campaign he says China, and also Russia and Iran, have already been running. A claim that large is only useful if you keep his distinction. War, in his mouth, is not a landing craft. It is interference, money, crime, stolen technology, and a story about who the enemy is. Readers can reject the word war. They should not blur the two meanings.
The interview aired in early October 2026. Jim Csek and Iain Burns hosted. Cooper is an investigative reporter who publishes at The Bureau. What follows is his case, and the places where a case is still an assessment. It is not a finding by a court. It is not a reason to buy or sell a stock, a currency, or a mine.
The border he says is real
Csek opened on a Mark Carney interview in New York. The prime minister had worried aloud about an invasion from the United States. He had not, in the hosts’ hearing, talked about China. Cooper’s first answer was about NORAD, not about a conspiracy board. Canada and the United States share a military system. The forces are built to work together. He says he speaks with nonpartisan Canadian and American officers. His claim from those talks is plain. Canada cannot defend its own shores against China or Russia alone. The threat those officers are working, he said, is in the north, and the partner in that work is the American military.
He does not claim Washington has been polite. He called some American comments careless. He has written at The Bureau that President Trump’s talk of Canada as a 51st state moved into the Canadian mainstream, and that the Liberals used it to elect Carney. He would not clear Washington. He would not treat the fear as a military fact. About eight months before this interview, he said, the Globe and Mail ran a front-page story on the chance that America might invade, with unnamed senior staff from Carney’s circle involved. Hours later, he said, Carney spoke in Davos about a rupture with the United States. Cooper’s job, as he describes it, is to sort a real threat from a story that a foreign power would be happy to see spread. An invasion from the south is, in his words, improbable and never going to happen. A hybrid campaign from the other direction is the file he has worked for years.
Burns later pressed the election line. Cooper had said, on another day, that Carney won in the middle of a Chinese psychological operation that supported him. On this show he tied that line to what he calls cognitive fog. Trump’s 51st-state talk, he said, began as trolling of Justin Trudeau over Canada’s low share of NATO spending, including remarks that became public after a private meeting at Mar-a-Lago. The baton then passed from Trudeau to Carney. Tens of percent of Canadians, in Cooper’s account of the mood, came to think an American attack was a live chance. He believes China and Russia gain when that is the fear in the room. He cited Raquel Garbers, a former Canadian defence official. She wrote, he said, that Ottawa’s anti-American message was helping Canada’s real enemies. She was fired. He pointed readers to his reporting on her legal case rather than retrying it on air. Her op-ed, as he summarized it, told Canadian leaders to name China and Russia. Carney, he said, is not naming them. Misleading the public about the real threat is, in Cooper’s belief, help for what he calls China’s shadow war.
What he counts as the war
Hybrid warfare, in the way he used it, is a stack. Election interference. Crime used as a tool. Destabilizing a country from inside. Cyber war. Stealing a company’s intellectual property. He added a wider map that is not only Chinese. A threatened base in Britain, or drones over a German airport, can be Russia, with Iran or China in the background, trying to sap the West’s effort in Ukraine. He said a former Canadian general has warned that a larger war is closer than it has been. He said the kinetic threat is approaching quickly. He did not say Chinese troops are in Canadian streets.
The British comparison is the part of his argument that does not depend on a Canadian prime minister’s tone. He described an MI5 public alert. China’s Ministry of State Security, the alert said in his retelling, was using a hundred or more British academics to move university intellectual property, paid for by taxpayers, toward China’s civilian spy service. The warning told academics they could go to jail if they kept working with a named company. It was not, he said, a one-off. British and American counter-intelligence have been making public warnings of that kind since 2022. The same year, MI5 named Christine Lee, a lawyer in Britain, as a front, according to the alert, for donations from China and Hong Kong into British politics at a high level.
Cooper’s contrast is blunt. This kind of public alert, naming people, does not happen in Canada. He says his own reporting shows people in Vancouver and Toronto with deep ties to the Chinese military, the Ministry of State Security, or the United Front Work Department, who donate to Canadian politicians, and that nothing comparable follows. He said leaked documents and quiet conversations with national-security sources supported a story he had already published. What Britain knew was happening in its parliament was happening in Canada. Canada was not acting. In 2022 the CSIS director was David Vigneault. Cooper says investigators were pushing senior managers for a British-style burn notice. The Trudeau government, in that account, was not answering the interference. He believes the block sits with the prime minister, his office, and a small slice of cabinet. A director could sit across from the prime minister, name a politician and a gangster, and still see nothing done in public. Lower-level officers, he believes, then press their own bosses for a warning a lawyer has cleared.
He offered one public witness rather than another anonymous leak. Former Vancouver mayor Kennedy Stewart has said CSIS officers in the region came to him during the 2022 city election, and that those officers told him Ottawa was not acting. Cooper has also reported that Stewart believes Premier David Eby knows a B.C. cabinet minister is the subject of national-security investigations tied to China. Eby, Cooper noted, has not acknowledged that in public. A listener can treat Stewart’s comments as a lead, not as a verdict. Cooper was careful enough to say the premier has not confirmed it. A careful reader should be at least that careful.
The long bet, as he tells it
Asked whether anti-American feeling in Canada is being used by China, Cooper said he believes it is. He did not claim a single new intercept. He threaded two books and a set of business ties. Jonathan Manthorpe’s Claws of the Panda, he said, argues that Power Corporation and the Business Council of Canada were treated, in Liberal prime ministers’ offices, as authors of Canada’s China policy. At The Bureau he has written that the Desmarais family, and especially the years of Jean Chrétien, sat in direct business relationships with princeling families of the Chinese Communist Party. Leaked CSIS documents, in his description, cast some of those ties as fronts for the Chinese military. That is his reading of leaked paper. It is not a document this article has re-read.
He said he walked the same map at the Hudson Institute in Washington this past spring, for former national-security officials. Carney, Chrétien, and others tied to the Power Corporation world, he told that room, keep tight links with China. The inference he offered the hosts was circumstantial, and he called it that. Chinese intelligence, in this theory, used private business ties, then used Canada as a channel and a wedge against the United States. A circumstantial case is a hypothesis with a trail. It is not a charge.
The older trail, he said, is in Dennis Molinaro’s book Under Assault. Molinaro is a historian and a former Canadian national-security analyst. Cooper summarized a chapter on Mao and a senior spy chief. The documents, in that account, show Chinese leaders laughing that they had cultivated Pierre Trudeau, steered Ottawa toward official relations with Beijing, and cut Taiwan. Mao’s line, as Cooper quoted the book, was that China had a friend on America’s doorstep. If that history is right, the cultivation started long before Carney. If a listener only starts the clock in 2025, they will miss the point Cooper thinks matters. The method is patient. It aims at people who already believe trade with China is the sophisticated view.
Elite capture, and the sentence he would not finish
Burns asked whether the method has a name. Cooper used the one common in this literature. Elite capture. Take people whose careers were built on an internationalist trade story. Dominic Barton, Carney, and, in the same breath, Americans such as Michael Bloomberg and Larry Summers. Their framework, he said, did not grow in a vacuum. Chinese intelligence interests spread a great deal of it. Carney as prime minister is, in Cooper’s phrase, a Canada-China Business Council prime minister, with backing from eastern Canadian interests that have traded with the top of the Chinese Communist Party for four decades.
The financial version is the part that touches money rather than speeches. Csek raised Carney’s talk of currencies and of borrowing tied to China. Cooper said a leader who urges the world toward China’s financial system, and toward a more central global currency, is a problem for any American president. The dollar, he said, is the first pillar of the Western order. Nobody would hand reserve-currency power to Russia or Iran. Those are states the dollar system is used to sanction. He asked why China would be different. If Beijing had more say over Canada’s financial system, let alone the world’s, it could freeze accounts. He named Joseph Tay as a person already targeted by what he called transnational lawfare. A sanction that works through banks does not need a ship. That is as close as this interview came to a market mechanic. It is still a political claim about who can turn the tap off.
He tied Carney to Jin Liqun, the banker who ran the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and to dealings he says Carney and others shared with that world. If Communist Party bankers do business with Barton and Carney, Cooper said he is almost certain they arrive with intelligence coaching. That coaching, plus deals that enrich, is how he thinks a politician arrives at these positions. Almost certain is not a document. It is the strongest personal inference he offered before the last question.
Burns asked whether that makes Carney a globalist, a self-interested friend of Beijing, and not a Canadian patriot. Cooper refused the last step. He would not go that far. He would say Carney fits, with Barton, in the category of a captured elite, and that he has questions to answer. Canadians who still think the durable relationship is the one with the United States, he said, can feel that relationship being damaged. Garbers, again, is his witness, and she was fired after the op-ed. Then Csek tried a harder yes-or-no. If the question is whether Carney is compromised, including over the borrowing, what is the answer? Cooper said yes. He added that qualifying the yes would take another hour of evidence. Csek mentioned “a hundred confirmed conflicts” and moved on. The hundred is the host’s number, not a count Cooper itemized on this tape.
Hold those two answers together. He will say captured. He will say compromised, with a footnote the length of another show. He will not say the prime minister is not a patriot. A viewer who clips only the yes has a slogan. A viewer who keeps the footnote has a reporting job still unfinished, including by Cooper, on this hour. He told them the evidence lives at The Bureau. An interview is not the archive.
Why the questions are not asked
Csek asked why Canadian media are quiet on the China file. Cooper’s answer was access and subsidy. Outlets that get in front of Carney are, he said, funded in a real sense by the Liberal government. Without the subsidy they would not exist at their current scale. Access reporting, in Ottawa, means you print the statement and you do not ask what it costs. He gave some credit. Terry Newman at the National Post, and Brian Lilley, have said there is a problem. Most, he said, are not asking the second and third questions. Burns added that many of the interviews look staged, often with foreign media, and that the people granted the microphone can end up as useful idiots. That last phrase is the host’s, and it is harsher than Cooper’s.
Cooper said American officials have asked him how Canadians do not notice they are getting a sliver. Some of those officials, he said, see parts of Canadian corporate media as a tool for government messaging. He offered one episode rather than a theory of all newsrooms. A person running against Carney was removed from contention, supposedly for national-security reasons, and learned of it from a television host before hearing it themselves. He called the line between government and some broadcasters too close. He also said he has a concrete worry about his own role. A parliamentary committee, in his account, was used by an elected official to attack him as a China specialist. He filed a letter. The reply, as he described it, said parliamentarians should not wave active legal issues involving Sam Cooper. He kept the paper. He said he may use it if he has to go after politicians. He described a separate episode around Margaret McCuaig-Johnston, in which he believes the floor-crosser Michael Ma used a seat to attack a critic of China. Cooper says he has asked Ma questions and received no answer, and that he has several document-based stories on that file. Until a reader opens those stories, the names are leads. They are not, in this article, proven misuse of Parliament.
He bundled a wider fear about who counts as a journalist. He mentioned Mark Miller and the arguments around Bill C-34, the mixing of real worries about children on the internet with a government interest in which reporters are accredited. He said he could talk for ten shows about that bill. He said his concern is legitimate and concrete. The hosts said they share it. A press law is a separate fight from a spy service. Cooper’s link is that both decide who is allowed to describe the threat in public.
The White House picture the hosts held up was their own contrast, not his investigation. In the briefing room, reporters were on top of the president. Carney, Burns said, keeps a safe distance from the people who might ask a hard question. Cooper granted that some of Trump’s words are beyond the pale, and that those words have bent Canadian politics in a bad direction. He also said the picture shows a man who comes back and takes the questions. Csek asked whether Carney’s government, or Eby’s, would survive that level of scrutiny, given closed committees and missing files. Cooper said the missing piece is not a spicy opinion. It is the place where people still try to get information good enough to make a choice. He thinks subsidized news has largely stopped being that place. He also thinks Eby may have hit the anti-Trump button once too often, in a way so absurd that voters start to look again at older stories from Cooper’s years at the Vancouver Province and the Vancouver Sun. That is a hope about attention. It is not a poll.
What a careful reader should not do with this hour
Do not promote his yes into a conviction. Compromised, captured, and guilty of a crime are three different claims. He made the first two, in his own voice, and he withheld the patriot charge. He did not walk through bank records on this show. He invited another hour. Anyone who writes “Carney is a Chinese asset” has left the interview and started a different piece. This one will not do that.
Do not dismiss the hybrid list because the word war feels hot. Election interference, united-front donations, cyber theft, and a refusal to name targets in public can all be true, or partly true, without a war existing in the legal sense. Britain’s choice to name Christine Lee and to warn academics is a fact pattern he is using as a control. Canada’s choice not to issue that kind of alert is the variable. You can argue the Canadian choice is prudence, libel law, or a weaker case. You cannot argue he failed to say what he thinks the variable is. He thinks the prime minister’s office will not allow the alert.
Do not treat the American relationship as a mood. His practical claim is narrow. NORAD is the defence Canada actually has. Rhetoric that paints the partner as the invader, while the hybrid file stays off the podium, changes what the public will fund and what it will fear. Garbers lost her job, in his telling, for saying the enemies are China and Russia. If that telling holds, the cost of the sentence is part of the story. If it does not hold, his strongest recent example falls over. The op-ed and the firing are checkable. They should be checked before they are worn as a banner.
Do not ignore the money sentence just because this is a politics interview. A reserve currency is a weapon because it can freeze. His Joseph Tay example is the small version. His objection to a larger Chinese role in the monetary system is the large version. Investors who care about the dollar, about sanctions, or about whether a Canadian borrower is leaning on Chinese state banks are in the same argument, whether or not they like his tone. He did not give a price target. He gave a reason the pipes matter. Who can close an account is a political fact with a financial result.
Why he says he keeps going
Burns asked what motivates him. Cooper called himself a patriot and then refused a cartoon. The people in charge, on his account, are not simply traitors. Some are captured. Capture can look like a career. His own reason, he said, is getting deeper as he builds The Bureau toward a print arm. He may one day write a family story. His father came from a prairie merchant family in Saskatchewan. The Cooper store was sold to a co-op. There was money. His father was sent toward Davos and a Swiss school, saw the elite path, and became a minister instead of a diplomat or a big businessman. Cooper thinks he inherited both habits. One is knowing how that world talks. The other is wanting a moral ground under the talk. Further back, he has been reading an ancestor, a French Protestant from the Dutch coast, who in the 1600s went to England to drain the Fens for the king and then stood up to local elites he thought were stealing wages from the Dutch engineers. Cooper wonders if the digging is old. He laughed as he said it. The hosts did not press him into a slogan.
The useful part of that answer is the limit he put on himself a few minutes earlier. He will call a prime minister captured. He will not call him an enemy of the country. The work he thinks is left is questions. There are, he and the hosts agreed, few people asking them. Csek’s picture of the silence was a China trip and a tray of sausage rolls, cameras on, nobody asking anything but which sausage. The joke is the hosts’ joke. The underlying complaint is Cooper’s. Access without a second question is not coverage. It is a tour.
The close
Sam Cooper told Jim Csek and Iain Burns that Canada has been at war with China for more than ten years. He meant hybrid war. He listed interference, crime, cyber theft, and Nortel. He said it stops short of shooting, and that shooting is no longer a distant thought. He said Canada cannot defend the north without the United States, and that talk of an American invasion is the wrong fear, useful to Beijing and to Moscow. He said Britain names names and Canada does not, and he believes the prime minister’s office is why. He traced a long cultivation, from Pierre Trudeau through Power Corporation to a prime minister he calls a captured elite. Asked if that man is compromised, he said yes, and that the proof needs another hour. Asked if that man is not a patriot, he said he would not go that far.
The idea to keep is the border. The war in his sentence is a method and a story, not a fleet off Vancouver. The story he thinks is winning tells Canadians to watch the southern border and to leave the hybrid file unnamed. If he is right, the silence is part of the campaign. If he is wrong, the silence is still a choice, and the alerts Britain was willing to publish are still the test. Either way, the word war does no work until you say which kind. He said which kind. The rest is the hour he has not given yet, and the documents he says are already at The Bureau.
A note on sources and limits
This account follows Sam Cooper’s remarks to Jim Csek and Iain Burns on The Really Big Show in the interview released at the start of October 2026. Allegations about leaked CSIS material, named politicians, donations, Jin Liqun, Joseph Tay, Raquel Garbers, Michael Ma, and the 2025 election are his allegations or his reading of his own reporting. The MI5 alerts are described as he described them. Book arguments from Manthorpe and Molinaro are his summaries. The phrase “a hundred confirmed conflicts” was the host’s. This article did not re-investigate the underlying files. Hybrid war is a term of art he used, not a legal finding that Canada and China are in a declared war. Nothing here is investment advice. Nothing here is a verdict on any person he named.