A weekend topic starting with the Globe and Mail in Canada. "There was a time when Vancouverites never gave any thought to the meaning of a condo that had no one living in it. But too many dark windows got people wondering, and it inspired urban planner Andy Yan to start asking questions."

"It’s been exactly 10 years to the month that Mr. Yan made the first official attempt to measure the extent of Vancouver’s empty condo problem, which lead to him coining the phrase 'hedge city,' to capture Vancouver’s emerging status as the ideal place to stash wealth. Studying 13 buildings and 2,186 units over a two-year period in the downtown core, they discovered that in any given month, a range of 5.5 per cent to 8.5 per cent of the study’s downtown condo units could be empty."

"'But that wasn’t the entire story,' Mr. Yan says,. 'The story was that 52 per cent of the units were investor owned – as in not occupied by the owner. That was totally unanticipated. That, to me, goes to the heart of the city we built – for all the buildings and condos we had put up in the city of Vancouver and the downtown in particular, it was about driving a speculator market.'"

"Sandy Garossino, former Crown prosecutor and regular commentator on the housing market, remembers that those who bravely suggested the market was speculator driven and fuelled by global wealth were derided, or unfairly accused of racism and xenophobia."

"'They actively undermined those of us ringing the alarm for our lack of data, then attacked our motives. It was an ugly battle that divided our community. Those whose responsibility it was to address this crisis turned their backs on a crying public need, while putting developers in charge of their election fundraising,' Garossino said."

"Mr. Yan also sees the period as a dark one for Vancouver. 'We kept hearing, ‘we don’t have any data. If only we had data.’ That’s a bit of a cop out, because there was data,' he says."

"'It was an indifference, a narcissism, and denial, with a faint whiff of corruption,' he adds. 'The complacent environment for corruption, whether perceived or real, is created with the amount of money circulating. Any time that occurs, without a rigorous regime of regulations and measurement, it opens it up for abuse. And the indifference part of it is that ‘the money is good,’ and ‘we are so beautiful so of course the world wants to come here,’ which is also the narcissism, and then the denial of leaders who are supposed to protect us.'"

From Maclean's. "Canadians have learned a lot in the past few months about some of the forces that contributed to the astonishing run-up in real estate prices over the last decade and a half. Many of these revelations have emerged from British Columbia in recent weeks with the release of two landmark reports on money laundering that sought to estimate the scale of the province’s dirty money problem, and detail how it tightened its grip on the housing market and other industries."

"The gush of ill-gotten gains into the economy is deeply troubling. An expert panel set up to examine money laundering’s influence on B.C.’s real estate sector 'conservatively' estimated in its report that $46.7 billion was laundered in Canada last year. Of that, the panel estimated that transactions in B.C. accounted for $7.4 billion."

"But the panel also contained unpleasant surprises for other parts of Canada. Using what’s known as the Gravity Model for its estimates—which factors in international trade flows, per capita GDP and crime statistics—it found that Alberta and Ontario have even higher levels of money laundering activity."

"'People like to say this is only a B.C. problem,' says Maureen Maloney, a Simon Fraser University professor and chair of the panel, 'but it’s clear that this is a problem facing all of Canada.'"

"Kevin Comeau, a retired lawyer and advocate for greater transparency in property ownership, is blunt: 'While money launderers in B.C. could leave Canada altogether, they’re more likely to head to Ontario, because it has among the weakest anti-money laundering laws of all the Western liberal democracies.'"

"How bad is Canada at stopping money launderers? 'We have a 99.9 per cent failure rate,' says Comeau. He sits on Transparency International’s Canada working group on anti-money laundering and beneficial ownership transparency, and says the most important thing Canada can do to improve its performance is to adopt a national registry of who owns what residential property."

From Burnaby Now. "Some drug rings are actually spending their days manufacturing, storing and selling their products of death in some pretty swanky digs in luxury highrises in Burnaby and other spots in Metro Vancouver."

"Just this week, Burnaby RCMP released details of a mid-level drug ring that was busted operating out of highrise condos in the Metrotown and Brentwood areas. It’s unclear if they owned the units or were just renting. Police moved in on May 30, executing search warrants at the two buildings and seizing two kilograms of prepackaged, street-ready drugs, bulk fentanyl and cocaine, $50,000 in cash, valuables such as watches and jewelry, and two vehicles."

"In June 2018, the NOW wrote about a drug lab that was operating not in some dingy warehouse, but in a high-end apartment in the High Gate neighbourhood in South Burnaby. The drug dealers had an arsenal of loaded firearms and were cooking up deadly drugs with Magic Bullet blenders and frying pans."

"When police finally entered unit with a search warrant, they quickly backed out again after finding open foil packages of fentanyl on the kitchen counter. Decked out in hazmat suits, members of the RCMP Clandestine Laboratory Enforcement and Response Team returned to find more than 1,578 grams of the deadly drug. Fifty times more potent than heroin."

"Unbeknownst to their neighbours, the stove used to cook up these 'highly toxic products' was also being vented directly outside of their complex, according to court documents. That must’ve been some shock to the neighbours. Loaded weapons. Toxic drugs. Highly flammable chemicals."

"Operating out of high-end Burnaby condos makes it more difficult to spot such illicit operations. After all, when you live in such a building, you probably don’t suspect your neighbours of committing heinous crimes. Then again, so many of these condos probably sit empty because they are owned by speculators, so there aren’t exactly a lot of neighbours around to be suspicious."

"I’ve also been told by people working in law enforcement that there are a lot of luxury condos in Burnaby that house prostitution operations. Good times."