Canada may change entire temporary foreign worker program over Chinese miners controversy

Canada may change entire temporary foreign worker program over Chinese miners controversy

 November 9, 2012 

"What the document says categorically is it will be 4½ years before a single Canadian will be working underground at the mine," said B.C. Federation of Labour president Jim Sinclair.

"After 4½ years, it will be 10 years before it will be a majority of Canadians working underground, and it will be 15 y

Accusations of Chinese miners being dubiously brought into the Canadian province of British Columbia to work in coal mines has prompted the federal government not only to investigate the issue, but to review its entire temporary foreign worker program.

In a statement released Thursday by Human Resources Minister, Diane Finley, the government said it is not convinced that HD Mining has made sufficient attempts to hire and train Canadians.

Finley said the government is also concerned about allegations that HD Mining required applicants to be fluent in Mandarin.

Both the provincial and federal government are already investigating the use of foreign workers in HD Mining ‘s proposed underground coal mine near Tumbler Ridge.

On Monday, two major B.C. unions requested Canada’s Federal Court overturn a decision to allow about 200 foreign workers to come before the end of the year to start building the coal project.

According to the Ministry of Jobs, Tourism and Skills Training’s website, a company can be fined up to $10,000 if found guilty of breaching the province’s Employment Standards Act.

Foreign workers are the responsibility of the federal government.

Chinese coal firms in Canada favour foreign labour – report

 October 18, 2012

In unveiling Canada’s British Columbia’s job-creation strategy last year, Premier Christy Clark said the government planned to capitalize on high demand for minerals, especially in Asia, by opening up eight new mines in the next four years and expanding nine more by 2015.

What Clark didn’t specify was who would be employed on those mines, said labour lawyer Sarbjit (Bobby) Deepak in a letter to the Vancouver Sun last February.

The answer to his question became clearer last week, as reports unveiled that an initial group of 200 Chinese citizens will begin to arrive in coming weeks to work at new mines in the western Canadian province.

The full time workers – whose number could grow to as many as 2,000 eventually – follow $1.4 billion in Chinese funding for two of four coal projects in the northeast of the province announced last year.

The Asian coal mining companies that are staring business in B.C. have been accused of favouring Chinese applicants to fill available positions. Questioned by a local journalist who writes for The Province, the firms claimed it was a mistake that some of their local want ads demanded Mandarin language skills for jobs at their mines.

“The companies say they tried — and failed — to find Canadians to work at the mines, so the federal government is allowing them to bring in the ‘temporary’ Chinese miners as a result,” writes Michael Smyth.

But he says most of the ads clearly stated the companies were looking for workers who speak Mandarin, a requisite that would clearly leave the majority of Canadian applicants out.

“This single reference to Mandarin was an isolated and unanticipated case,” Jody Shimkus, a spokesperson for HD Mining International, told me in a statement.

“This ad was never meant to suggest there was a language requirement for Mandarin.”

But the “isolated” error was repeated in at least four ads.

However, an investigation by local news outlet The Tyee.ca shows that Chinese miners being recruited are paying over Cdn$12,500 for the right to work in Canada, and their actual wages are less than those advertised.

A recruiting ad translated by The Tyee promise Chinese miners the “possibility of immigrating to Canada” and the ability to “sponsor your family to Canada, too.”

None of the new mines announced by BC’s Premier have opened yet, but fears over who will be extracting the province’s coal keep growing.

Speaking at an economic summit on Tuesday, Clark said she’s set lofty goals for B.C.’s economy, which include turning the province into Canada’s No. 1 economy.

She added her government’s year-old jobs plan, which focuses on increasing trade with China and Asia and promoting mining and exploring innovations in technology and agri-foods, has already resulted in growth.

B.C. mine to hire only Chinese temporary workers for years

HD Mining plans to start hiring Canadians after 4 years

Dec 12, 2012

B.C. mine to hire only foreign workers

12 years ago

Duration2:06

Documents show that HD Mining plans to only hire foreign workers for years to come.

X

• Email
• Reddit
• LinkedIn

The B.C. Federation of Labour says documents show it will be 14 years before Canadians replace all the temporary foreign workers from China hired to work at an underground coal mine in northern B.C.

Two unions are in court challenging more than 200 temporary foreign worker permits obtained by HD Mining for its Murray River underground coal mine near Tumbler Ridge, B.C. The employer says there were no qualified Canadians to do the specialized work at the underground mine.

Documents tendered in the case include HD Mining's previously unreleased transition plan, which outlines how the company won't start hiring Canadian miners for more than four years and plans to continue using temporary foreign workers for the next 14 years.

The plan says temporary foreign workers will be used for 30 months of construction and then for two more years as they set up a training school and start recruiting and training Canadians.

HD Mining says it will take 10 years to transition work to Canadians, but documents show it will take more than four years for that process to begin. 

After that, the plan indicates it will take another decade to shift the work to Canadians at a rate of 10 per cent of the mine's workforce per year.

The company has already said it will take 10 years to transition work to Canadians, but it has not said it will take more than four years for that process to begin.

The International Union of Operating Engineers and the Construction and Specialized Workers Union are in Federal Court this week asking for an injunction to stop more foreign workers from arriving until the unions' larger challenge against the permits is heard.

Sudden China Censorship From YouTube

 Sudden China Censorship From YouTube 

March 8 2025

 

Meth kingpin Tse Chi Lop extradited to Australia

 Joshua Berlinger

Tse Chi Lop, drug kingpin, accused of running a multibillion dollar methamphetamine empire, has been extradited to Australia following a nearly two-year legal battle with Dutch authorities.

Tse, 59, was arrested in January 2021 after he landed at Amsterdam’s Schipol International Airport on a flight from the Taiwan. Dutch authorities then detained him on a warrant from the Australian Federal Police (AFP) issued in 2019 in connection with an operation targeting Sam Gor, the drug-trafficking syndicate he is accused of heading.

Through his lawyers, Tse has denied all the allegations Australian authorities have leveled against him.

Australian authorities said Tse arrived Thursday and was formally charged shortly after landing. 

Asia’s methamphetamine trade is believed to be worth billions of dollars each year and Sam Gor, which is sometimes simply referred to as “The Company,” is allegedly its biggest player.

Authorities alleged that the organization was, as of 2018, earning between $8 billion and $17.7 billion worth of illicit proceeds a year, according to a briefing on the syndicate shared with CNN by an official with direct knowledge of the investigation.

The organization is accused of running a synthetic drug manufacturing empire in large swathes of the under-policed jungles of Myanmar, a region marred by civil war and still under the control of various competing warlords and militias – conditions that make it easy to hide industrial-scale drug manufacturing operations from law enforcement.

Tse allegedly ran his multibillion dollar operation from Hong Kong, Macao and southeast Asia. But his name – or existence – was not public knowledge until he was revealed by a Reuters investigation published in 2019 that dubbed him “Asia’s El Chapo.”

His arrest, however, has not stopped the massive flow of drugs in Southeast Asia. A record amount of methamphetamine – including 1 billion meth tablets – was seized in 2021, and drug prices remain cheaper than ever, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Tse has faced criminal narcotics charges before. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to import heroin into the United States and was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2000. He was released in 2006 and returned to Canada before moving to Hong Kong.

 Lethal Exports: The 'right hand' of a crime boss dubbed the Asian El Chapo is this B.C. man
Postmedia crime reporter Kim Bolan reveals how an Abbotsford-raised gangster is linked to a drug kingpin suspected of producing billions worth of methamphetamine in Myanmar jungle labs. Second in a five-part investigative series on B.C. organized crime syndicates that stretch around the globe

Kim Bolan
Published Jan 23, 2024

BANGKOK — When B.C. fugitive Khamla Wong was arrested and returned to Canada three years ago, the tip off came from Australian police investigating an alleged international drug smuggler on the scale of Mexico’s Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

Wong, then facing charges of importing bulk cocaine into Canada, was picked up in Taiwan in February 2021 after the Australian Federal Police determined he was seen repeatedly with Tse Chi Lop, a Canadian suspected of producing and smuggling billions worth of methamphetamine from Myanmar jungle labs into Australia.

Tse, purported leader of the Sam Gor criminal syndicate, was arrested in the Netherlands and extradited to Australia in December 2022. He is in custody awaiting trial. Postmedia learned of Tse’s close relationship with Wong, who grew up in Abbotsford, while investigating the international links of some B.C. criminal organizations. 

“It was work by one of our best analysts, who was the expert on the Sam Gor network, that actually identified Khamla Wong and his presence in Taiwan,” Jared Taggart, the superintendent of transnational operations for the Australian Federal Police, told Postmedia recently in Canberra. 

He said his agency then briefed the RCMP, who worked to bring Wong back to B.C. to face charges he smuggled more than 200 kilograms of cocaine into Canada from the U.S. in 2009.

“We think he was the right hand, a close partner … of Tse when he was present in Taiwan. And they just continued business as usual, from Taiwan,” Taggart said.|

Wong’s charges were stayed in late 2021 after lawyer Matthew Nathanson won two pretrial motions in B.C. Supreme Court about how evidence was collected in the 2009 cocaine case. One ruling said there was unsupported information in the court document used to get the warrant to search Wong’s house on Downes Road in Abbotsford in June of that year.

The second ruling by Justice Mike Tammen said that three BlackBerry devices found during the search — which linked Wong to the drug conspiracy — should not be admitted into evidence because his Charter rights had been violated again when police didn’t give him the chance to contact a lawyer for three hours after he was detained.

Postmedia asked Nathanson to comment on the information about Wong’s relationship with Tse.“I have no comment on this,” he said.

Wong, who has close ties to the United Nations gang and spent more than a decade on the run, has continued to be an international player in the movement of methamphetamine and other drugs, Australian police and experts on transnational organized crime have alleged.

Jeremy Douglas, Southeast Asia and Pacific representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, said in Bangkok that he’s well aware of the affiliation between Tse and Wong.

Douglas, who observed the international investigation of Tse, said last month that “you can connect the two” and that both men are experts in networking among international drug smugglers of all stripes.

Wong is not the only B.C. player believed to be operating at the highest levels of transnational organized crime. 

Highly opportunistic, highly entrepreneurial’
Wolfpack gangster James Riach continues to arrange huge drug shipments into Australia while serving a life sentence in the Philippines.

A senior UN gang member from Vancouver, accused killer Conor D’Monte, remained a fugitive for 11 years before he was caught living under a fake name in Puerto Rico in February 2022. He was recently ordered extradited. 

Two years ago, UN gangster Jimi Sandhu, who also grew up in Abbotsford, was shot to death at a rented beachfront villa in Phuket, Thailand. He had been based in both Ho Chi Minh City and Dubai before his death.His accused killer, former Canadian soldier Matthew Dupre, was allegedly hired by the Wolfpack to kill Sandhu. Postmedia has learned that when Dupre and his now deceased co-accused arrived in Thailand before the murder, they were picked up at the airport by an Australian Comanchero biker. Several Canadian Hells Angels attended the opening of a new chapter of the criminal organization in Bandung, Indonesia, in March 2023.

The interconnectivity between transnational organized crime groups, including the Canadians involved, has only increased in recent years, said Taggart of the Australian Federal Police.

Canadian Hells Angels are working with their Australian HA counterparts and other biker gangs like the Comancheros to smuggle drugs into Australia and New Zealand. And a Middle Eastern organized crime group based in Vancouver has also been brokering major drug shipments into Oceania. The United Nations gang, founded in the Fraser Valley in 1997, is now operating out of Vietnam and the United Arab Emirates.

“It’s driven by groups all around the world, including in Canada, who are sometimes closely interconnected or loosely interconnected, but highly opportunistic, highly entrepreneurial, and able to shift and move their commodities around the world through many enablers.” Before his 2021 arrest, Wong had been a fugitive from Canada for over a decade. Postmedia has learned that much of that time was spent in Southeast Asia — including in his native Laos and in neighbouring Myanmar and Thailand, as well as in Taiwan.

He was travelling on a Laotian passport in the name of Sakhone Xayyavong when he was seen with Tse in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City in October 2019. At the time, he was also with an Australian. “The same individuals were again sighted in Taipei in January 2020,” one intelligence report obtained by Postmedia said. Another Australian was also with Wong and Tse during the second Taiwan meeting.

Wong was described in the intel report as “actively involved in organized crime, living and operating under several assumed identities in various countries, including Thailand. Research shows that Wong was targeting Australia with drug shipments while operating from Bangkok during the period between 2016 and 2019.”Unlike his associate Tse, Wong has never faced charges in Australia. But he was arrested and charged in Thailand on March 17, 2016, after being caught with a commercial quantity of ecstasy. He was mysteriously released from custody without going to trial. Thai authorities have never publicly explained what happened. 

Kingpins and pawns 
While Wong is a purported kingpin, other Canadians in custody after being linked with him are better described as lowly pawns.

One-time Fraser Valley trafficker Robert Schellenberg, now 41, remains on death row in China after being convicted in connection with a 222-kilogram shipment of methamphetamine hidden within plastic pellets concealed in tires. The meth was to be shipped by container to Australia.

Schellenberg maintained he was just a tourist when he was arrested in the smuggling conspiracy in 2014. He was originally convicted and sentenced to 15 years. But when he was retried in January 2019, he received the death penalty. At his second trial, he told the court that Khamla Wong was behind the meth shipment.

Postmedia has also learned new details of the circumstances that led to Schellenberg’s arrest. After completing a B.C. sentence for drug trafficking in 2013, he travelled to Southeast Asia, where he visited his friend Blair Stephens in Bangkok. Postmedia has also learned new details of the circumstances that led to Schellenberg’s arrest. After completing a B.C. sentence for drug trafficking in 2013, he travelled to Southeast Asia, where he visited his friend Blair Stephens in Bangkok. Stephens, originally from the Okanagan, was working in the drug trade for Wong at the time. But when Wong asked Stephens to travel to China to supervise the methamphetamine shipment, he refused, according to sources. Schellenberg was then pressured to get involved.

Schellenberg’s deadly predicament didn’t serve as a warning for his friend Stephens, who also had a criminal record back home for trafficking, possessing a weapon and riding in a vehicle where a firearm was found. Three days after Schellenberg was sentenced to death on Jan. 14, 2019, Stephens was arrested in Bangkok in another drug smuggling case linked to Wong.

Postmedia obtained a Thai language copy of the ruling convicting Stephens, dated Dec. 20, 2019, and had it translated. Details of Stephens’s arrest are laid out in the document. 

That January, Stephens told an associate to head to Bangkok’s main airport to pick up a parcel at the Federal Express warehouse. It had been sent from Thailand to Melbourne, but returned because the Australian address on it didn’t exist.What Stephens didn’t know is that the associate had already told officers from the police office of the narcotics control board that the two boxes with eight shock absorbers inside likely concealed drugs.

The police had checked the packages and found almost four kilograms of white powder hidden inside. It was heroin. They arranged a controlled delivery to the Bangkok apartment Stephens shared with a Thai co-accused in the case.Stephens was waiting in a black Toyota Camry outside the The Silk condominium complex when his associate arrived at about 2 p.m. The B.C. man walked over to the informant’s vehicle and took out one of the boxes of shock absorbers. That’s when Thai police moved in.

While searching Stephens’s apartment, officers found a copy of a charge sheet in Khamla Wong’s name, given to him upon his 2016 trafficking arrest in Bangkok.The court ruling said that Stephens, now 42, told investigators that Wong had contacted him to pick up the FedEx parcel. He also said that Wong had been behind other drug smuggling ventures in the region. There is no specific reference to the shipment for which Schellenberg was arrested.

The Thai ruling noted that the penalty for conspiracy to import narcotics is usually death. But because Stephens “confessed” he would get the lesser sentence — life. Postmedia wrote to Stephens at his Thai prison to request an interview, but received no response.

Postmedia also visited the Bangkok apartment building where he was arrested and where Wong’s documents were found.

The eight-storey building has a rooftop pool, gym and sauna and markets rentals to foreigners and expats. A two-bedroom costs about $2,000 a month. A building manager claimed not to recall the police raid in 2019. But a security guard at the building next door did remember. It was an unusual scene in the affluent neighbourhood, he said.

Canadian gangster grew meth trades
While those all around Khamla Wong have landed behind bars, the man nicknamed Smiley has had better luck. Not only did Wong get his B.C. case dropped, and avoid jail in Thailand, but charges of conspiracy to distribute cocaine and money laundering laid against him in California in 2010 were dismissed with prejudice nine years later because of his fugitive status.

Former UN gang members testified at a B.C. murder trial in 2017 that Wong was a “respected elder” closely aligned with, but not a member of, their criminal organization. There was also testimony that he arranged for cartel contacts to kill UN gangster Jesse Adkins, an accused hitman who had been hiding in Mexico and whose gangmates feared had become a liability. Wong wasn’t charged. Adkins’s body has not been found.

How and where Wong, Stephens and Schellenberg first crossed paths is not known. Was it in the Fraser Valley, where Wong and Schellenberg both lived and where Wong, then known as Khamla Siharaj, ran Abbotsford’s Mango Tree restaurant for several years? Was it through their alleged involvement in the B.C. drug trade? It’s also not known how Wong and Tse became close, given their early Canadian lives were lived thousands of kilometres apart. 

Tse belonged to the Big Circle Boys gang when he arrived in Canada from his native Guangzhou, China, in 1988 with his fiancé. They settled in Toronto. Wong, who came to B.C. with his family as a 10-year-old refugee in 1979, was never a member of Sam Gor, but was more of an “international entrepreneur,” said Douglas, the UN official and Tse expert. One source told Postmedia that Wong at one time had some associates in the Big Circle Boys.

Tse and Wong moved in the same circles given their line of work, said Douglas.

“The fact is that you can see how these two gentlemen would share common interests,” he said. “One thing you learn about these guys — especially the guys like Tse Chi Lop — is if he thinks it’s in his interest to work with you, he will. And I think Khamla Wong has that trait as well. And so their paths would cross in the world they live in. And they would realize … there’s mutual benefit there, they can make a lot of money together and grow the business. At the end of the day, they’re entrepreneurs.”  They’re also both skilled networkers — something Tse perfected while in Toronto, when he was smuggling heroin from Southeast Asia for his Mafia associates to sell in New York state.

“People have innate abilities. And he has that. He has the ability to bridge groups. You can see it in his heroin trafficking days where he was sourcing drugs from the Golden Triangle, getting them to Canada to get to the United States to work with the Italian Mob … to flood New York with heroin,” Douglas said.

At the time the Mafia didn’t routinely work with Asian organized crime.
“He really had the ability to convince them to work with him … they wanted the heroin and they wanted to make a lot of money and they were willing to work with him.” 

“Petitioner again expresses great sorrow over the crime that he became involved in,” the court document said. His transfer was denied and he remained in the U.S. until his release in June 2006. Almost immediately, he got a passport and left, Douglas said.

“In Canada, he also had the ability to look over the horizon and see where he could take the drug business,” Douglas said. “In my view, what he did in Asia was the logical next step and progression once he got out of prison.”

In putting together Sam Gor, Tse was able to consolidate and grow the methamphetamine trade to unprecedented levels. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that at the its peak, Tse’s gang made between $8 billion and $18 billion a year.

Said Douglas: “He could work with armed groups in Myanmar, he could work with his triad connections, he could work with his banker connections, or his money-laundering connections. He brought them all together into a syndicate. It was pretty amazing.” 

More of Kim Bolan’s investigation

Part 1: B.C. gangsters at the centre of a global drug trade

Part 2: The alleged ‘right hand’ of a crime boss dubbed the Asian El Chapo is this B.C. man

Part 3: How B.C. gangsters are damaging a tropical paradise

Part 4: UN bosses run their B.C. gang from a Vietnam hideout

Part 5: Lethal Exports: Why Canada is a ‘global refuge’ for Hells Angels, other crime networks

 

Vancouver’s Housing Bubble Fueled by China’s Credit Bubble and Crime

Jul 2016 

Many of us are under the impression that there is an endless supply of multi-millionaires in China who are intent on scooping up Vancouver properties at any price, often before they even hit the market. But the underlying source of the money does indeed have a limit, and we might be getting close to that limit. There is an unprecedented $25 Trillion (USD) credit bubble in China that will deflate at some point, and the big question is when.

Once a credit contraction happens, it will not matter whether buyers are coming in with cash or taking out local credit – not only will new buying activity slow dramatically, there will likely be margin calls on the net worth of existing foreign investors.  This could lead to forced selling. Without the steady inflow of new capital, it is not difficult to predict what will happen to real estate prices here. 

This poses an extreme risk to the financial well-being of locals who have recently taken out large mortgages, as well as to the broader BC economy.

Vancouver housing prices have far exceeded anything that resembles market fundamentals, and numerous reports have foreign buyers as a prime factor, with the majority from mainland China. Prices for detached homes are up some 30% year over year and the average detached price went as high as $1.8 Million this year.

There is no doubt that there is a continuing debt binge of over-mortgaging by locals, thanks to easy lending and record low interest rates. However, the foreign-money factor is legitimate and a key driver of demand for multi-million dollar properties, which has a trickle-down effect into the rest of the lower mainland and elsewhere in the province. The rise we’ve seen in prices has less to do with population growth, municipal planning and our restricted geography (though all are factors) than it has to do with global credit expansion. Without credit, there’s no money to buy houses, even by those who seemingly buy with “cash”.

The average Vancouver detached home is priced at over 20 times the average pre-tax household income.  Consider that a “normal” house price-to-household income ratio should be in the range of 4-6 times income.  According to RBC, the average household needs 110% of pretax income just to take a mortgage out on the average Vancouver home.

So will prices rise indefinitely?  Will a 40-year old Vancouver Special be going for $4 Million in 10 years?  The answer is no.  Prices only go up so long as credit expands. And 800 years of financial history tells us that credit bubbles are normal and are really just a part of human behavior, and they all end the same way, with a recession. With the sheer size of China’s credit bubble, its collapse would certainly cause a credit contraction in Canada along with a global recession.

China’s credit bubble in context

China looks to be in the late stages of extraordinary credit bubble, one which is comparable to the Japanese bubble of the 1980s or the US sub-prime debt bubble of 2007-08.  The chart below (Figure 1) illustrates this comparison, showing the total credit-to-GDP levels in each of the three countries (source: Bank of International Settlements, credit to Economist.com and Asian Nikkei Review). China’s rise in total credit has been much sharper, which makes sense given our recent low interest rate environment.

Deutsche Bank researchers also recently noted that bank credit growth in China today has surpassed bank credit growth in the USA at the height of its subprime lending bubble.

Figure 1: Comparing Recent Credit Bubbles (source Bank of International Settlements, via the Economist)

In only 15 years, China’s outstanding credit has grown from roughly $1 Trillion to $25 Trillion (USD). China has used the growth in credit to overproduce infrastructure such as roads, airports and even malls and housing stock to such an extent that it is estimated that they have as many as 70 million residential units (condos) sitting empty. According to one widely cited report from the Washington Post, China used more cement in three years, from 2011-2013, than the United States used for all of its construction during the entire 20th century (100 years!).

In addition to overbuilding at home, there’s been an exodus of capital as Chinese companies and individuals have been purchasing land, businesses, buildings and property throughout the world – not just in Vancouver or Toronto.  This June, CNBC reported that Chinese investors have bought over $300 Billion (USD) of property in the USA in the last 5 years with a third of that coming just last year.

Chinese investors are worried that China’s economy and currency may be living on borrowed time and they are increasingly desperate to move their capital out of China and into foreign assets and currencies. In addition, there is a crackdown on corruption that the Chinese leadership has undertaken – increasing the desperation to move money out of the country.

How do we know that China debt is a bubble?

We know it’s a bubble because 1) the scale is unparalleled and huge relative to China’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product); 2) it is unsustainable because the effectiveness of credit growth is declining (see chart below) and because of the oversupply of unused goods and infrastructure; and 3) financial engineering is occurring on a growing scale.

For example, the Bank of China is buying the defaulting loans for an equity stake in the companies who have borrowed too much. This creates “zombie” companies, which are businesses which cannot pay back their loans but are not allowed to go bankrupt and die.  The state has even instructed six of its larger domestic banks to issue asset-backed securities with the defaulting loans as the underlying assets (for more see this recent Bloomberg article). Repapering bad debt with asset-backed securities draws obvious parallels with the Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis of 2008.  The Bank of China itself wrote in their 2016Q2 Outlook: “Commercial banks face a grim operating situation, implying more difficulties for coordinative implementation of monetary policy”.

The Financial Times noted that it now takes four times the amount of credit to create GDP growth as it did 10 years ago, meaning that it’s getting close to the point where new credit growth is like “pushing on a string” in terms of effectiveness to create economic productivity.  From prior credit bubbles, we know that once credit growth stops creating real economic results, credit often will contract.

Andy Xie, a former economist for the World Bank, Morgan Stanley and contributor to the South China Morning Post, was bullish on his home country during the past decade.  Recently, he reversed his stance, and was quoted in Marketwatch stating that rampant speculation in China will end in a market crash and a “1929-style Depression.”

When will it burst?

Though fundamentals suggest that China’s debt bubble is showing signs of weakness, it really is impossible to provide an accurate timeline because of the nature of China’s economy.  With centralized decision-making by the government, reliable data is difficult to come by.  It is quite possible that their government might push credit to $30 Trillion and force state-owned enterprises to continue the bad lending to banks and business for a long-time to come.

If we do see credit continue to expand, the most likely outcome would be further devaluation of the Chinese currency (Yuan), which would in-turn lead to reduced buying power for Chinese investors as well as a reduced ability to pay foreign loans.  Further currency devaluation would also cause significant global market volatility.

China does have a large supply of foreign reserves (about USD$3.2 Trillion worth) but that is down from $4 Trillion just last year, and still pales in comparison to the USD$25 Trillion of debt currently owing.  It is estimated that China could burn through its foreign reserves in three years if the current pace were to continue. A currency and economic crisis would surely ensue well before reserves are depleted, as investors will see it coming well ahead. In this case, a Chinese bubble may continue but its value would still fall in USD terms.

At some point, the Chinese government may also curb the flight of capital if foreign reserves start to dwindle down to worrying levels or when an economic contraction eventually occurs. This is important because it would curtail a source of capital for real estate markets in North America, Europe and Australia.

‘Free Market’ philosophy is misguided

The irony here is that proponents of free market philosophy who don’t want the Canadian (or Provincial) government to interfere with foreign buying activity do not realize that if the Chinese government operated under free market principles, China’s credit bubble would have contracted years ago, and along with it, Vancouver’s real estate bubble.  Instead what we are seeing is government mandated oversupply of debt-fueled money from China with little GDP growth to show for it. Nor is it helping their private sector achieve sustainable growth.

Foreign real estate investment should be restricted

Unaffordable home prices have had negative consequences for young families in BC.  Young millennials are either putting off buying homes (and delaying starting families) or getting deeper into debt to try to carve out a living in the region they grew up in.

In many cases, Millennials are only able to afford homes by having their parents take out home equity loans.  In other cases, Millennials simply choose to move elsewhere – creating a “brain-drain” effect.

High prices affect all residents. Increasingly large mortgages also lead to high rents and reduces discretionary income for many working-age residents, which reduces consumer spending, and often forces consumers into deeper debt. It also forces the BC economy to be over-reliant on just one sector – real estate.  Knowing that credit and real-estate move together and in cycles, the inevitable downturn will make a quick recovery difficult to achieve.

Politicians must look forward from time to time to assess sources of risk to the local and provincial economy, and currently there may be no greater risk than a housing crisis led by a Chinese credit crisis.  The financial fallout for local families would be unprecedented.

At the time of writing, we suggested the rational course of action should be to tax foreign ownership as well as to apply an additional tax on empty properties, with funds put towards affordable housing.  Similar steps have been taken in Hong Kong and Singapore.  A recent announcement by the BC Government has introduced a tax, although it’s efficacy has yet to be determined.  Other useful measures may include an income-tax based solution, as well as further scrutiny by the Canada Revenue Agency to investigate and fully tax foreign speculators.