In 1982 three of the most powerful men in Asia met in Hong Kong. That day they would decide how Hong Kong would be handed over to the CCP and how Chinese business tycoons Stanley Ho and Li Ka-shing would help Deng Xiaoping realize the CCP's domestic and global ambitions. That meeting would not only change Vancouver but the world. Hong Kong and Chinese investment would soon reach the shores of Canada's Pacific coast. B.C. government casinos became a tool for global criminals to import deadly narcotics into Canada and launder billions of drug cash into Vancouver real estate. And it didn't happen by accident. A cast of accomplices -- government officials hungry for revenue, casino, and real estate companies with ties to shady offshore wealth, professional facilitators including lawyers and bankers, an aimless RCMP that gave organized crime room to grow -- all combined to cause this tragedy. There was greed, folly, corruption, conspiracy, and willful blindness. Decades of bad policy allowed drug cartels, first and foremost the Big Circle Boys -- powerful transnational narco-kingpins with ties to corrupt Chinese officials, real estate tycoons, and industrialists -- to gain influence over significant portions of B.C.'s economy but it spread across the nation. For years it seemed to be a victimless crime. Many looked the other way while B.C.'s number one industry, real estate, ballooned with dirty cash. But the unintended social consequences of this negligence and corruption are now clear: a fentanyl overdose crisis raging in major cities throughout North America and life spans falling for the first time in modern Canada, and a runaway housing market that has put nails in the coffin of middleclass dreams in B.C. and the rest of Canada. But the story takes a real twist as Sam Cooper uncovered more evidence that Vancouver had become the headquarters for corporate and industrial espionage by the Chinese Government (CCP). Their beachhead to North America was a place they could call home. While the RCMP, CSIS, government officials, and politicians in Canada turned a blind eye, these ruthless entrepreneurs exported their success in "The Vancouver Model", to other countries around the world including Australia and New Zealand. Billionaire criminals operating and funded by the West now seem untouchable in their quest to control and dominate global IT infrastructure and world trade. The arrest of Huawei's CFO is one small anecdote in this bigger and more compelling narrative on Beijing's master plan. Recently the RCMP arrested Cameron Ortis for attempting to pass sensitive intel to a foreign entity or group. Ortis also had oversight and directed Fintrac investigations on Money Laundering in Canada. Many investigations never came to fruition under his watch. Drawing on exclusive access and extensive interviews with the whistle-blowers on the front lines of the scandal in B.C.; thousands of pages of government and court documents obtained through legal applications; and large caches of confidential material available exclusively to the author from intelligence agencies throughout the world, Wilful Blindness is a powerful narrative that follows the investigators who refused to go along with institutionalized negligence and corruption. Wilful Blindness reads like a crime and espionage novel or political thriller, but it is a real story only the author can credibly tell; as the reporter who was there connecting the dots, identifying the suspects and mapping new criminal trends at the same time that government investigators were chasing down the same shocking facts.