Episode
How Canada Birthed a Sinaloa Cartel Boss: A Veteran Mountie With 50 Years of Experience Explains the Unthinkable Rise of Ryan Wedding
- Podcast
- The Bureau Podcast
- Published
- Mar 4, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3551
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://www.thebureau.news/p/how-canada-birthed-a-sinaloa-cartel
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Summary
OTTAWA — In this episode, former senior Mountie Garry Clement joins Sam Cooper to answer a question that should unsettle every Canadian: how does a figure like Ryan Wedding — an Olympic athlete from Coquitlam — end up becoming one of the most feared Sinaloa Cartel operatives in North America? The answer, Clement argues, has less to do with Wedding himself than with the country that made his rise possible. Clement spent 34 years in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, including deep-cover undercover operations in British Columbia and an extraordinary posting to Hong Kong in the early 1990s, where he and immigration control officer Brian McAdam came face to face with the top tier of Chinese transnational crime — Stanley Ho, 14K Triad leadership and elite businessmen like Li Ka Shing, whose shipping entities were recently barred from the Panama Canal under US pressure — while watching Canadian diplomatic officials accept red envelopes of casino cash and look the other way. Clement watched a system designed to stop dirty money instead absorb it. He is now watching history repeat itself, at industrial scale. On Wedding specifically, Clement is blunt: the former Olympian had the profile of every major trafficker he ever investigated — the ego, the drive, the early dabbling with no consequences, a prison stint that functioned as a graduate seminar in criminal networking. Wedding’s athletic psychology, Cooper suggests, may have been an accelerant rather than an anomaly — the same ruthless focus that puts an athlete on a podium, possibly the unbound ego of a sociopath that never faced correction while pushing boundaries in pot-permissive British Columbia at a young age, now applied without correction to a criminal enterprise. One of the episode’s most arresting moments comes when…