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It hasn’t helped that Brion Energy boss Li Zhiming disappeared down the corridors of China’s security apparatus in June. He hasn’t been heard from since.

Li is caught up in a corruption investigation (a euphemism for what used to be called a “purge”) that has swept up several key PetroChina and China National Petroleum officials. Until recently, Li was the CNP’s representative on the board of a CNP joint venture with the Alberta government called the CNPC-Alberta Petroleum Centre, but his photograph has been scrubbed from the centre’s website (this used to be called “airbrushing”).

Although she hasn’t been taken into custody, Margaret Jia, a long-time fixture on the Calgary oilpatch circuit, has also been recalled to Beijing. Best known in Vancouver for having attempted to arrange permission to drive her Mercedes onto the runway at Vancouver International Airport to collect visiting Beijing strongmen, Jia has been deposed from her sinecure as general manager of Calgary’s CNPC International (Canada) in Calgary.

It should be a safe wager that no mere coincidence is to be construed from Jia’s brother-in-law being China’s former chief torturer and national security boss, Yongkang Zhou, the biggest piece of senior-party detritus just now spinning in the eye of Beijing’s “corruption investigation” tornado.

In Greater Vancouver, meanwhile, the crippling cost of housing has reached the point that the average price for a single-family detached house is $1.36 million. This is a calamity in a city with one of the lowest median incomes in Canada, and it is not unrelated to the rapid disappearance of vast chunks of urban real estate into the offshore investment portfolios of China’s multimillionaire ruling-class apparatchiks.