Grey zone enablers: The impact of Canada's Pacific Rim strategy on the Vancouver model of money laundering

This thesis explores the economic security and prosperity policy challenges that make British Columbia and Canada vulnerable to money laundering and illicit finance. It studies the influence of Canada's Pacific Rim strategy on provincial efforts to combat money laundering by examining the hearing transcripts from the Commission of Inquiry into Money Laundering. The first part uncovers latent factors and confounders that weaken BC's resilience against money laundering through thematic content analysis with unsupervised and semi-supervised topic models. The second part enhances the Walker-Unger economic gravity model by integrating cultural and ecological dimensions influenced by the Vancouver model of money laundering and the Pacific Rim strategy. It identifies vulnerabilities despite implemented countermeasures and investigates factors affecting the proportion of money laundering flow between Canada and China. This study demonstrates that socio-computational approaches with proxy variables enhance ethical intelligence-led policing strategy, especially when access to fair, accurate, and transparent data is limited.