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It’s Time to Talk about Canada’s Links to Epstein
Last month, Prime Minister Mark Carney called for the removal of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor—formerly known as Prince Andrew—from the line of succession.
Key points- Epstein’s web of relationships included ties to prominent, powerful, and wealthy Canadians
- Some connections were solely interested in business opportunities, ignoring Epstein’s disturbing and illegal dealings
- Canada’s homegrown cases of predation demonstrate how the elite protect each other from consequences
Mountbatten-Windsor had been arrested in the United Kingdom amid mounting scrutiny of his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier who operated, according to prosecutors and investigators, as a kind of ultra high-end pimp. Court filings and investigative reporting indicate Epstein not only sought out sexual encounters for himself but traded access to underage girls in exchange for connections, favours, and patronage.
But Canada could have spoken out about Mountbatten-Windsor long ago. His ties to Epstein had been a global scandal for years. Virginia Giuffre’s allegation that she had been trafficked to the prince as a teen first emerged in Florida court documents in 2014. By 2022, the Queen had stripped Mountbatten-Windsor of various titles.
It’s worth asking why we didn’t. Why didn’t we act when the right path was clear but not quite so easy? The question is not merely about reputational risk to the Canadian Crown. Epstein’s world-spanning web of financial, political, and academic elite included other Canadians too. Why did they, like so many others around the world, continue to be active parts of his transnational network—years after his crimes were no longer a secret?
Epstein lived a life defined by connections. After starting as a math and physics teacher at a private school in Manhattan, he leveraged a relationship with a pupil’s parent into a job at the investment bank Bear Sterns. He eventually launched his own investment firm in 1982. By the 1990s, he had carved out an unusual niche: part financial adviser, part social broker, part fixer.
The earliest allegations surfaced—and were discounted—in the 1990s. By 2005, he was under investigation in Florida for soliciting sex acts from minors. Federal investigations sought charges related to dozens of women as young as fourteen. In 2007, Epstein negotiated a “sweetheart” plea deal in which he pleaded guilty to lesser prostitution charges, served thirteen months in a county jail, and registered as a sex offender in 2008.
That plea deal temporarily halted further investigation until 2018, when federal authorities reopened the case. Epstein was rearrested in 2019 to face new charges. His death in custody later that year was ruled a suicide but not without controversy. Questions about the full scope of the network surrounding him continue to surface through the massive—albeit still incomplete—cache of files ordered released by American lawmakers last year.
Documents in the files show that Epstein took an interest in Canada, even managing to visit Vancouver in 2014 to attend a TED conference despite legal restrictions that should have barred a registered sex offender from doing so. He was denied in another attempt to visit Vancouver in 2018 to attend another conference.
The interest from Canada was mutual. The case of Lee Smolin is illustrative. The decorated Canadian-American physicist was one of hundreds of scientists that fell into Epstein’s orbit. (Smolin was once a member of The Walrus’s Educational Review Committee.) Speaking to the Globe and Mail, Smolin said he came into contact with Epstein during the 1990s, when he received some funding for research. Smolin’s career was blossoming at the time; in 2001, he became one of the first three long-term researchers hired by the then new Perimeter Institute in Waterloo.
Things get more troublesome when it comes to the question of just how long that connection lasted. In February, news reports emerged that correspondence between the two men continued years after Epstein’s conviction, until 2013. The two men even made plans to meet in New York City in 2011, though the emails do not confirm whether the meeting took place. This contradicts Smolin’s previous account to the Globe and Mail that he couldn’t recall any contact with Epstein after seeing him at a conference in 2003 and his statement to the Verge that he had not seen Epstein since 2008.
Smolin called Epstein a friend, someone he said would be missed at conferences while he was unable to travel during his conviction. Simply appearing in the files is not an indication of wrongdoing. The troubling part was something else: Epstein’s crimes didn’t seem to bother him at all. By that point, Epstein had, by his own admission, prostituted a minor. Yet Smolin’s sympathy was with Epstein in his confinement, not the girls he abused.
Other cases have even greater ramifications. As chief executive officer of DP World, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem oversaw the company delivering port services in Vancouver, Surrey, Nanaimo, Prince Rupert, and Saint John. Sulayem was ousted earlier this year in the wake of revelations that he built an expansive professional and personal relationship with Epstein in the years after his 2008 conviction.
Correspondence between the two cover business ventures, women in various contexts—including apparent arrangements to train Epstein’s “personal masseuse”—and what seems to be approving discussion of a “torture video,” the contents of which remains unknown. The two collaborated on numerous ventures, lobbying other powerful actors on behalf of one another.
In short, the man responsible for a crucial component of Canada’s transportation infrastructure maintained ties with a man of power and influence even after he was revealed to be a sex offender. Even that resignation came only after Canadian pension giant Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec and British International Investment, the UK’s national development agency, both suspended further joint investment with the company until the situation was addressed.
To be clear, not every Canadian connection takes on such a disturbing tenor. Cirque du Soleil co-founder and CEO Guy Laliberté appears in the Epstein files, beginning in 2011, only through mass-distributed messages, such a Christmas cards, and a failed real-estate pitch to him in 2018 to purchase two Ibiza villas. As with Laliberté, many simply didn’t seem to care what he was—or at least didn’t care enough to break off contact.
Austin Hill’s story makes this problem clear. He is an entrepreneur and tech investor active for decades in the Montreal area and elsewhere. Summaries of Hill’s work online highlight involvement in everything from internet services in the 1990s to bitcoin. He presents himself as an entrepreneur who makes “meaning rather than making money” and looks for ways to better the world through his work.
In 2014, at that same Vancouver TED Conference Epstein should not have been able to attend but seemingly did, records in the Epstein files indicate Hill connected with him in pursuit of funding for the blockchain venture he was promoting at the time. The men’s conversation—accompanied by “two pretty girls” with Epstein, according to messages between the two—led to a meeting at Epstein’s island, Little St. James, in April 2014. Hill confirmed to media that, following that meeting, Epstein indirectly invested $500,000 (US) toward Hill’s venture.
Their relationship continued until 2018, when the relationship ended because Hill was “no longer actively involved in the fintech or bitcoin scenes, and no longer had business reasons for continued contact with him,” according to reporting by the Montreal Gazette. Put differently, it seems he maintained the relationship as long as it was useful, regardless of the ethical implications of doing business with a known sexual predator.
While our focus rightly has been on the most disturbing elements of the Epstein story, this latter reckoning remains, with implications far beyond the Epstein network: We’ve become too comfortable compromising with evil whenever it’s in our interests to do so.
Hannah Arendt, who tracked the rise of fascism in Europe in the early twentieth century, famously coined what she described as the “banality” of evil: How evil outcomes are often the result of mundane decisions by people living lives without reflection. Simply by leaving judgment of right and wrong to others, we help bad actors thrive.
The exposure of Epstein’s network lays bare the banality of evil as it exists in the twenty-first century: A global network of wealth, influence, and mutual protection dedicated to the exploitation of women, with tendrils reaching into Canada. Its existence makes clear that, too often, we remain a society that follows orders, that goes along to get along. Those orders take the form of individualistic imperatives: Do whatever you can to advance your own interests. Worry about number one, and don’t think too hard about the implications of your choices for others as long as things are working for you.
Canada is not a country full of Epsteins, though we certainly have our share of deeply disturbing cases in the realm of science, arts, business, and politics, where the wealthy and powerful preyed on the vulnerable and were protected by others as they did. Whether it’s the infrastructure Austrian-Canadian billionaire Frank Stronach put in place to allegedly prey on young and vulnerable women, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s use of non-disclosure agreements to hide sexual misconduct in its midst, Hockey Canada’s use of millions to quietly settle sexual abuse cases, or allegations of unreported sexual misconduct on Parliament Hill, we are all too familiar with individuals and institutions making space for those doing wrong.
Rather, too often we are a country of Austin Hills, willing to turn a blind eye to wrongs so long as it helps us. We are a nation of bin Suleyams, willing to provide support to those doing wrong if it helps us in return. In each of the homegrown cases of sexual predation described above, people just doing their jobs and looking out for number one were crucial in shielding the powerful from scrutiny.
That, in the end, was Epstein’s real genius: He did not rely on monsters. He relied on ordinary people who found it easier not to look too closely.
The post It’s Time to Talk about Canada’s Links to Epstein first appeared on The Walrus.
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