Monks, money and the fierce debate over PEI’s scarce land – The Globe and Mail Feedzy

Norma Millar had designed the little green bungalow herself. It was to be the place she and her husband Lawrence would live out their retirement years together, surrounded by 45 acres of woods, old apple trees and a flowering meadow.

Heatherdale Road, a rolling strip of asphalt that slices through farmland and woodlot in eastern Prince Edward Island, seemed like the kind of place where they could embrace the quiet, country life. But, almost as soon as they moved in, their neighbours started moving away. First, the farm down the road sold, then the family next door moved out, then the owners of the home directly across from them left.

Then came the knock on their door.

It was two men in orange robes, with their heads shaved and an offer in hand. They had been sent from a Buddhist institute that had recently opened across the road. The monks had been buying real estate around Kings County, acquiring family farms and homes. And now they were standing in the Millars’ doorway, asking to buy their home.

“We barely had the framing up when they first visited us,” Ms. Millar recalled. “They said they wanted to buy the land and the house. We said, ‘No, this is our home. We don’t want to sell. We want to live here.’”

The Millars bought the property on Heatherdale Road in 2007 after returning to their home province from British Columbia. By the fall of 2011, they were already encircled. Over the next six years, all but two properties within a roughly two-kilometre stretch of the monks’ facility, known as Great Enlightenment Buddhist Institute Society, or GEBIS, had been bought up by the Buddhists.

Initially, the Millars tried to push back. They opposed a rezoning application from GEBIS, which was asking for more farmland to be deemed institutional to accommodate its growing campus. They also wrote letters to the local council and told the monks to leave them alone. For the next few years, the visits and the phone calls stopped.

Then, in 2017, a new realtor appeared at the Millars’ door, saying she had been hired by the monks to try one last time. With most of their neighbours now gone, and more money on the table, they finally agreed to sell. What the Millars didn’t understand at the time was that changes were coming that would be far more transformative than what was happening on their quiet country road. The sales on Heatherdale were just a small part of a larger expansion effort by Bliss and Wisdom, a Taiwan-based, China-linked Buddhist organization whose presence has sparked a fierce debate over land ownership on the island.

The group, fuelled by tens of millions of dollars in international donations and led by a globe-trotting Chinese-Canadian woman known to adherents as Master Zhen-Ru, is linked to hundreds of land transactions in eastern PEI – an acquisition spree that has led to calls for a public inquiry.

Bliss and Wisdom now has five affiliated campuses in PEI, with hundreds of students seeking enlightenment in the Buddhist tradition. Each year, more monks and nuns keep coming – and with them, more land sales linked to Bliss and Wisdom and its followers.

Open this photo in gallery:A monk demonstrates the model of planned expansion for the GEBIS campus.

The influx of faith-minded newcomers has raised alarms on PEI, where issues related to land are emotional because there’s so little of it, and because links to that land often go back generations.

The island is covered in family farms. Even though its population is only about 174,000, it’s the most densely populated province in Canada. PEI has also has a unique law, the Lands Protection Act, that was enacted in the early 1980s specifically to prevent individual landowners from dominating the island. It allows a maximum of 3,000 acres of arable land to be bought by corporations and 1,000 by individuals. Non-residents are limited to just five acres each, and can only buy property on the island once it has been publicly listed on the market for 90 days.

Islanders complain that the Bliss and Wisdom-linked land purchases exploit loopholes in the legislation by dividing up transactions through a network of companies and individual followers. Bliss and Wisdom says its land purchases on PEI, which the organization considers a central part of its global expansion, are perfectly legitimate.

But many islanders believe they see something more – a highly co-ordinated land grab. They contend that many of the properties linked to the group are left vacant for much of the year. And they say the effect of these land purchases has been to inflate real estate prices in their rural communities at a time when a pressing housing crisis is making it hard for families to find homes.

A citizens’ group called the Coalition for the Protection of P.E.I. Lands estimates that more than 17,000 acres has been bought up by Bliss and Wisdom and people affiliated with the organization. That includes five educational institutions: two campuses, GEBIS and the Great Wisdom Buddhist Institute (GWBI), are tailored to Taiwanese men and women, and the three others are designed exclusively for Chinese students, who are kept apart from those from Taiwan.

If that 17,000-acre figure is accurate, the group and its followers control about 4 per cent of all the land in Kings County, which makes up around a quarter of PEI.

But getting an accurate picture of the group’s total land holdings remains difficult. The Globe and Mail analyzed hundreds of land title documents, and cross-referenced those with directors of known Bliss and Wisdom-linked corporations. Even so, much of the land on PEI now linked to Bliss and Wisdom is owned in the names of individual followers. Because the organization doesn’t publish a list of its members, it’s almost impossible to get a handle on the size of its footprint.

Open this photo in gallery:Open this photo in gallery:The GWBI centre in Brudenell, and a development across from it, are among many of the monks’ real-estate projects on PEI.

Officially, the Bliss and Wisdom foundations say the group’s PEI campuses are separate legal entities that only share religious views and a spiritual leader, Ms. Zhen-Ru – who the organization’s chief executive says has final say on significant purchases, such as land acquisition.

Bliss and Wisdom’s spokespeople say its followers are acting independently and are only buying up land around the group’s campuses because they want to be near the students there. The group has said it needs “buffer zones” around the schools to protect against pesticides and other development. “No one would question this if we were all Catholics,” said Venerable Eli Kelly, one of the few PEI-born monks at GEBIS, who spoke to The Globe. “Any new group that has ever come to PEI in history has gone through the same thing.”

But Bliss and Wisdom isn’t just a religious following. It’s also a big business, with jewellery, electronics, organic farming, translation and export divisions intertwined with an ever-growing network of followers’ numbered companies, affiliated foundations, shell corporations and donors’ financial gifts. An analysis of its business holdings in Asia shows a complex web of corporate entities, run by a small group of senior members, of which the Buddhist schools are only one part.

The amount of cash that has flowed into Canada from the group’s overseas donors and business operations in Taiwan and China is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, according to filings with the Canada Revenue Agency and provincial land sales records.

For a while, all of that new capital coming into eastern PEI was a welcome surprise. Peggy Coffin, the former mayor of Brudenell, a community since amalgamated into the Kings County town of Three Rivers, said when the land buying began in 2008 local farmers were thrilled to get good money from the Buddhists and ease into retirement. “Initially, it seemed like a gift from God,” she said. “But it just never stopped. They just kept gulping up more and more farmland. They had a plan from the get-go that we didn’t really understand.”

In 2008, when a group of Taiwanese monks first arrived in the Three Rivers community of Montague, they were seen as something of a novelty. They moved into an old seafood restaurant and motel called the Lobster Shanty, and began introducing themselves through a series of publicity stunts. In one event, they released live lobster from a local Atlantic Superstore back into the Northumberland Strait, to rescue them from islanders’ dinner plates.

The monks made inroads with local politicians and met with members of the premier’s office. And they began bringing investment and people into a province that at the time was looking for new sources of revenue and immigration to boost its economy.

Part of what drew Bliss and Wisdom to PEI – a “land of ice and snow,” as it was described on the group’s website to followers back in Taiwan – was a federal immigration program called the Provincial Nominee Program, which allowed affluent newcomers to fast-track their way to Canadian residency. That program, since overhauled by Ottawa because of concerns over abuse, brought millions in new revenue into the province.

For years, the program enjoyed support at the highest levels of the island’s government. Robert Ghiz, a former premier, met with Ke-Zhou Lu, the chief executive officer of Bliss and Wisdom’s noncharitable corporate divisions, and saw the organization as a way to increase immigration and investment in PEI. Mr. Ghiz, who is now CEO of the Canadian Telecommunications Association, was unavailable to comment, according to a spokesperson.

The group’s followers say they’re particularly attracted to PEI because land is cheaper than it is in Taiwan, and because Bliss and Wisdom needed neutral ground where it could train monks and nuns who couldn’t travel easily between Taiwan and China as a result of political tensions between the two.

Another factor is Ms. Zhen-Ru herself, who has moved Bliss and Wisdom away from its roots in Tibetan-style Buddhism, headed by the Dalai Lama, toward a more Chinese-centred version of the religion that places her as the supreme leader. Her travel privileges were temporarily suspended by Taiwan after an issue with her visa more than a decade ago, but she did return there in 2016, Mr. Lu said in an interview.

Bliss and Wisdom has said that uncertainty around her ability to enter Taiwan is part of the reason resources are being directed away from there and toward PEI.

Open this photo in gallery:Bliss and Wisdom’s leader is Zhen-Ru, in the black coat fourth from right. Beside her, in the grey coat, is Ke-Zhou Lu, CEO of its non-charitable corporate divisions.

Soon after Bliss and Wisdom appeared on PEI, talk of the group’s publicity efforts gave way to rumours about a strange new group of land buyers, some of them offering large cash payments and insisting on total confidentiality. The rumours remained rumours, partly because sellers were often required to sign nondisclosure agreements. In many cases the ultimate sources of the money were unclear.

What is clear is that Bliss and Wisdom’s arrival coincided with a number of complex land purchases on PEI that in some cases appear as though they were designed to circumvent Lands Protection Act limits on ownership by non-residents. Rather than being purchased by Bliss and Wisdom’s schools, the properties were bought by laypeople – a term for followers who aren’t monks or nuns – or by companies that seem to exist only on paper.

Many of these corporate entities are linked through directors and companies that share addresses, and many of those enterprises link back to directors of the Bliss and Wisdom network of schools.

A nun named Venerable Gan Jing, for example, is a director of the Compassion and Grace Institute, another Buddhist school. Since arriving on PEI, she has acquired one of the larger pieces of commercial property in Three Rivers, the main building at the old Holland College campus. All of the tenants in the building are affiliated with Bliss and Wisdom: a Buddhist educational charity, a consulting firm and a hostel for international students.

Ms. Jing and the rest of the nuns from Compassion and Grace live in an old motel owned by GEBIS, and get their student visas handled by Moonlight International, another Bliss and Wisdom-affiliated company, while their study permits are issued by GWBI.

While these are all separate corporate entities, the people behind them overlap. A monastery that was incorporated in 2016, called the Guan Yin Monastery, shares the same corporate address in Stratford, PEI, as a director of a company called Hopetown Corporation, which bought 504 acres in 2020 in Three Rivers and was planning a major development there.

That land was previously owned by a woman named Bin Sun, wife of Xiofeng Li, who is a director of the Compassion and Grace Institute. Prior to this, Yaw-Hui Chen, a director of the Bliss and Wisdom Education Foundation in Taiwan, had attempted to buy the same land but was denied by the province.

Although in many cases it is not possible to trace the origins of the money used for land purchases by Bliss and Wisdom followers, one person in a position to observe the flows of funds during the group’s early days on PEI was Jian Qinghua, who was among the first wave of arrivals and lived on the island from 2008 to 2012.

Mr. Qinghua served as Bliss and Wisdom’s first senior abbot, but was dismissed from the group’s inner circle after criticizing Ms. Zhen-Ru’s leadership. He left the group in 2017 and is now master of another monastery in Taiwan, where he spoke to The Globe.

Mr. Qinghua said Bliss and Wisdom required monks to hand over their bank passbooks, and that these accounts were often used to transfer money on behalf of the organization. In the early stages of the organization’s expansion into PEI, monks travelling to Canada were also instructed to carry suitcases containing $10,000 each to help finance temple construction, he said.

He filed complaints with Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau, alleging his personal bank accounts along with those of about 30 other monks were used to move millions in Bliss and Wisdom funds out of Taiwan without their knowledge, but nothing ever came of his complaint. A former chief of staff at Bliss and Wisdom, Li Yan Zhong, also told The Globe he quit in 2005 because he was growing frustrated with what he believed was mismanagement of followers’ money.

Bliss and Wisdom’s leaders have dismissed these allegations, saying the claims are being pushed by a handful of disgruntled former members and that no government office has discovered any wrongdoing.

“For almost a decade now, the same group of former followers and monastics who left on bad terms have repeatedly tried and failed to establish these accusations,” a senior monk named Venerable Dan Chang said.

Open this photo in gallery:Open this photo in gallery:At top, real-estate signs lie on land connected with the Buddhist organizations. At bottom is a farmhouse in Brudenell purchased, but left abandoned, by a person linked to the monks.

A monk named Qing Jie, who goes by Venerable Kelvin Lin, said in the early days of the group’s arrival its followers sometimes bought land with cash because it was suggested as preferable by the PEI sellers and their realtors. He said language barriers prevented them from understanding that large cash transactions must be reported to federal authorities.

But Mr. Lu, the Bliss and Wisdom CEO, did not dispute all of Mr. Qinghua’s story. He told The Globe it is true that Mr. Qinghua’s bank accounts were accessible by other monks. But he said this was a common arrangement for dealing with donations, which followers sometimes make to individual monks rather than the organization itself. Mr. Lu said banking restrictions between China and Taiwan sometimes made it difficult for the organization to transfer funds internationally, and that using the personal accounts of its followers was more convenient.

E-mails and banking records shared with government officials and provided to The Globe by a source show that in some cases lines were blurred between the finances of Bliss and Wisdom followers and the finances of some of the Buddhist organizations buying land on PEI. The Globe is not naming the source because they were not authorized to share the documents.

In an e-mail to a PEI lawyer in 2016, Yvonne Tsai, a former director of finance for GWBI, said Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce was questioning her about nearly $1.15-million in deposits into her personal account in the span of 13 days in 2015.

The money, she said, came from donors in Taiwan. The e-mail didn’t explain why the cash was being put in her bank account and not in GWBI’s.

Other e-mails obtained by The Globe suggest GWBI’s directors withheld information from the Island Regulatory and Appeals Commission, PEI’s land ownership enforcement body. In one instance, Ms. Tsai said a student who owned land should be considered “a friend” of the organization rather than a nun, which would allow GWBI to discount her property from the group’s total holdings.

GWBI said Ms. Tsai was unavailable for comment, and was no longer responsible for the group’s finances. GWBI’s spokespeople, Heather Chang and Joanna Ho, said in a statement that Ms. Tsai made a “personal decision to help as a friend” because she was fluent in English and understood the Canadian banking system, but they acknowledged this made it appear that GWBI was involved in nuns’ land purchases.

“As our Buddhist nuns consider the monastery their home, those who own land would certainly hope their properties could somehow support the monastery’s needs. But any land transaction, gifting, or even monastery use of individual properties would abide by the spirit of the [Lands Protection Act] and follow all IRAC procedures,” the statement said. “In the past, we did experience some culture shock as newcomers, and our lack of local knowledge resulted in inadequate handling of some situations.”

Other e-mails from senior nuns suggest the organization co-ordinated the purchase of land on behalf of its followers. In separate messages, Ms. Tsai confirmed she paid the property tax for another nun, and another senior nun directed an employee on which names and addresses to use to file a land purchase with the province.

“Let’s pretend the lay people are buying first for better negotiation and then transfer later to GWBI before closing,” the senior nun, named Venerable Janet, wrote in an August, 2016, e-mail.

At the centre of Bliss and Wisdom’s move into PEI is its spiritual leader, Ms. Zhen-Ru, who led the arrival in the province in 2008. She is a Chinese-born layperson who managed to rise to the top of the religious order, where senior roles have typically been reserved only for those with years of monastic training.

Ms. Zhen-Ru became leader after the death of Bliss and Wisdom’s founder, Master Jih-Chang, in 2004. While her appointment – as a woman and layperson – was contentious, the group has said the handover had the blessing of Mr. Lu, who according to the provincial land registry owns nine properties on PEI. Since Ms. Zhen-Ru took over, Bliss and Wisdom has embarked on an ambitious global expansion effort. The group says the number of its students worldwide has grown from 20,000 to 100,000, with more than 800 monks and 600 nuns.

Both Ms. Zhen-Ru, whose birth name is Meng Rong Jin, and Mr. Lu, known as “General Lu,” have shown they are skilled at amassing power. The organization says Ms. Zhen-Ru does not hold any executive position or hold shares in any of the Bliss and Wisdom network of companies, although she owns a small music studio that produces Buddhist music. She also owns a 35-per-cent stake in a Chinese electronics company, Senpu Electronics Co., Ltd.

Although spokespeople for Bliss and Wisdom have said frequently that the land purchases on PEI by the group’s followers have been made independently of the organization, Mr. Lu said in his interview with The Globe that Ms. Zhen-Ru, in her role as master, wields influence over such “significant endeavours.”

He said followers “always report to Master Zhen-Ru, and she guides us from a Buddhist perspective on what is favourable and what is unfavourable.”

Mr. Lu, meanwhile, is deeply involved in the business side of things. Among the ventures he has brought to PEI is an enterprise focused on exporting PEI-grown organic soybeans, Leezen Company.

Ms. Zhen-Ru divides her time between properties around the globe registered to family members and close associates. Now a Canadian citizen, she spends about half the year on PEI, and a few months in other parts of Canada, Singapore, the U.S. and elsewhere, according to Mr. Chang, the GEBIS spokesperson.

While Bliss and Wisdom students are taught to reject material goods, when Ms. Zhen-Ru travels around PEI she is sometimes surrounded by an entourage who dress in business attire and drive in a convoy of SUVs led by a black Mercedes. Neighbours near the GWBI temple in Brudenell said they have seen her walking with handlers holding umbrellas over her head to shield her from the sun.

Mr. Chang said the Mercedes was a gift from a follower. He said the other vehicles are used to transport monks on special visits.

“The monastery does not need expensive cars for transportation, but if one is offered to us with a good intent, we would not discard it either,” he said.

Open this photo in gallery:Worshippers make offerings at Bliss and Wisdom’s Fengshan Temple in Hukou, Taiwan. The island is a self-governing territory that Beijing claims is part of China.Jimmy Huang/The Globe and Mail

But it’s the perception of Ms. Zhen-Ru’s close links to China that is most unsettling for some former followers in Taiwan. Political tension between China and the self-ruled island remains high, and some see her position at the top of Bliss and Wisdom as evidence of China’s attempts to use Buddhism as a tool to push Taiwan toward what Beijing calls “reunification” – the political union of Taiwan and China, which is overwhelmingly opposed by the Taiwanese population. Buddhism remains a major religion in Taiwan, with about a third of its citizens describing themselves as followers of the faith.

Requests to interview Ms. Zhen-Ru were declined.

Mr. Qinghua, the former head abbot, was sent by Bliss and Wisdom to China to teach Buddhism. He said the organization used to have a close relationship with a monk named Venerable Xuecheng, the former head of the Buddhist Association of China, which is run by the Communist Party of China. He said this arrangement helped the group’s growth in China and allowed it to operate in the country, where religious groups are strictly controlled.

Bliss and Wisdom dissidents also cite Ms. Zhen-Ru’s connection with Harwa Rinpoche, a monk appointed by the Chinese government to run a religious school in China. Mr. Rinpoche was Ms. Zhen-Ru’s mentor and the person who introduced her to Bliss and Wisdom. He continues to support her, including by collaborating with her on writing books, according to the organization’s website.

Bliss and Wisdom’s leaders said in a statement that Ms. Zhen-Ru hasn’t been in China or Hong Kong in 15 years, and they vehemently denied any links to the Communist Party, saying those concerns are being spread by a handful of dissidents. As evidence of the group’s independence from China, Mr. Lu, the Bliss and Wisdom top executive, told The Globe he was detained by Chinese police during a visit to Kunming, China, in September, 2010. He said officials told him to stop his group’s Taiwanese followers from organizing group visits to the Dalai Lama in India.

“I told them that I don’t have such authority. Whether Bliss and Wisdom sends a group to India for teachings is not within my power to decide. However, they kept pressuring me to agree to their demands,” Mr. Lu said.

In the Asia-Pacific region, the friction between Taiwan and China looms large. But Ms. Zhen-Ru takes no position on the conflict, according to Mr. Chang.

“Like many spiritual leaders, what Teacher Zhen-Ru cares most about is not taking sides on political issues, which can hardly bring peace and happiness when such a stand is used to create division,” he said.

Many PEI residents who sold to the Buddhists are hesitant to talk. Others have been silenced because nondisclosure agreements were a condition of the sales.

The land issue came to a head at a public meeting in March, inside a community hall above the hockey rink in Three Rivers. Hundreds of residents listened to speakers call for a formal investigation by the province. People who couldn’t squeeze into the room listened in a stairwell.

Shane MacDonald, a local contractor who spoke in opposition to the land transactions, said Bliss and Wisdom’s leaders haven’t been honest about their plans for PEI. He accused the province of dismissing residents’ concerns.

“The lack of transparency is really troubling. There’s a total cloak of secrecy over all of this,” he said. “It’s our right to be worried about what’s happening. What we know may just be the tip of the iceberg.”

Islanders at the meeting complained about unusual land transactions – such as 15 monks buying one 75-acre farm property, apparently to get around the five-acre limit for non-residents, or two nuns who have taken a vow of poverty, but who still, according to land title documents, spent more than $1-million on 40 acres of property included in expansion plans by a convent up the hill.

Mr. Chang admitted that “ill-advised mistakes did happen” with some properties, but insisted the organization is trying to be more sensitive to islanders’ concerns about land. In the case of the 15 monks who bought a farm together, he said, they were “misled” by a local realtor, and later subdivided the land, resold a portion to a farmer and rented out a house.

“This is far from the ‘land grabbing’ or ‘land speculation’ accusations that Buddhist monks often receive,” Mr. Chang said.

Open this photo in gallery:Monks at GEBIS survey a construction site.

In June, dozens of people protested near Charlottetown’s legislature building to voice their concerns about the Buddhist land acquisitions. They have the support of Wayne Easter, a former long-time MP for the PEI riding of Malpeque, who says a provincial inquiry that can independently investigate and subpoena witnesses is needed to get to the bottom of islanders’ concerns about Bliss and Wisdom.

“Briefcases of cash were being used to buy farms,” Mr. Easter said in an interview. “I’ve been concerned about this for years.”

PEI Premier Dennis King has said in media statements that he is looking into issues of land ownership on the island, and insists his government is rejecting applications to turn farmland over to developers.

The mayor of Three Rivers, Debbie Johnston, is among those who sold their homes to the Buddhists, along with Allen Roach, PEI’s former minister of finance, who sold his waterfront property to two GWBI devotees in 2017. After the sale, Mr. Roach sat on a standing committee that examined land issues connected to the group. He stepped down from cabinet in 2018.

Mr. Roach said in an interview that the land sale did not influence any of his decision-making at the committee. A lawyer representing him said in an e-mailed letter that Mr. Roach disclosed the land sale in his declarations to PEI’s Conflict of Interest Commissioner, who had no concerns or objections.

In a statement, Ms. Johnston said the sale of her property was a “private matter” and that it has not affected her decision-making as mayor.

Anne Van Donkersgoed, a Three Rivers town councillor, said the municipality’s hands are tied when it comes to concerns about land issues connected to Bliss and Wisdom. IRAC, the land regulator, is frequently overruled by the province, which, under the Lands Protection Act, has the power to exempt buyers from the regulations.

“We have no control over who’s buying land,” she said. “The regulator will say ‘No, you’re not allowed to buy that,’ and then provincial cabinet overrules it, because it’s bringing money into the province.”

Ms. Van Donkersgoed thinks the province needs a tax on empty properties to dissuade out-of-country owners from leaving homes vacant for most of the year. She said she supports immigration and development, but that she’s concerned about the amount of land being transferred out of the hands of local farmers.

In 2018, IRAC completed an investigation into the land holdings of five Buddhist organizations on the island, but declined requests from the media, citizens’ groups and opposition politicians to release its report because it had found no evidence of an infraction.

Cory Deagle, a provincial MLA for Montague-Kilmuir, said the land issue dominated complaints from voters during the recent provincial election.

“I’m concerned young people won’t be able to buy a first-time home, the way things are looking now,” he said.

He added that he is raising the issue within cabinet, but stopped short of saying a provincial inquiry is needed. He argued that many other corporations, including land developers and large agriculture companies, are exploiting loopholes in the Lands Protection Act.

While the island waits for word on whether the government will commit to a public inquiry, the upheaval in Kings County continues. The Millars say they don’t like to drive down Heatherdale Road and see all the empty homes and silent farms. It makes them realize how much their community has changed. Today, they live in Stratford, a suburb of Charlottetown.

When PEI was first colonized, much of the island was owned by wealthy absentee landlords. It’s that same history that gave rise to the Lands Protection Act.

“We could go back to that, if we’re not diligent to stop it,” Ms. Millar said.

With research by Stephanie Chambers

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