Evidence of meeting #21 for Justice and Human Rights in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was gaming.
A recording is available from Parliament.
12:50 p.m.
NDP
Charmaine Borg NDP Terrebonne—Blainville, QC
Thank you.
Do you think that these organizations have links with certain countries in particular? We have the statistics for 2008. Have there been any changes since then?
12:50 p.m.
C/Supt Michel Aubin
I don't have the information on the correlation between the countries, but it goes without saying that there is still a fairly significant correlation in the area of drugs in South America and the Caribbean, where those countries are used as a conduit for cocaine. There's also some correlation with heroin and countries in Southeast Asia.
Now, with what we call the
“strategic early warning”,
we pay close attention to what's going on in the world, for example in northern Africa. With what's currently going on there, it creates opportunities for organized crime. It's the same thing for certain European countries and the issue of economic stability. Will there be a destabilization of the European Union that will create opportunities for organized crime established in Canada and having links in those countries?
First, we need to evaluate the current situation and the correlation between the countries. As I said, I don't have the data here. We are also looking at future events outside the country. Do they present opportunities for organized crime? So we're looking at those two factors.
12:50 p.m.
NDP
Charmaine Borg NDP Terrebonne—Blainville, QC
I'll be brief. In your presentation, you said that there has been a slight increase in the trafficking of ketamine, pharmaceutical opioids, and so on. The 2008 report indicated that the trafficking of ecstasy and crystal meth is a big concern. Is that still the case? Is everything that's a concern on the list? Is it only because there's been an increase?
12:50 p.m.
C/Supt Michel Aubin
Absolutely. We're seeing that these other markets remain relatively stable, based on the information we're given. In the case of ketamine, we're seeing that there is some impact and an increase in organized crime in that market. One of our duties is to inform operational bodies about which markets are growing, which are declining and which are stable.
12:50 p.m.
Supt Eric Slinn
If I may, I'll add to that in my role as the director of the drug branch, in terms of the trends, I think what's more disconcerting for us is the trend towards ecstasy. Many of you are aware of the deaths in the last couple of months in B.C. and Alberta. A lot of the ecstasy being sold is purported to be ecstasy but in fact is methamphetamine, which causes serious, serious concerns for our youth.
12:50 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dave MacKenzie
Thank you.
I'm going to try, in a couple of areas, to help the analyst who has to write this report. For one of them, you talked about the groups. You have them divided into how many groups now...?
12:50 p.m.
C/Supt Michel Aubin
In past years and right up to this year, sir, there are four categories. We're right now considering migrating to a three-category model.
12:50 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dave MacKenzie
Given the four categories, can you give us the numbers and tell us what timeframe they are applicable to? Are they for 2010 or 2011?
Can you give us the numbers?
12:50 p.m.
C/Supt Michel Aubin
The numbers for 2011, sir, are that we have 24 groups in category 1 and 262 in category 2; there are 121 in category 3 and 210 in category 4. We have 30 groups that we did not rate for various reasons, and we've received 82 additional groups that came in after the production of the national threat assessment.
12:50 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dave MacKenzie
Okay, thank you.
Are category 4 primarily street gangs that fluctuate in number?
12:50 p.m.
C/Supt Michel Aubin
No, they're primarily groups for which their sphere of influence is local.
Mr. Lamontagne can probably explain that.
12:50 p.m.
Ken Lamontagne Director, Strategic Intelligence Analysis Central Bureau, Royal Canadian Mounted Police
At this point, I wouldn't say they're the most fluid groups, but they're the ones for which we have a greater problem to analyze because they appear and disappear from the provincial threat assessments a little more often; that impacts significantly on the national threat assessment.
Often enough, as Michel was explaining before, we rely significantly on the municipal, provincial, and other law enforcement agencies to provide this information to the provincial bureaus, and it then comes back to us. Often there is a cutoff point for the number of groups they report to us, so it's often the localized groups, we suspect, that are the ones coming down.
But there is a significant amount of fluidity. In the category 1 groups from this year, I think there's a change of perhaps 45% from the previous year. There is a significant turnaround, not only in the lower groups but in the higher-level groups as well.
12:55 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dave MacKenzie
Could you clarify for the analyst what the categories signify?
12:55 p.m.
Director, Strategic Intelligence Analysis Central Bureau, Royal Canadian Mounted Police
The first category.... This is what Michel was mentioning briefly. Category 1 and category 2 are very similar. The distinction we make to category 1 is that the analysis of all the category 2 groups takes place to ascertain whether they deserve to be listed at the higher level of threat.
Essentially, what you have in category 1 is groups that are at a significant level of involvement in Canada—they're either interprovincial, cross-border, or international. They're heavily involved in certain markets, either a market per se or in multiple markets. You have a group here that is very significant.
Category 2 again represents groups that are international, cross-border, or interprovincial in scope, but what happens is that those in category 2 are reassessed to ascertain whether they should fall within category 1. What essentially happens is that all category 1 groups, for lack of a better term—and I'm trying to describe this as well as I can—are initially in category 2 until the group of analysts both from our central bureau as well as the provincial bureaus get together and assess which are the higher priorities. These become category 1 groups.
Category 3 groups are usually those in a single province.
Category 4 groups are those with an operational scope that's in a single area. Often enough, the comparison is made to street gangs; that's the one we hear most often.
That's pretty much the distinction among the categories.
12:55 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dave MacKenzie
And is there—probably more in category 4—a distinction between rural and urban, or are they mostly urban?
12:55 p.m.
Director, Strategic Intelligence Analysis Central Bureau, Royal Canadian Mounted Police
At this point we don't make a distinction between them. That's an area that's coming up increasingly with respect to wanting to see analysis of it. We're seriously looking at it this year to see whether we can do something in that regard, but we haven't made this distinction necessarily in our assessments.
We did, however, do an assessment this year with respect to what we call our criminal intelligence estimate, which is an estimate of markets, and we did an assessment of what we call strategic early warning, wherein we're forecasting that some of the rural areas, because of expansion or various significant industry changes, etc., will impact upon organized crime. Organized crime will take advantage of the change.
So we are moving in that direction, but we're not at the point at which I could say there's a concrete analysis being done.
February 16th, 2012 / 12:55 p.m.
Conservative
Kyle Seeback Conservative Brampton West, ON
Concerning what you were just talking about, I was looking at the 2008 numbers. There were 430 groups in category 4, and category 3 had 200. I think you just told me now that there are 200 and 200.
Did I mishear that?
12:55 p.m.
Director, Strategic Intelligence Analysis Central Bureau, Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Sorry. Category 3 this year is 121, and category 4 is 210.
You're correct. There is a significant difference.
12:55 p.m.
Conservative
12:55 p.m.
Director, Strategic Intelligence Analysis Central Bureau, Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Part of it this year was that one of the provinces did not provide us with the groups prior to the publication of the national threat assessment. There's another one where we had a significant number of groups that weren't rated this year.
Again, increasingly with the lack of resources and things like that, some of the provincial bureaus are having a cut-off point with the number of groups they actually report to us. They're reporting about those they have an interest in, and not necessarily all the ones that are there.
That's having a significant impact on those numbers.