Justice committee  It does; it's just that we've renamed it three times.

Justice committee  Sure. There are provincial and federal ministers, I know, who are looking at the issue. It's a jurisdictional, territorial issue. A warrant is a warrant anywhere in Canada. So if you're wanted on a criminal matter, in theory you can be arrested. Say you commit a crime in Vanc

Justice committee  These are statutory issues dealing with parole and mandatory releases. You can--

Justice committee  There's very little you can do, and you'll get a mixed view from police officers about this. I know many inmates, and a lot of these fellows go to jail, and they're going to try to turn themselves around. If you remove any hope at all of perhaps some good time when you're in jail

Justice committee  The bail provisions need strengthening. In Canada there are only two grounds to detain an offender, and that's if you are a danger to the public--and that's a very high bar, and you have to prove that danger--or if you have a record for failing to appear. Many jurisdictions don't

Justice committee  Mr. Chairman, if I found out that members of my organization weren't sharing appropriate information with other agencies, heads would roll. People would be out of a job. So it's just not an issue where we are. The RCMP have taken over a program that was started in B.C., where a

Justice committee  We and the RCMP do that already. When we multi-task and go after offenders we don't just do it in isolation. A lot of times, depending on the seizure and the product, it will depend on who gets called. We have a huge problem at the moment with street-level drug dealers in Vancouv

Justice committee  You and I should talk afterwards.

Justice committee  If I could just make a point, if you run a police force similar to the way you run a business, budgets are crucial. So when officers come to me and say look, we've got a major project we would like to do, we listen to the project. The first thing, one of my deputies pulls out of

Justice committee  Yes, this isn't a direct link to organized crime, as such. These are habitual offenders we deal with, and we deal with the same usual suspects. So we started off with a smaller criterion--I think it was five arrests in a year--and the numbers were just so big. The criterion is 12

Justice committee  Our chronic offender program is a popular one in Vancouver because it's non-stop action. Believe it or not, when we want to “surveil” an individual, we usually begin the surveillance at the court house, because at least we know that's where they're going to be, because they're sh

Justice committee  You asked about tools. The current federal proceeds of crime legislation doesn't work for us. I think the most offensive part of the legislation is that defence lawyers get first crack at the money. An accused person is charged with an offence. For the money we seize, the defen

Justice committee  It's great that the federal government uses it a lot. We very seldom use it in Vancouver.

Justice committee  So that's why we're here; we need better laws. When we make these small recommendations for making changes to words here and there--about replica--it may not seem that crucial, but it's huge for the street-level officers. We tried to get regulations at the local level that you ca

Justice committee  First off, on how we pick the names of investigations, it's done by the alphabet. That's all. Simply, if it's in a certain geographic region we'll go with V, so it's project victory, project Vesuvius, whatever it is. I don't know what the reference you make about--