Good morning, Mr. Chair, ladies and gentlemen of the committee.
My name is Claude Bélanger. First, I'm going to note that the Bélanger Street neighbourhood Mr. Delva referred to in his presentation has nothing to do with me.
For a little more than 32 years, I have acted as Crown attorney or permanent Crown prosecutor in the federal Department of Justice. During those 32 years, which I've spent before virtually all the courts of all jurisdictions, I've followed the trail of a very large number of members of organized crime. Unfortunately, when I began my career, the organized crime act had not even been conceived of, and I'm not sure anyone felt the need to do so.
The legislation concerning organized crime and the proceeds of crime are indissociable in my mind. They cannot be separated from each other because the purpose of the crimes committed by organized crime is to appropriate material property, money, and all that entails.
In 1989, when the new act on the proceeds of crime came into force, I established the Mont-Joie ski resort case, which you may have heard about. This involved individuals who, through narcotics imports in southern Florida, had acquired enough money to build a ski resort in North Hatley, in the Eastern Townships, in Quebec.
Since the act was new, this case went on for four years. I worked on it full time and managed the police investigation. I wasn't a police officer, but we had to train the police officers who were starting this type of investigation based on an act that had previously never existed. The case ended in 1993 with, among other things, the confiscation of the ski resort.
In 1994, I managed the prosecution — I wasn't the one who established this case — in all the proceedings instituted by the Attorney General of Canada following the RCMP operation designed to operate a currency exchange desk in the Montreal business centre. Police officers played the role of clerks there. The purpose of that police operation was, first, to identify individuals likely to make use of this type of procedure to erase any traces and mask the origins of money and, second, to determine where that money went.
Some individuals appeared with hockey bags the size of those that Ken Dryden used to transport his goalie equipment. They put these bags filled with money on the counter and told the clerks, whom they obviously did not know were police officers, to send the money to given locations. The officers then immediately knew where the money was going. However, they didn't know what happened from that location. That was the purpose of the operation. This was another case that we established. The police investigation started in 1990, and the trials ended in 1997.
It was probably for these reasons that, in late 2001 and early 2002, at the RCMP's request, the Department of Justice assigned me, as legal counsel, to the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, or CFSEU, that the RCMP had just established.
That unit consisted mainly of veteran investigators mainly from the RCMP, but also from Sûreté du Québec and the Montreal and Laval police departments. The RCMP spearheaded the investigation. The unit's first target was what the RCMP calls traditional organized crime. That's the organized crime that you don't see and whose existence you generally don't suspect, in other words, the mafia.
At first, working on that investigation, I very soon saw that it was an illusion to think that the federal Department of Justice alone, within its jurisdiction, could make a complete, qualitative contribution to the investigation. It wasn't because the investigation was generally conducted by federal police officers that the members of organized crime were going to be content with committing “federal” crimes. I therefore requested the assistance of the provincial Ministry of Justice, which assigned a very experienced lawyer to the role. We both started supervising the CFSEU investigation from a legal standpoint.
What did we do together? The way you investigate definitely varies with the type of organized crime concerned by the investigation. In 2001, a new act had just been amended. To a certain point, the organized crime criteria had been changed, and it was in that context that we started working on the new investigation.
The lawyer René Domingue and I first had to consult in order to agree on the definitions and interpretation to be given to the new act. Then we spent a fair amount of time training the investigators, not because they lacked experience, on the contrary. In virtually all cases, these were veteran investigators, but what they had to investigate was entirely new to them. Why? Because, under the new act, elements that absolutely had not constituted evidence at the time the investigators had conducted the investigations and acquired their experience now did constitute evidence. We had to investigate.
To obtain our investigation tools, we supervised the required affidavits. These were affidavits for wire taps, search warrants and installations of GPS systems in vehicles. There was also the affidavit pertaining to what I call the special warrant, provided for in the Criminal Code, which is quite recent. It's a warrant used by police officers and allowed by the law in cases where the investigation procedure or the anticipated invasion of privacy would constitute an illegal or abusive search, were it not for this provision of the Criminal Code, in section 487.01. We also supervised the affidavits required to force the institutions to provide documents, applications for retention of seized articles.
The government amended the Criminal Code and facilitated the use of certain investigation methods, including wire taps. Unlike Randall Richmond, I don't think it's easier to obtain permission for this. On the contrary, the time it takes can be longer than that originally provided for by the Criminal Code. You can even listen to private conversations for a full year with legal authorization.
However, if you install a GPS in a vehicle, legal permission to do so is valid for only 60 days. In other words, when the Criminal Code was amended, they forgot to amend certain provisions. As simple as it may seem, this causes quite particular problems.
With regard to seized articles, we're normally required to return them following the seizure. We can obtain extensions of up to one year, the same period as for wire taps. However, for an organized crime investigation like the one at that time, the period, whether it be three months or one year, isn't enough. Police officers spend a considerable amount of energy preparing all the documentation, affidavits and explanations required to obtain an extension of the time for retaining seized evidence. The more the number of these procedures is increased, the more the investigation is jeopardized. Each action police officers take requiring court authorization requires documentation filed at the court house, and that involves risks. It's a bit like lottery tickets: the more you buy, the more chances you have of winning. The more necessary actions must be taken to conduct the investigation, the greater the chances of jeopardizing that investigation.
Having spent nearly four years judicially supervising the investigation, I can tell you without hesitation that the police officers spent almost as much energy protecting the investigation's existence as they did obtaining the evidence that ultimately led to the arrest of 70 or 90 individuals in Montreal.
Another problem — and this is what I've been asked to talk to you about — was endorsing the warrants. Let's simply take the example of a search warrant. In the kind of investigation we're talking about here, despite the fact that the centre of the investigation is in Montreal, the area concerned is Canada as a whole and, very often, foreign countries. That was the case of this investigation. Consequently, a warrant may be issued in Montreal, but have to be executed in another province. In many cases, quite extensive documentation accompanies the warrant application. Under the Criminal Code, if it is anticipated that the warrant will have to be executed in another province and the execution of that warrant will require entering a house or domicile, the warrant must be endorsed by the local judicial authority of the place where the warrant must be executed.
Despite the fact that there are two official languages in Canada, warrants drafted in French were also a problem, and I can understand that. In very small municipalities where warrants had to be executed, we had to go before the local judge, who didn't understand the documentation because it was drafted in French. Here again, I'm telling you about problems we faced every day.