Justice Committee on April 30th, 2009

[Michelle Miller]

Yes.

[Ujjal Dosanjh, Liberal, Vancouver South, BC]

I see Mr. Boyd jumping up to answer.

My next question is with respect to organized crime. This study is being done in the context of organized crime. What would be your number one priority if we are to make a dent in organized crime? Politicians can't do 200 things at once.

[Prof. Neil Boyd]

That's a tough question.

On the one hand would be improved resources targeted at organized crime and improved prevention. I think the focus on penalties is misplaced. I don't think it's at all productive, ultimately, as we have very tough penalties in place. That's one side of the continuum.

The other side of the continuum is to look at the way in which we regulate drugs. As I said in my presentation, you can regulate all drugs in different ways and you would still have organized crime, because of many aspects and many other kinds of business that they can become involved in. But I think that something like cannabis is an interesting issue. You have a member of your own party who has proposed a bill to decriminalize cultivation and possession. So on the one hand, it seems that you have to make a distinction between cannabis itself and the illegal trade in cannabis. It was my generation that was the first to come into contact with it. For 40 years, we've been telling young people that this is a criminal offence. I deal a lot with law enforcement and I deal a lot with the police. It's one of the areas they have difficulty with.

I guess what I'm suggesting is that the two sides to solving this problem are, on the one hand, to have much more money for prevention and much more money targeted at enforcement, and on the other, to think about what we can regulate and what message we can send that makes sense and is consistent around legal and illegal drugs.

[Ujjal Dosanjh, Liberal, Vancouver South, BC]

Would the top priority be decriminalizing it?

[Prof. Neil Boyd]

I'd say that these are both priorities. It's not a question of one being more important than the other.

[Ujjal Dosanjh, Liberal, Vancouver South, BC]

Mr. Gordon, we've been talking about regionalizing police for some time. I used to vent every now and then when I was the attorney general. I've said publicly that obviously I didn't have the political courage to force municipalities into regional policing, because essentially that's what you have to do in British Columbia. I remember that about two months ago, when I made a comment, there was an uproar from the municipalities and furor over imposition.

It is important to have regional policing. I agree with you. But how do we get there? You've been in British Columbia for a long time. You know the politics of the Lower Mainland and Greater Vancouver. That's what we're dealing with. How do we begin to actually get there? No beginning has been made.

[Prof. Robert Gordon]

Right, and the status quo prevails, and we are rapidly approaching 2012, when the RCMP contract will be renewed, unless we can negotiate an alternative.

It's a great question. There are two issues.

First of all, we're talking primarily about amalgamating police services in the two large metropolitan areas: Victoria and in particular Vancouver. That's creating a single metropolitan force for those two separate city areas. That is the issue that causes the greatest resistance on the part of the municipal mayors, with some exceptions.

The answer to that, quite frankly, is for the province to seize the bull by the horns and go ahead and do it and, unfortunately, reap some of the consequences. But if it's done in the first year, as you well know, immediately following an election, by the time you get out of the green zone and into the yellow zone, you're at about year three, and most of the pain is over and done with, and people begin to see the benefits of it. My advice to politicians on this issue is to start figuring out how you're going to do it in the year immediately following election and then just brace yourself. In the end, what will happen is that the electorate will realize that this is actually the best way to go.

That is creation of amalgamated police services in the metropolitan areas. Over top of that, you have a second tier of policing. That is the tier two or level two policing. Level two policing involves policing across the region. There's often a confusion in the use of these terms.

When talking about creating regional response to organized crime, I'm talking about a response province-wide, plus across the state of Washington and the American services, plus in Alberta, because the drug trade in this part of the world most certainly is a regional drug trade, and with all due respect to folks who are concerned about human trafficking—I am too—it's the drug trade that is driving the operations at the moment. If we can tackle that on a regional basis—and that will require the kind of organized crime agency that you created in 1999 that is going to operate in an amalgamated, organized, and properly funded way, with some accountability—we will make tremendous headway. But at the moment, we are facing a siloed system, and I don't think it's effective. I think many serving police officers will agree that it's not effective. And you're going to hear people who will defend the status quo.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Thank you.

I'll move on to Monsieur Ménard. You have seven minutes.

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

I'm going to speak in French.

I greatly appreciated the presentation of Mr. Boyd.

You told us that after 1967, the number of people charged has been massive. If I understood correctly, you mentioned 40,000 Canadians, while before there had been only 1,000. So I would like you to elaborate on this statistic.

[Technical difficulty--Editor]

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Perhaps we could go to Mr. Comartin first, because the technician has a problem with the French-to-English feed.

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

Are you going to get back to me?

Can I leave my line? I am a human being too.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

The problem is that they're going to now switch it around, but while they're doing it there will be no feed to Ottawa and there will be no digital or analog record of this particular part of our testimony.

Let me canvass the members. Are you okay...[Technical Difficulty--Editor]...officially recorded? It has to be by consensus.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

This is a committee of the House of Commons. It has to be official. If it isn't official and regular, it's an insult to the people who have come here and to the members of the committee.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

We're going to suspend for five minutes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

We're going to reconvene the meeting.

Monsieur Ménard, I believe all the technology works now. We'll just start from the beginning again, so you have seven minutes.

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

I greatly appreciated your presentation Mr. Boyd, although I would like to have an exchange with you about three subjects. You know that our Committee has undertaken a study on organized crime. When we talk about organized crime, we are never far removed from the issue of drugs.

Could you repeat the statistics? You seemed to say that there has been a kind of cut-off between the period before 1967 and the period after 1967. If I understood correctly, you said that 1,000 people were charged before 1967 and 10,000 thereafter. I would like you to elaborate on how the prohibition strategy has been a failure and how we are going in a very questionable direction with Bill C-15. All sorts of scenarios have been put forward in our Committee.

I am going to ask you my three questions all at once so I will not need to talk any more. I would like to know your opinion and that of your colleagues on the following idea. Our Committee could recommend establishing a list of criminal organizations, but this would be circumscribed within a framework. For example, you know that despite the fact that three courts of law have declared the Hells Angels to be a criminal organization under sections 467.11, 467.12 and 467.13 of the Criminal Code, every time members of the Hells Angels are brought to trial, the Crown must start all over again and prove that this is a criminal organization.

So we are playing around with the idea of having a list that would say, after a court adjudication, that this organization has the status of a criminal organization. Do you believe something like that could be useful in combatting organized crime?

If I have some time left, I would like to get back to the infiltration by organized crime of the legal economy, because I believe it will be the challenge of the next five years. So I would like to hear your opinion on these matters.

[Prof. Neil Boyd]

Thank you.

The point about prohibition is that until 1967 we only had 1,000 convictions per year for possession, distribution, and cultivation of all illegal drugs combined. So one has to ask, why was it so different? Why, by 1976, did we have 40,000 convictions for marijuana possession alone?

The way to understand that is to understand global travel. Only the wealthy could travel globally until the mid- to late 1960s. People went to countries like Thailand and Colombia and they brought back the drugs of the third world.

We've always had our first world drugs, alcohol and tobacco. In fact, when we criminalized smoking opium in 1908, it was not because we had any informed debate about the harm. The law itself was introduced by the Minister of Labour and he said in the House of Commons, “We will get some good out of this riot yet.” There was a very virulent anti-Asiatic riot in the fall of 1907 that led to the criminalization of smoking opium.

Smoking opium had been a part of British Columbia for 40 years, sold in Vancouver, Victoria, and New Westminster. And in fact, in 1885 a Supreme Court inquiry into local business concluded that it was much less harmful than alcohol. The inquiry found that the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, which was formed to combat beatings by drunken husbands, was on the right track to focus on alcohol as a more serious problem in British Columbia than smoking opium.

So this is my point about how we've come to make certain drugs legal and certain drugs illegal. It's not because of informed public debate about health consequences but because of history, politics, culture, and economics. It's about good first world drugs. There used to be a doctor clad in a lab coat and stethoscope: “More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette” was an ad in Life magazine. And a life expectancy table appeared on the side, demonstrating that since the twenties and the advent of the modern cigarette, life expectancy had improved. You couldn't put that forward today as credible. So we've used a regulatory model towards tobacco--aggressive public health education, non-smokers rights and issues--and we've accomplished a great deal.

My point, then, about prohibition is this. The biggest issue there is really cannabis. It's 10 to 20 times the market of all the other illegal drugs combined. The market for heroin use and cocaine use.... Many of the countries that have innovative approaches in western Europe are finding that heroin use, with prescription and supervised consumption and so forth, is declining among young people. It's not a glamour drug any more.

So I think we have to make distinctions around drugs and have to think carefully. We've done that around alcohol and tobacco. We still have a lot of work to do around alcohol. You look at ads.... Anyway, I'm rambling.

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

Excuse me, I would like to know what you think about the Hells Angels.

That is the second question. I would also like to know the opinion of the other guests. What do you think of having a list of criminal organizations that the Crown could use?

[Prof. Neil Boyd]

I'll be quick on that point. If you get Supreme Court decisions that document that certain groups are organized crime groups, that may settle the matter. On the other hand, as you know, you can get into a situation where groups change over time and what was once an organized crime group may not be an organized crime group at a future date. So it's tricky.

There are many who are highly critical of the Hells Angels, who suggest that the best way to approach them is individually and not as an organized crime group. But that's a long debate for another day.

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

Mr. Gordon, what do you think?

[Prof. Robert Gordon]

It would indeed be a problem. The major problem, of course, is staying on top of the list of organizations. At first blush, it sounds like a very useful way of proceeding. But I think that groups will simply either change their names or drop their names altogether.

What you have to understand, too, about the drug trade in British Columbia--and this is obviously my primary focus--is that it's actually not operated by a single organization, or even by a couple of organizations, but it's operated by a lot of dispersed groups. That's why it's actually inaccurate to be referring to them as gangs. They're not actually gangs in the traditional sense. You have clusters of criminals, of organized crime groups, engaged in different aspects of the industry. Some are concerned with financing and real estate acquisition, some are concerned with cultivation and production of drugs generally, and some are concerned with distribution. They break down across ethnic and cultural lines. There is no way of actually identifying any of these groups. They don't have names.

If you noticed, the recent arrests in Vancouver involved individuals who were referred to as groups. They didn't have any specific name. One group was referred to as the Sanghera group. There's a very good reason for that, and that is that they simply don't allow themselves to be identified in that way.

So what seems to be useful may in fact turn out to be less useful than you think.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Thank you.

We're going to go on to Mr. Comartin, for seven minutes.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

And thank you for being here, witnesses.

Professor Gordon, as part of our briefing in advance of this, we were given documentation from the Province of British Columbia. In terms of task forces and an integrated fight against organized crime, or the gangs, I think you're left with the impression from these documents that with the uniform gang task force--and they make reference to another one--in fact, we don't have the silo effect here in B.C. I have to say that when I came here, I had the opposite impression, and when I got this material, I was a bit taken aback.

How accurate is this reflection that the province is moving away from silos and in fact having some kind of organized, integrated response to organized crime?

[Prof. Robert Gordon]

I think your original impression is the accurate one. Unfortunately, I don't see any destruction of silos; in fact, I see a burgeoning of them.

Let me give you a quick example. There is the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, which is designated to deal with organized crime matters in the province. That operates at one level. You also have the integrated or uniform gang task force, which was originally set up to deal with youth gangs. That's operating at another level. You have the integrated homicide investigation team, which, among other things, investigates gang-related homicides. That's operating at another level, without, by the way, membership from three key municipal police forces: West Vancouver; Vancouver, which is the largest in the region; and Delta. And I could go on and on. Even within the RCMP itself, you will find there are different groups or teams tackling different aspects of what constitutes organized crime.

So I refute the claim that there is the level of organization that we need to effectively tackle organized crime. We need a single organization, under provincial control, that operates on a regional basis. And I will fight for that to the end.