Justice Committee on April 30th, 2009

[John Shavluk]

Thanks for the question.

No, it was explained in court that for five years I was targeted, and I must have been a criminal mastermind because they couldn't catch me for anything, so they took one of my tenants, whom they had caught breaking into 70 homes in Saskatoon--and this is all public knowledge, the names of everybody have been released on the Internet--and he withheld two months of my rent, and they went into my banks and scared them all. The trust company that held all my holdings even went under. They had offices in B.C. It was called Sask Trust. I held so much of the city's real estate that it caused the collapse of a financial institution.

A prison has never been built where they have not found illegal drugs. I listened to the comments here, where he said they move to harder drugs. I'm sorry, mother's milk is the gateway drug. When I was in jail for something I didn't do, not seeing my children, I would've taken poison. I found out I was too much of a coward to kill myself because of what I did, and I've been fighting for 18 years to stop somebody else. Jail is just the beginning. They have to pay for it the rest of their lives.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Thank you.

I will move on to Mr. Comartin, for seven minutes.

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

Thank you for being here, Mr. Tousaw and Mr. Amar. You seem to be the strongest advocates for decriminalization, even legalization.

I put this question to Professor Boyd earlier today, that unless the U.S. in particular moves to decriminalize and/or legalize, do either one of you see a practical way that Canada could do it, given that so much of our market, in particular cannabis, goes over to the U.S. side of the border?

[Kirk Tousaw]

Sure. The reality is that while a great deal of our domestic harvest goes to the United States, it comprises only a very small fraction of their market. I don't think we need to be beholden to American policies that have been proven failures over the last 25 years and longer. We have to chart our own course. If we choose not to chart our own course, but instead to follow the failed policies of the past, we'll end up with the same failures on our street.

I used to practise criminal law in Detroit, Michigan, before I moved to Vancouver. I've seen the future of mandatory minimum sentences, an increased militarization of our police forces, an expansion in our prison populations leading to recruitment into gangs. That's the future we have in front of us. That's the future we can choose not to take.

I should also point out that while the bulk of our marijuana goes south, and we know what comes back up north as a result, a lot of it is consumed right here. A conservative estimate is about 10 million grams of marijuana are consumed by Canadians each month, so it's not as if we don't have a significant demand in our country for drugs.

The problem is we can't do anything to address that demand until we take the blinders off and stop putting enforcement ahead of the other methods we have. A dollar invested in enforcement is wasted. A dollar invested in prevention and treatment makes a difference to the generation to come.

[Mani Amar]

I believe the legalization of marijuana in Canada will be more or less an incentive for gangs to deal with a product going south. It would cause more U.S. gangs to create their own back ends, their own alleyways, into Canada to hold up the criminal underworld.

I can't stress this enough, the number one priority on every gang member's list, and I know this for a fact because I've driven around with them and I've spoken to them for research on my documentary, is not guns, not cocaine, not prostitution; it's marijuana. It is so easy to do.

If the government can reduce the incentive for them, they have no reason to bring in guns, to become stronger gangs for the U.S. over here. So I think we should be looking at our own process in cutting off the legs to the U.S. to even want to trade with us.

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

Thank you.

Mr. Mendicino, I think you're only the second prosecutor we've had in front of us on this study. Of course, Stinchcombe comes up, not just from those sources, but every police officer we've had has raised it.

As to the expectation that legislation is going to be able to correct this problem, I don't see how we can do that. At the basis of Stinchcombe is the charter. Even if we curtailed the extremes that we're seeing with Stinchcombe, the Supreme Court is ultimately going to tell us that the charter overrides us.

Do you see anything developing where we get to the judiciary with better arguments that the extreme amount of information you're having to find and disclose to the defence should be curtailed? It has occurred to me that our judiciary is not—maybe because they don't have enough time—actively engaged enough when the motion is being brought forward for further disclosure, or else the crown is saying it's given what it has to and it doesn't have to give more. They're not engaged enough at this point. I have the impression that this is a particular problem in this province.

[Marco Mendicino]

You said that judges weren't involved enough at the pre-trial phase, which is where some of these disclosure issues could be resolved. It's a theme that Michael Code and Justice LeSage recently picked up on in a report that I believe was published in Ontario several months ago. The idea of the report was to try to identify the problems in prosecuting major cases. Of course, it's an issue that's synonymous with the theme today, which is discussing guns, gangs, and drugs.

You mentioned that whatever legislative response we may come up with will ultimately be overturned, because the Supreme Court of Canada will say that the charter applies. If one looks at Stinchcombe very closely, it does not take long to figure out that the reasoning and the fact pattern that informed the decision was varied. It was a garden variety case, a small case.

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

But it's never been overturned. In fact, it's been reinforced repeatedly by subsequent decisions.

[Marco Mendicino]

That's right. I think the answer to our question lies in how we define “relevance” and “clear irrelevance”. That is the operative standard we're working with. The police investigators go out and collect the evidence. There is a corollary obligation on them to turn over all the evidence to the prosecutor. The prosecutor will sift through it, but it all goes out to the defence. It was one of the rationales that informed Stinchcombe.

There is very little discretion exercised by the crown in separating the wheat from the chaff—between what is turned over from the police to the prosecutor and what is turned over from the prosecutor to the accused. The reason we don't exercise much discretion is that we don't want to quibble over what is clearly irrelevant. If it's clearly irrelevant, what difference does it make? We have to revisit our notion of what “clearly irrelevant” means. Certainly, as cases have mushroomed, you have your evidentiary component, which is what police officers do—the surveillance, the wiretaps, what will actually make up the case to meet. Then you have another component, which is corporate disclosure, and which essentially amounts to the communications exchanged between police officers and various investigative branches.

My point is, under the current disclosure regime, rather than quibbling about all the other corporate disclosure, which can actually be far more significant in volume than the actual court case to meet, we simply disclose it to the defence. Then it can take months if not years for the trial to come to pass as the accused sifts through all this other corporate disclosure, which has no bearing on the essence of the case. If we revisit “clear irrelevance”, I think we may actually be able to persuade the courts all the way up the chain to rethink the way they view disclosure, even in the light of the charter.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Ms. Grewal, you have seven minutes.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you all for coming here and for your presentations.

My question is for Mr. Amar. As you know, in the last decade, more than 100 South Asian men have died violently in the lower mainland as a result of gang violence. Why is it that these men, who are often from very good families, have turned to gangs? What can we do to prevent this from happening?

[Mani Amar]

I spent three years trying to discover the answer to that exact question: why were so many South Asian males over the last 19 years getting involved? And before that, why were so many Asian males getting involved in the 1980s in the drug trade?

It seems that for the last 100 years or so, it has moved from one minority to the next. It moved through the Italian community, through the Irish community, all the way through prohibition, through small Honduras communities and native communities. We've had Vietnamese gangs that were very prominent.

I don't believe it is because of the cultural or even religious traits of the South Asian community, which a lot of people have stressed. It's not that easy. I think this is more of a societal issue than a minority importing issue. These young men came from well-to-do families, not broken homes. If we look at the typical North American gangster, for example, if we take a look at south L.A. and African Americans getting involved in gangs, the majority of the time they come from broken homes, with one parent, usually a single mother. They have drug abuse or a parent who is currently in the judicial system or has served time.

None of those factors were really relevant in the South Asian and Asian communities from the 1980s on. It was more of a societal issue. Because Vancouver is a port city, and very prominent in trade routes north to south and east to west, the drug trade is very easy to get into.

Every one of my friends and any one of my acquaintances knows that I'm an activist and that I stand against any criminal activity, yet I can pick up the phone right now and ask one of them to drop off a marijuana plant here at the Four Seasons Hotel and it will be here within half an hour.

We have to look at the fact that the marijuana trade is so prevalent in B.C. I was not an advocate for drug use or drug legalization before, but I do see the logic behind legalizing it now. We have to reduce the incentive for these gangs to exist. The number one reason they exist, especially from one minority to the next, is because of marijuana. It is such an easy trade to get into, and there's so much money to be made. It's not slowing down. Supply and demand is not going down. The amount of money being made from it has not slowed down for years.

Last year, annually, we were looking at $7 billion in illegal criminal underworld trade for marijuana alone. It's not an issue that's going to slow down, unless we can control it. It's just like prohibition. We regulate alcohol. We tax alcohol. We should be looking at doing that for marijuana as well.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

My other question is for Mr. Shavluk. Mr. Shavluk, I understand that you want to legalize drugs. Would you allow children to take drugs? Where would it stop?

Is it not true that decriminalization might even result in the criminals turning their attention to younger and younger children? Children are already being inducted into the drug subculture in alarmingly high numbers.

If you legalize it, do you assume that there is a natural limit to the demand for these drugs and that if their consumption were legalized, the demand would not increase substantially?

Price and availability would exert a profound effect on consumption. The cheaper alcohol becomes, for example, the more it is consumed, at least within quite wide limits. Why wouldn't it be the same for marijuana or crystal meth? Could you please explain?

[John Shavluk]

First off, thank you, Nina, for the question, because sitting here there are a million things I'd like to say.

Thank you, because the dead Indo-Canadian men are in my riding as well, and I've run in three provincial elections about that.

Let's face the facts, please. There are zero deaths from cannabis. You say, how would I stop children from being targeted? Well, alcohol is safe for legal drinkers. When it was illegal, people were dying just from consuming wood alcohol. I've been in bikers' homes where they've sprayed cans of Raid on these things. There are children in the hospital, high school students with asthma attacks, because there's nobody controlling the marketplace. In countries where they kill you for a joint, they still have drug use. You're fooling yourselves to think, oh, get them out of our sight, out of our mind, and we'll feel better. Well, I'm sorry, but since I started this in 2000, there have been a thousand more police added to the streets of Vancouver, and what do we have? We have shootings with AK-47s in shopping malls. So it's ridiculous to sit here and say that what we learned from alcohol prohibition will work.

Do you want to do your kids a favour? Do you want to do all of us a favour? These drugs have killed nobody. Sugar and meat kill the majority of people in this country.

They found a grow-op in one of Mr. Dosanjh's houses. The Liberal Party and this provincial government are threatened with receiving money from illegal marijuana grow-ops. It's so big, I've been threatened by the unions because it's such a money-maker for people.

If you really want to make a difference in this country, please stand up and be brave, because the people whose lives you're going to ruin—and give a criminal education to while they're in jail—are Canadian citizens.

Do you want to make a difference? Make fats and sugars and meats regulated. Put a sign on it, “Steak: you're going to die of colon cancer from this.” Nobody dies from cannabis; there's yet to be a case. In fact, I've found people who were cured of cancer by it, and the government won't talk about this.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Thank you.

We'll move on to Mr. Dosanjh.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Mr. Amar had something to say about this.

[Mani Amar]

I just wanted to make a quick point.

I want to stress that I've never done marijuana and have no reason to, but at the same time, I haven't drunk a sip of alcohol my whole life, yet it's readily available. Just because something becomes legalized, it doesn't mean that everybody is going to go out and do it.

Those gangsters I hung out with—Bal Buttar, and the sister of Bindy Johal—and from speaking to the youth gangsters, they told me for a fact that they never carried a gun or never traded in cocaine or any hard drugs until they were given it instead of money for marijuana, because B.C. bud is in such high demand.

As for the regulation of this, who would you want selling marijuana to your children? Would you want a drug dealer selling to your 12-year-old, or would you want to go to Shoppers Drug Mart and say, hey, son, you're too young to be buying marijuana at this time? It makes it harder for these kids to get it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Thank you.

I'll move to Mr. Dosanjh. You have five minutes.

[Ujjal Dosanjh, Liberal, Vancouver South, BC]

I'm sorry I missed the presentations from some of you. I was doing something else.

Mr. Amar, I have a question for you about part of the remarks you made when I was here.

You said there's a cycle and that each community of newcomers goes through the cycle. What is inherent in each new community that it becomes victimized by this, if that's the logic, and there are no other factors, essentially?

[Mani Amar]

That definitely was the logic up until probably the 1980s. We don't have racial oppression of many of these minorities, such as the Asian and South Asian minorities, but they still went through it. This is no longer a minority issue; the cycle has stopped going from one minority to the next. We saw it going from the next major minority coming into Canada in the 1980s, the Chinese Canadians, and then in the 1990s with the East Indians, even though they had been here for hundreds of years before that. It's when the influx of immigration happened. But that no longer happens.

Gangs are multi-ethnic now. They're working together. We don't see the same norms that North American gangs have, especially in the United States and in L.A., where most of my research has been based. It is no longer because of the usual precursors that they're going through it. Here it seems to be more of a collaborative approach, as they're working together. It's not even going to the next minority now; it's more a matter of a recruitment and who can do the job the best. Even the Hells Angels, who were once a Caucasian-based gang, have opened the doors to ethnic minorities to come in and work with them, because they see the benefit of having everybody working together against the government, against society, right now.

I don't believe the cycle exists anymore. I did touch on it as a research point that it was going from one minority to the next, but that doesn't exist anymore. It's a multi-ethnic issue; it's society in general.

[Ujjal Dosanjh, Liberal, Vancouver South, BC]

I don't take the issue of decriminalizing marijuana lightly. It almost happened when we were the government. The legislation came that close to being passed.

I grew up in India until I was 17, and marijuana grew wild everywhere. Nobody touched it. Even the animals didn't touch it. It still grows wild.

Let's assume you decriminalize marijuana--or at least its possession or growing it for personal use--what is there to prevent crystal meth or something else from becoming the item that's traded? Just two or three days ago, a couple of Indo-Canadians were caught on the way to Edmonton or Calgary in a car with one or two kilos of crystal meth. Where do you go? How do you deal with that?

[Mani Amar]

Gangs and criminal activity have always been--

[Ujjal Dosanjh, Liberal, Vancouver South, BC]

I'm not saying we shouldn't think about it because of that.

[Mani Amar]

I understand. You're saying something new will take marijuana's place. But marijuana is not a gateway drug for the criminal underworld and the people using it. Marijuana is the standard for why gangs exist in B.C. If we legalize it and regulate it, fewer gangs will exist, but I'm sure they'll exist in another faction, or whatnot.

I'm not saying we should legalize all drugs, but we should be legalizing the number one trade in B.C. right now. Marijuana is the one we should be concentrating on.

Crystal meth may be an issue in parts of Vancouver and sometimes in rural communities, but it's not a major issue if you look at the amount of the drug traded and issues that are occurring from marijuana.

[Ujjal Dosanjh, Liberal, Vancouver South, BC]

Fine.