Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you, members of the committee, for inviting me here today.
I have been a federal prosecutor in western Canada for almost my entire career and have handled several large organized crime cases involving street gangs, outlaw motorcycle gangs, and members of other organized crime groups. I have seen just about every type of organized crime criminal, from the unsophisticated street criminal to people in suits in office towers.
Today I'd like to give the committee some insight into how prosecutors deal with organized crime laws and the challenges they present. Because I'm in the middle of conducting several of these prosecutions for the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, I will speak in some generalities today.
The organized crime investigations we receive from the police tend to be very long investigations, often over a year in length. By the time we get them from the police, the police have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars. The investigations tend to have lots of voluminous and complex evidence derived from wiretaps and unsavoury witnesses such as civilian agents or turncoats inside a gang.
Major organized crime investigations often lead to charges against several dozen accused. The cases typically take two or three years to get through the trial stages. Such cases often tie up at least two senior prosecutors during the investigation stage, dealing with wiretaps and other covert matters, and two or three senior prosecutors as well as junior lawyers and support staff once charges are authorized. The files are very resource-intensive for prosecutors.
We often run up against institutional capacity issues. We do not control the pace of an investigation or when it concludes, and like most things in life, timing is everything. As a result, an investigation may be ready to proceed to prosecution at a time when senior prosecutors are otherwise occupied. There are not enough prosecutors to handle these cases across Canada, both in terms of numbers and experience. Inadequate resources to deal with these cases are a reality. We currently survive by charge screening, plea bargaining, and sometimes luck. We cannot prosecute all the cases we currently receive, nor could the courts likely handle all the cases going to trial.
I have prosecuted organized crime cases under the old Bill C-95 legislation brought in 1997 and the current law based on Bill C-24 in 2001. There are two important things in common under the legislation in the last decade that I wish the committee to take into consideration. The first point is something I call gang dynamics. The second point is how much court time is spent on proving a group is a criminal organization.
First, there are the dynamics of a gang. Gang members face internal pressures that, even if the criminal organization can be proven by the crown, the accused and his lawyers won't admit the gang is a criminal organization for fear of retribution. This is not how the criminal courts typically work. Most experienced criminal defence lawyers know that wasting the court's time is a bad idea for their client; thus they admit parts of the crown's case based on disclosure and focus the trial on discrete issues. That general practice, however, does not often play out in these organized crime cases, through no fault of the defence bar.