Justice Committee on Oct. 23rd, 2009

[Stephen Schneider]

Certainly it will be identity theft, without a doubt. Identity theft is actually a technique. It's a means to an end, because you steal someone's identity to apply for credit cards or mortgages. It's as much a means to an end as an end in itself. But without a doubt, you've seen great increases in cases of identity frauds in Canada and the United States.

And certainly the Internet is the next great frontier, as we've heard, for crime. We've heard that hacking has evolved from the teenager in his mother's basement hacking into a corporation for fun. Now, it's much more highly organized; it's done for profit, hacking into credit card and bank databases.

Also, child pornography is becoming increasingly organized, to the point that organized crime is now involved on a highly profitable basis.

The common denominator in all of these is the Internet. You steal identities through the Internet; you market child pornography through the Internet. The Internet again is a means to an end. It's a good example of the opportunistic character and the greater sophistication of organized crime.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Do I have a little time left?

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Yes, you do.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Because the currency changes over time—we started with tea, and alcohol was the currency during prohibition, and gambling, but gambling is now legal even here in Halifax.... Cigarettes are legal, but still a currency for organized crime. So why do you believe that prohibition is part of the problem? It appears to me that once you cease to prohibit a currency, they either find a new currency, such as white-collar crime or identity theft, or use the taxation margin to continue to deal with the contraband substance.

[Stephen Schneider]

Absolutely. There's no panacea to organized crime. Legalization is not a panacea; you're exactly right. Even if we legalized marijuana and we taxed it, organized criminals would find the same route as for cigarettes, and they would smuggle from low- to high-tax provinces and into and out of Canada.

The same is the case with gambling. When government started to compete with organized crime in legal gambling, the one area the organized criminal still dominated was the one area that's still generally illegal, and that's bookmaking. It's generally still illegal to be a professional bookmaker in this country for betting on sports, so the biggest gambling operations are in bookmaking. In Ontario alone, it's estimated at $1 billion a year, just in bookmaking.

If I have any one message to leave today, it's that there's no silver bullet or panacea for organized crime, and legalization certainly is not a panacea. My argument is that law enforcement is so overwhelmed right now, the playing field is so unlevel, and they have so few resources to target this massive problem that we need to start prioritizing.

Is it sound policy to be chasing around marijuana drug traffickers when we have senior citizens being robbed of their life savings by telemarketing fraud, or we are faced with the epidemic in crack cocaine or crystal meth, which has a far greater impact on society?

So you're exactly right—

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

I'm going to have to cut you off there because we're at six minutes.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

We'll move on to Ms. Jennings.

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

I have no questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Mr. Norlock.

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Thank you very much, and thank you to the witnesses.

To Mr. Purcell, since we share a similar background, one of the things we did as junior managers in the Ontario Provincial Police when we were looking at ways of going about tackling crime—and I notice you alluded to the street gangs in your testimony.... In the special squads we call them street crimes. Intelligence-based...we did that. But one of the things I was involved in—somewhat of a sociological part of it—was that we looked at one of the highest crime areas in North America back in the 1970s and 1980s, and that was in New York in the social housing area.

One of the common denominators for criminal activity, especially property crimes, was that people who committed property crimes were people who didn't own property and therefore didn't value property. And of course the other common denominator was literacy—in other words, levels of education.

They looked at areas of crime activity—and of course that comes back to the Halifax Regional Municipality—and the area was the Bronx, which today happens to be one of the better places to live in New York. They looked at social housing. People who lived in social housing were less educated and didn't have a trade.

There is going to be a point to this.

We looked at the people who committed crimes. The people who committed the big crimes were also the people who committed the little crimes. So the guys you arrested or stopped for jaywalking or failing to pay their parking tickets ended up being the guys who were committing the murders and those other crimes. The criticism of police forces was, “Well, why don't you go out there and catch the big guys? You're after the little guys.” But the little guys happened to be creating the big crimes also.

So what am I saying? I'm saying, would you not agree that if governments looked at social housing...? One of the things they said in New York was, “Okay, well, let's do this. Let's take a look at the people. How do we get them to change their lifestyles?” So they taught people trades, but they took away the social housing aspect and said, “You people need to own your own properties,” and of course they came up with co-op housing.

The next thing they needed were trades, so that instead of hiring somebody to fix the social housing, they actually trained people to paint, to fix the plumbing, and to be electricians and those other trades. The people became owners of their own properties, and they didn't want somebody damaging their property or putting graffiti on their property and they took ownership of their property.

So if I said to you that the Government of Canada currently, through employment insurance, has increased exponentially the amount of training we're giving people who are unemployed to upgrade their skills.... And then we go outside of the employment insurance scheme, and we then said that even people who aren't on employment insurance will have an opportunity to train.

Then we looked at policing and we said that provinces and municipalities need extra police officers as well as the federal government's own police force, the RCMP—1,500 additional RCMP officers. And in your particular case here in this area you said somewhere in the vicinity of 250 police—and I imagine some of the money going towards those police officers was as a result of the federal government's contribution across the country to increasing the number of police officers.

My question to you is this, Mr. Purcell, because I've been out of policing for so long. I know when we were talking about telemarketers—

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Mr. Norlock, this is just a reminder that it's been a four-minute question and you want an answer.

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Yes.

I'd like you to talk about PhoneBusters. Do you take part in PhoneBusters, which was a big part of the OPP—their telemarketing—or are you aware of that program?

[Robert Purcell]

No, I'm not aware of that program, unfortunately.

I do have a lot to say about what you said leading up to that, though, if I could address some of your questions, and maybe it relates to PhoneBusters.

Mr. Chair, how much time would I have for that?

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

I will give you a minute.

[Robert Purcell]

It should be said that I think Stephen has raised a very good point. Simply put, I don't believe Nova Scotia ever had a prohibition/enforcement model, but as of about two years ago, we moved into a crime reduction strategy. That strategy is getting at many of the things you're talking about, and federal government involvement would be great. It's wraparound services, so that whether you're talking about individuals or street gangs or organized crime, we're looking at making a three-pronged effort: one on enforcement, primarily through the additional officer program; then on intervention, so that if people, and particularly young people, become involved with the law, we have intervention practices such that if they become involved once, that might be the only time; and third on prevention methods, recognizing what the risk factors are so that we can get at the root causes, so that ten years from now we will not go through a blip in crime, as we did in 2004.

So we're trying to get at all three angles, for wraparound services to deal with the root causes that you just identified.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Thank you.

Is there anyone on the government side with any further questions?

Mr. Moore.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

Thank you both for being here. I have just one question.

You have mentioned some areas or communities where there were higher instances of crime. As we've travelled around on other justice bills, we've heard evidence from witnesses that it's usually a relatively small number of people who are the problem, and when that small number of people is taken off the street, in some cases there's a marked improvement in the criminal activity in that area.

Can you give a sense of whether that would be your idea of the situation in Halifax or in Nova Scotia?

We heard of the shooting, which gained national attention, outside the children's hospital some time back. I remember reading about it; I'm from your neighbouring province of New Brunswick. Sometimes it takes an incident like this, which is high profile and what the community considers outrageous, to draw people's attention to what's happening, so that now that this has impacted upon them, they are going to take an interest in what's going on.

I know you wouldn't have an exact number of how many people are involved in criminal activity, but can you give me your sense as to whether this is true? Is it a small number of repeat offenders who are the problem? If we impacted heavily upon that number, would you see a marked impact upon criminal activity in the community?

[Robert Purcell]

This is what I was referring to. If I may answer the first part, I'm sure Stephen will have some things to say.

I can't give you the exact number. What I can say is that we certainly subscribe to the idea that—and everyone uses different figures—10% to 20% of the people do 50% of the crime. That's why I say we have to continue to work hard, but we have to work smarter. We have to find out who the 10% to 20% are and spend our time going after them, because if they're doing 50% of the crime, that's where we're going to have our biggest impact.

Stephen talked about police and law enforcement having so many things to do. That's why we believe that you have to be intelligence-led and it's why we have, I think, a pretty robust intelligence-led community. They need to be able to put things in the queue, and we need to prioritize them with some of the things that Superintendent Brennan was talking about, OCTAC and groups that will say, here's all the activity going on, and ask—Stephen made some mention of it—whether they should do this or do that.

We have to become strategically focused so that the intelligence comes up and we start picking off the most important things.

Even with the 10% to 20% who do 50% of the crime, that's not to say they're thrown into a never-never land and not dealt with. A good crime reduction program should have the opportunity to try to turn them around and make them valuable citizens.

Some may say this isn't about organized crime. I think these plans are about everything. In our view, as I said, we're as concerned about these street gang activities, which we believe could be considered, in a broad sense, organized crime.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

Mr. Schneider, did you have anything to add to that?

[Stephen Schneider]

First, I agree with everything Bob said.

To answer your question directly, taking a drug dealer off the street solves the problem temporarily, but for every one drug trafficker you take off the street, you have ten who'll step in and fill that position. I can give you dozens of examples of young offenders I've worked with in Halifax.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

We've had some discussion around the table on the point you just made. Are the Hells Angels here? Is the traditional Mafia here? That's not exactly the point. As long as people are engaged in organized crime, a drive-by shooting at a children's hospital is just as serious no matter who is pulling the trigger. That element is here, and there is an organizational aspect to it. We want to see those best practices to combat it.

I don't know how much time we have.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

We're running ahead of schedule right now, but if there are other questions from anyone, then prepare them because we're going to wind this up soon.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

I want to give you an opportunity to address anything you heard around the table that you haven't been able to address. I'd be happy to hear any points on that.

[Stephen Schneider]

I'd like to follow up on the issue of the nature of organized crime in Nova Scotia.

Organized criminals go where the money is and where their markets are--Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and Fort McMurray, when cash was going in there. Nova Scotia has attracted organized crime, as Bob mentioned, because of our coastline.

The Hells Angels chapter was shut down here, and that's an interesting case study. Why were we as a society or as law enforcement able to shut down this chapter, which is very rarely done in this country? That might be a successful case study to look at.

One of the reasons is that the Quebec Hells Angels, which controlled the Halifax chapter, said they didn't need a chapter there any more because they could control the ports from Sherbrooke. They deemed the Halifax chapter generally irrelevant because Sherbrooke took over the smuggling operations at the port here. The Italian Mafia also saw Nova Scotia as very attractive to smuggle hash and cocaine into this province.

In general, you find the major crime groups in major cities, but they will also move to other provinces for strategic reasons. The reason the Hells Angels set up shop in B.C., Halifax, and Montreal is quite obvious. They are all port cities and very strategic in that sense.

To answer your question, Halifax is very attractive as a major cocaine and hashish smuggling route. It's also a major outport for stolen vehicles from Montreal. The port is used to export cars that are mostly stolen in Montreal. It all comes down to our port and to our coastline. We're not a big enough market for drugs to make it attractive for the presence here of organized crime for marketing. It's more of a conduit into and out of the country. Both the Montreal Rizzuto family and the Hells Angels still have a presence in this province at the port and use it for smuggling into and out of the country.