Thank you for the opportunity to present to the committee this morning on organized crime. My colleagues, Mr. Craig Grimes and Ms. Mia Dauvergne, will assist me in answering any questions you may have.
If you would please turn to the first slide in the deck, this is the first of several slides providing information related to homicides committed in connection with a criminal organization or street gang. The charts show the number of gang-related homicides and the number of homicides not related to gang activity over the last decade. By gang related, we mean whether the police identified the homicide as involving an organized crime group or a street gang.
In 2008, police reported a total of 611 homicides in Canada. There were one in four of these homicides, or 138, reported by police as being gang related. This is an increase of 20 over 2007.
Gang-related homicides have been increasing over the last decade, as you can see in the chart on the left. This upper trend contrasts with the trend in the number of homicides that were not gang related, as shown on the right. Firearms are more likely to be used to commit gang-related homicides than in other types of homicide. In 2008, 77% of gang-related homicides were committed with a firearm, compared to about 20% of homicides that did not involve gangs.
The next two slides indicate where the gang-related homicides occurred. The first is a regional breakdown. In the late 1990s, most gang-related homicides occurred in Quebec. However, in recent years, many gang-related homicides have also been occurring in Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia. The overall number of homicides increased in Alberta and British Columbia between 2007 and 2008. Two-thirds of the increase in Alberta was due to an increase in gang-related homicides. In British Columbia, gang-related homicides accounted for about one-third of the provincial increase in homicides.
If you could please turn to slide 4, you will see that most gang-related homicides occurred within Canada's largest cities. The 10 largest census metropolitan areas accounted for about half of Canada's homicides in 2008, but more than two-thirds of gang-related homicides. In particular, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, and Calgary had the highest number of gang-related homicides. Together they accounted for 55% percent of all such homicides in 2008.
Turning to the next slide, we will look at youth accused of gang-related homicide. In 2008, 501 people were accused of homicide, including 55 youths aged 12 to 17. We know that homicides for youth who are accused often involve gangs. There were 32% of homicide incidents with youth who were accused involving gangs, compared to 11% of incidents with an adult accused. Because of the small numbers, the rate of youths accused of gang-related homicide does fluctuate year over year. As you can see in the graph on the left, the trend in this rate has generally been upward since about 2002, despite dropping in 2008.
Please turn to slide 6. The extent of organized crime activity in Canada is very difficult to measure. There are some agencies, such as Criminal Intelligence Service Canada, that do collect detailed information on criminal organizations, but it is mainly intelligence-based, often secret, and generally kept in a format that is not conducive to statistical analysis.
At Statistics Canada we have information on four Criminal Code violations related to organized crime, as presented in this slide. Information on the involvement of organized crime groups for other violations, such as drug offences, prostitution, or fraud, is limited. That is something we are currently working with police services to improve.
Other than the four violations listed, the only offence where we can estimate the involvement of organized crime is motor vehicle theft. Based upon the assumption that most vehicles stolen by an organized crime group are not recovered by police, about four in ten motor vehicle thefts in 2008 involved an organized crime group.
As you can see on slide 7, Statistics Canada has a number of upcoming releases that can inform the work of this committee. These include data tables on street gang activity, which will be available in June, and police-reported crime statistics, which will be released in July and will include information on the short- and long-term trends in overall violent and non-violent crime at the national, provincial and territorial, and census metropolitan area levels.
Adult criminal court statistics will be available in July and will summarize trends from provincial and territorial adult criminal courts across Canada. Information will be available on the characteristics of cases and accused persons, the percentage of guilty cases, sentencing trends, and related issues. Similar data on youth courts will be released at the same time.
From these data it will be possible to produce statistics on cases where the accused was charged with a Criminal Code offence specific to organized crime. Data from the 2009 cycle, as a general social survey on victimization, will be released in August. This survey collects data on victimization and public perceptions of crime and the justice system. It measures the risk of violent and household victimizations, victims' use of services, and perceptions and fear of crime.
Finally, data from the 2009 homicide survey will be available in October. We would be happy to return to the committee in the fall to provide you with updated statistics from these data sources. Once again, thank you for the opportunity to present this morning. This concludes the presentation.