Thank you very much.
My name is Margaret Beare. I'm a professor at York University, where I served for 10 years as the director of the Nathanson Centre for the Study of Organized Crime and Corruption. The name of that centre has now been changed to the Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security, but policing and organized crime is still a topic for that centre. Prior to that time, I worked for 13 years in what was then the Department of the Solicitor General of Canada and is now the Ministry of Public Security. I was the director of police policy and research.
Our panel has a bit of an advantage, in the sense that your committee has been meeting for quite a while and I've had an opportunity to go through some of the previous testimony that was given. A lot of it was given with passion and commitment, and I welcome this opportunity to add my own opinion, experience, and to a large extent my hope for change into the mix that somehow you have to make some kind of sense out of.
Running through the various presentations that have already been given, there was a call for a focus on root causes to combat organized crime. Obviously no one answer is going to be the answer that meets all kinds of organized crime, but I would like to focus just for a moment on the kinds that in fact do speak to root causes.
As you may know, yesterday there was a gang summit held here in Toronto, and the strong message was a need to look at membership, the need to look at and understand who are the members of these street groups or gangs, and in fact not to automatically assume that they are criminal gangs that should be slotted into the magic three: membership, criminal organization, and categorization.
There is agreement that to work effectively to reduce street violence from street gangs, the focus needs to be on jobs, literacy, social inclusion, and social services. This, however, appears to be political poison, accepted as mere rhetoric, backed up by an array of get tough legislation that you've all been hearing about. The list of get tough measures include the mandatory minimums, the criminal organization enhancement to police powers and sanctions, and the debate on the practicality of naming groups as being criminal organization entities.
Both James and Antonio addressed that issue to some extent, James emphasizing the networking, the fluid nature of a lot of organized crime groups, and Antonio emphasizing the grey area, the blurriness between political corruption, corruption of officials, influence peddling, and the “criminal element”.
What do you put under the umbrella of whatever name you want to assign to a group? The Hells Angels are a beautiful group because they have everything going for them: the jacket, the club, the name, the whatever. The organized crime groups that you would perhaps be better served to look at are the fluid groups that include the legitimate and illegitimate activities.
I just finished a study on women involved in organized crime. The international community appears to be concerned that women are moving into leadership roles. Other than anecdotal examples, I think we are safe from women for a while, although they do play a key role in some of the trafficking of persons through certain routes. Mainly these women are the same poor, jobless, abused, often illiterate, often single moms that we see in our domestic prisons, victims of abuse much more than abusers. We now see these women targeted with the mandatory minimums associated with drug trafficking, i.e., the drug mules. But when one analyzes the court cases, what you find is naive, duped, intimidated women mixed with—yes, of course—some women who knowingly choose to take upon themselves the most risky and the least profitable part of the trafficking network that leaves them most exposed, while somebody else who runs the operation possibly, but not necessarily, becomes rich.
I've also just finished a study on the enforcement of gambling. You probably would ask yourself how gambling relates to the issue we are looking at. In my mind, it speaks to justice policies that appear to be derived, at least to some extent, by flavour-of-the-month polling mechanisms.
While everyone acknowledges that illegal gambling is still a major source of profits for organized criminals--and even the recent killings in Montreal reveal some of the players who have been and are still involved in this enterprise--there is little political will to continue to fund street gambling enforcement. Far sexier is the international hype over money laundering, terrorist financing, and of course gangs and guns. Focusing on street-level traditional police work, rather than funnelling our precious resources perhaps too heavily into elite squads, might be a better response.
What is my point that links these three areas? What is needed is the political will on the part of committees such as yours--which is why I'm so pleased to be here speaking to you--to stand up to political masters. When Corrections Canada briefed the Prime Minister about the severe downside of mandatory minimum sentences in terms of the impact on prison populations, his response was that the hardest thing he had to deal with was getting the bureaucrats on board. Research, evidence, and the experience of the knowledgeable correctional research staff and the prison staff were irrelevant to him.
Standing up and saying everything we know, nationally and internationally, tells us that mandatory sentences do more harm than good; massive gang roundups that cannot be processed by either our legal aid systems or our courts must be a last resort to alternative measures in some of the most depressed areas of our cities; and the Gladue judgment tried to tell us, regarding the far excessive overrepresentation of aboriginals in our prisons, that equal justice is not equal when everyone does not start at the same point. Therefore justice must be flexible and wise, free from political ideology, and free to make brave, made-in-Canada social justice-focused responses.
I would like to add my voice to the choir that emphasizes that the current drug laws are not working, pure and simple. No matter what your view on marijuana is, what we are doing is not working. Save your resources for other drugs if you must, but decriminalization is the only reasoned response to marijuana.
I was a member of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police drug abuse committee for several years, and there was one magic year when the CACP drug committee voted to recommend decriminalization to the government. Alas, when the chiefs went back from the conference to their home departments, they apparently got whacked, because the formal decision changed. However, it was an indication that the police do see the folly of what the laws cause, and this most powerful policing organization almost had the courage to tell the government.
I thank you very much.