Justice Committee on March 29th, 2010

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Thank you.

We'll open the floor to questions now. We'll begin with Mr. Murphy, for seven minutes.

Yes, Mr. Comartin.

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

On a point of order, we have one more, don't we?

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Did I miss anyone?

Madam Clerk, I understood that each organization was going to receive 10 minutes. Typically, for example, if we have the RCMP up here they have a collective 10 minutes.

[S/Sgt Terry Kohlhauser, Non-commissioned Officer in charge and Team Commander of Project KARE, K Division, Royal Canadian Mounted Police]

Project KARE was notified late last week and I was advised to be here with a presentation.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

May I suggest to you that we have your presentation and we will all read through it? What I don't want to do is leave us short of time for questions, because we have about an hour, and everybody should get an opportunity to ask questions, if that's all right.

[S/Sgt Terry Kohlhauser]

Yes, there's no problem.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Mr. Comartin, do you agree with that?

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

I wonder if we can give him even just two minutes for an overview of KARE.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

All right.

In two minutes, give us a summary of your presentation, please.

[S/Sgt Terry Kohlhauser]

I'm the team commander and a staff sergeant with the RCMP.

In the fall of 2002, it was noted that an increasing number of cases involving found human remains were determined to be cases of persons who had been engaged in a high-risk lifestyle in the Edmonton area. Our K division criminal operations officer requested that a strategic analysis be completed on all high-risk missing females and unsolved homicides in Alberta.

A report and strategic overview were completed in November of 2002. The overview confirmed that significant numbers of high-risk missing persons and unsolved female homicides were reported in Edmonton as opposed to other parts of the province. In January 2003, the high-risk missing persons project, HRMPP, was formed.

This team incorporated several police analytical processes, investigative file reviews, and major case management protocols. The HRMPP soon expanded its definition to include all high-risk missing persons, regardless of gender. Its mandate was to identify, collect, collate, evaluate, and analyze all high-risk missing persons and unsolved homicide cases in Alberta and the region, determine if they were potentially linked, and, if possible, identify offenders.

That review resulted in a task force being created: Project KARE. The four goals and objectives of Project KARE are as follows: first, to formulate and implement strategies to minimize the lethal risk facing high-risk missing persons; second, to create and pursue investigational strategies to investigate leads and to apprehend and prosecute the serial offender or offenders responsible for these types of crimes; third, to establish an integrated RCMP and EPS homicide unit that enables the Province of Alberta to have a permanent capacity to investigate high-risk missing persons, unsolved historical homicides, and serial offenders; and fourth, to create a template of best practices for utilization in other similar projects nationally.

There are several initiatives within KARE. One of them is the proactive team. This team was established to canvass, identify, and register sex trade workers and others engaged in high-risk lifestyles on the streets of Edmonton.

The members of this unit have been very successful over the past six years in building genuine trust between the unit and those leading high-risk lifestyles. It's allowed for intelligence gathering on persons of interest and potential suspects who interact with sex trade workers.

It also provides an educational and preventative framework to develop reliable information pertaining to the whereabouts, movements, associates, identifying characteristics, and next of kin contacts of sex trade workers. This proactive team is one strategy investigators utilize to collect, analyze, and potentially link information with respect to persons identified as “bad dates”. They present a particular challenge to our conventional methods of enforcement due to the lack of trust between persons living in that environment.

In the Project KARE analytical unit, which contains the Alberta missing persons and unidentified human remains project, there are several initiatives. A website has been developed by that unit. Police can view and search over 180 missing persons and unidentified human remains profiles that contain photos and information gleaned from the RCMP and other agencies.

New cases are added on a regular basis to our missing persons website. In November 2009, Project KARE obtained approval from policing partners in Manitoba and Saskatchewan to import their missing persons data from their provincial missing persons website into the AMPUHR searchable database, which already contained Alberta cases and cases from the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. This will allow us to create a centralized, searchable, missing persons data set.

Project KARE and our Alberta missing persons and unidentified human remains team are contributing partners to the ongoing Canadian strategy on missing persons and unidentified remains. The ultimate goal is to develop a national, searchable, missing persons and unidentified remains database, a publicly viewable website that Canadian police agencies and the coroners services will contribute to and share. This committee is currently looking at ways to adapt existing databases and search tools to meet their needs.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Thank you.

We'll move on to Mr. Murphy, for seven minutes.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses for coming here today.

Some of us have been on the justice committee for quite a while, we've been around the country a little bit, and we get a lot of issues. We understand the need to tackle the disclosure issue, so I won't dwell on it. We understand that it's an issue that probably can be helped with legislative intervention. We get that.

We definitely get the idea that technology is surpassing law enforcement's ability to keep up and that something has to be done about it. Please don't think that I'm not asking about it, that I don't care, or don't understand it.

We also get that prevention, early intervention, and tackling mental health issues, which are often intertwined with recidivist crime and so on, are extremely important. But I'm not concentrating on those today.

I'm going to be rather surgical in asking specific questions of specific witnesses, so please understand that we think there are some great ideas here. This mortgage fraud reform seems very pertinent and is something that can be done.

But two specific things struck me, and I'd like to give you the time to flesh them out. Chief Hanson in particular, you spoke of—I didn't write this down perfectly—the national cybercrime unit. It sounds to me, from Mr. Gibson's testimony, like you have a great precedent here in Alberta. We've been in other places where the silos are still pretty strong, but the ALERT example sounds pretty good.

It sounds to me as though in Alberta you have the “working together” thing going pretty well, so maybe you have really good evidence to give us. What would this look like? How would it help? Who do you see being part of it?

[Chief Rick Hanson]

As you suggested earlier, we're woefully behind, and not only in relation to investigating organized crime and its ability to use technology. Canada is in desperate need of a national organization consisting of educational partners, the private sector, and the police to better monitor some of the multitude of huge risks associated with the use of Internet cyber-attacks, not only on our critical infrastructure, but also in relation to policing and to regular citizens.

There's so much that's happening that we and the average citizen are not being kept aware of. I guess the best way to put it is that if we can get ahead of it with this national partnership that would include those three key partners—the private sector, government, which includes the police, and educational facilities.... There's that gap in protecting the average person in society from the predators who use the Internet for everything from viruses to infiltrating people's computers to obtain key information from them. There are things that are as simple as identity theft--and I mean it, it is simple today--right up to accessing key information that will allow them to commit serious fraud.

This model just does not exist anywhere in Canada today. There was an effort made to try to build this type of model with work by Ian Wilms and the Global Centre for Securing Cyberspace. There's an international appetite to commit resources and organizations to work towards this common end, but the reality is that it's not happening in this country, and the gap continues to grow. What we're seeing is victimization at the early levels, the youngest levels, with kids, right up to the senior levels, with seniors themselves, who are so open to being victimized by crime.

I don't know if this helps at all. The short answer is that there is an appetite for it at all levels.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Thank you very much for your help.

Chief Boyd, you spoke around specifics on the topic. I listened intently. You spoke about the players in the criminal justice system; not to sound like a Law & Order prelude, they're independent, but also interdependent.

[Chief Michael Boyd]

Yes.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

In particular, I think you were talking about show cause hearings and reports prepared therefor that are being ignored. Are you saying that judges are not taking into account bona fide and useful reports and that they should be made to?

Because you talked in your second point about specific reforms to make certain things mandatory. Let's be open and frank here. Are you saying that certain players are not taking good evidence into account to make right decisions? Because you did say, particularly with respect to section 515, that the legislation is there and it works, but it's not being applied right.

[Chief Michael Boyd]

I think a number of different participants need to do what they need to do. For example, in some parts of Canada, police officers act and do the job of crown prosecutors, which in my opinion is totally unacceptable. Crown prosecutors need to be engaged to do what their role is in the system.

I think justices of the peace and judges need to take judicial notice of what amounts to a threat assessment. It's not just a bunch of information. In today's policing parlance, it's a threat assessment/risk assessment and there are very valuable clues that I think need to be taken into consideration.

All of us are engaged in a system to make it effective. We all need to do what we are all responsible for doing, so that the public is protected.

In my humble opinion, that's not what is happening now—including among judges.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

I only have 45 seconds left, I know, but would you say that a piece of legislation should say a judge “must” consider the threat assessment, if you want to call it that, or that he “must“ follow it? What exactly are we talking about here?

[Chief Michael Boyd]

I think so, and yet the law says that on a reverse onus, a judge must provide reasons and must say why. If you got a transcript of all of the show cause hearings, I submit to you that you wouldn't find a judge offering an explanation.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

We'll move on to Monsieur Ménard.

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Please allow people time to get their earphones in place, and to be fair, as you always are, please begin timing me when everyone is ready.

I would like you to confirm quickly that I have understood something correctly. There is no longer a single, main group monopolizing criminal activities, like the mafia or the Hells Angels. If I understand correctly, now there is much more diversification and many organized crime groups. Is that right? I thank you, because the same thing will be noted elsewhere.

Furthermore, you all talked about human trafficking. A bill was passed in 2005 regarding subsection 279(1) of the Criminal Code. Recently, when there was an effort to strengthen that aspect of the law, we noted that only about six or eight such cases have been prosecuted under section 279 in all of Canada.

Are there other cases of human trafficking? Have there been any arrests? Why is this new subsection added to the Criminal Code in 2005 not being used more?

[Chief Rick Hanson]

Calgary laid charges for human trafficking just this past year.

But like every organized crime investigation, it takes a huge amount of resources to focus on the investigation itself. When you don't see large numbers of charges, it may not be because the effort is not there; it may be because the effort is currently under way in the form of an ongoing investigation. When we target these large organized crime groups, we find that it's not just about human trafficking: there are links to their other enterprises.

I can tell you that in Calgary we have used that legislation. The case is currently before the courts.

[Chief Michael Boyd]

In Edmonton we have also laid those charges, and we continue to have investigators focus on that particular crime of human trafficking.

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

But how many cases have there been, approximately?