Mr. Chair, thank you for the opportunity.
By way of introduction, my name is George VanMackelbergh. I am the vice-president of the Winnipeg Police Association. I represent 1,943 women and men of the association. I have 24 years as an experienced police officer working in downtown Winnipeg as well as in the north end. I spent six and a half years working as an organized crime investigator in the full gamut of investigations—multi-jurisdictional, technical investigations—as well as developing informants and pushing them to agents, so I know a little bit about gang activity.
I work in one of the most challenging jurisdictions in the country when it comes to gang activity. For approximately 30 years Winnipeg has experienced a multi-generational gang membership, and for three decades it's had what is considered the current model of street gangs.
At face value, the WPA supports this legislation particularly, as we would support any legislation by the government of the day that attempts to stymie gang or organized crime activity. Bill C-394 contextually speaks to recruitment but doesn't specifically address it, and along with Minister Swan, I believe this is key legislation.
Gang recruitment is targeting younger and younger persons. In Manitoba, in Winnipeg, we have 10-year-olds being actively recruited into gangs, whether it's “standing six” or holding drugs for the older gang members. We currently have 15-year-olds on charge for murder who were driven to this by older gang members, knowing they would face a lesser penalty.
Again, tackling recruitment and making it illegal is very important, because often when these people are recruited at a young age, they don't understand the life they're getting into. They see it as having rock-star status in the media. Popular culture makes it look like it's something to do. It's not until they're in it and they've been in it for two, three, or four years at age 15 that they realize the road they're going down. There aren't riches, there isn't fame and fortune, and they cannot leave the gang.
They suffer severe beatings at the hands of the older, more experienced gang members, who do this to maintain loyalty. The threats are to their family and to their community.
There are neighbourhoods and communities within Manitoba and within Winnipeg itself in which if you are not a member or an associate of a gang, it's understood that just by living in those neighbourhoods you'll support the gang if they knock on your door.
I liken this to Belfast in the 1970s. Whether you were a Loyalist or a Catholic, many people in Belfast believed that the way to handle those issues was politically. But make no mistake about it, when there was a knock at your door at zero dark thirty, you were expected to support.
I think legislation like this will define what gang recruitment is: it's not complying out of necessity, and I think that's important.
We foresee difficulty meeting the burden of proof in some gang legislation, so I would ask on behalf of the association that the crafting of this come up with a burden of proof that isn't onerous. As we see with some organized crime, probably when this hits the court you're going to have to deal with the question of whether the gang is organized crime. You'll have to prove that in the burden of proof before you even get to the recruiting issue. We've seen in jurisdictions in Canada that doing this can be tremendously difficult. Sometimes proving this exceeds the capabilities of some police agencies, so we'd like to see this legislation be a crafted, workable piece of legislation.
A key part of that will be having support for this legislation. To be successful in prosecuting these charges, crown attorneys across the country will probably have to rely in great part on documentation that's been gathered.
The many shareholders in the criminal justice system have individual silos of information. As it stands now, there's no real conduit to allow these stakeholders the ability to share this information, which will be crucial in these prosecutions. It would be good to see the federal government have a standard or provide a conduit so that this standard of collecting information and disseminating it is unified across the country. That would be a great help to this legislation and would support it.
Gangs continue to exist in Canada. We're starting to see a trend where larger criminal organizations recruit from smaller gangs and organizations who want to align themselves with the big fish. The problem this provides for law enforcement across the country is that it creates insulation from law enforcement, but it also allows the big fish to look at a potential member ten years down the road. They can weed out possible informants or agents, which makes undercover work virtually impossible. Again, we believe this legislation would help law enforcement in trying to chip away at that.
In closing, I would agree with Minister Swan that our country's greatest resource is our youth. I wouldn't say adding more laws is the solution to this, but it certainly is part of the equation.
Thank you for your time.