Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to the Bloc Quebecois motion. It reads as follows:
That this House instruct the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights to conduct a study of organized crime, to analyse the options available to Parliament to combat the activities of criminal groups and to report to the House no later than October 31, 2000.
I applaud my colleagues who have worked on these important issues, sometimes at their own personal risk, particularly the hon. member for Berthier—Montcalm, who, with my colleague from Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, is leading this debate, the hon. member for Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot and the hon. member for Hochelaga—Maisonneuve who, in a way, raised the red flag after the tragic death of the young Daniel Desrochers in his riding. This young boy died in a car bombing incident involving feuding criminal gangs.
I am very proud of the work my colleagues have done. We cannot tolerate in the Quebec society, or the Canadian society for that matter, any kind of ingrained violence as a way of determining markets. This is how it works in the underworld. Neither can we allow crime to become a way of becoming rich without being punished, because all our values could be compromised in the long run.
On a number of occasions, it was pointed out that, in Quebec, which we do not like to think of as a violent society, between 1994 and 1998, criminal organizations were responsible for 79 murders and 89 attempted murders, 129 cases of arson and 82 bombings.
This is a serious situation. We know that it is not all that serious in Quebec, but we are still concerned. However, this scourge also ties in very closely with what is happening internationally. Today we are looking at the globalization of organized crime. Global crime involves more than connections between Canada, Quebec and the United States, for example, with some ramifications in Mexico. It is much larger than that.
As I said before, we know that places that lend themselves to criminal activity become markets that are fought over internationally. We only have to look at the various gangs competing with one another with the means and the level of violence we know.
I just want to take a moment to mention that, in other countries, in Europeans countries for example—and I have been made aware of that—one type of crime that is being dealt with is the exploitation of half a million women from developing countries who are brought to western Europe each year for profitable sex crimes.
We know that young women and women are kidnapped and disappear and that they end up being exploited somewhere. When you add up all these numbers, it looks like a modern-day white slave traffic.
Then there is the whole issue of the displacement of persons. According to the International Organization for Migration, those who are involved in the organized trafficking of human beings are responsible for the displacement of one million individuals at any given time, generating $7 billion worth of business every year.
Putting an end to the trafficking of human beings was the primary goal of the European Union summit held in Finland. The aim was not to simply prevent the displacement of people. Displaced people who are charged $20,000—in the case of those from China for example—are subject to a kind of slavery and control including threats against their person.
Several migrants from Europe landed illegally in western Canada. Recently, some of them were brought here by boat in the same unacceptable fashion.
Drugs are an international scourge. Numbers vary but, according to a document we produced, there is between $100 and $500 billion in trade every year. By comparison, drugs account for 8% of international trade, or approximately $400 billion, roughly the same as oil and gas. This is a lot. Oil and gas represent an extremely important part of international trade. The drug trade is said to be of an equal value.
The stakes are enormous and profits from organized crime could be as high as one trillion dollars. I am not mistaken. I do not mean one thousand million in French, or one billion in English, I mean one trillion, which as far as I know is “un billion” in French.
This goes to show how extremely important these illicit, violent activities are with all their showy wealth. In Moscow I have seen the most sumptuous boutiques. There are 20 BMW dealerships in Moscow, and it would seem that very few are authorized dealers. There is world-wide trafficking in the resale of stolen automobiles.
Why mention this in connection with the death of the Desrochers boy? In order to indicate the extreme importance of the work my colleagues on both sides of the House will have to do. They will certainly need to know exactly what is going on, as far as international agreements are concerned, because the globalization of crime is such that it cannot be considered localized and therefore solvable locally. This is particularly the case now that there are new approaches, such as high tech crimes, cyber attacks and crimes committed by hackers.
Now there are brilliant hackers who are able to commit financial crimes by infiltrating computer systems and then, with a few keystrokes, hiding all evidence of their crime, or transferring the proceeds from it to another country.
This field is one of extraordinarily rapid change, and it is at the service of biker gangs as much as it is for any other group. Under these circumstances, the authorities face a major challenge, because the crime must first be located and then the data has to be obtained to prove it. There is considerable urgency here.
Some countries, we have heard, want to make encryption keys mandatory. Encryption uses extremely lengthy formulas that supposedly make it impossible to get into messages and therefore protect honest people from those who want to invade their privacy. They may, however, also afford protection to dishonest people by preventing the justice system from being able to find out what they have been doing. This is what happened in Japan, when a sect carried out its plans to poison subway travellers and Japan found itself with evidence that had to be decrypted. This was a very long and difficult task and it had to be done before the criminals could be tried, and they were not able to decipher it completely.
In closing, I wish to say that, as a society, we cannot allow these crimes to go unpunished, because the entire social balance is jeopardized. What is more, young people who are struggling to make it in the world may be attracted by this way to get rich quick.