Justice committee  First, I agree with everything Bob said. To answer your question directly, taking a drug dealer off the street solves the problem temporarily, but for every one drug trafficker you take off the street, you have ten who'll step in and fill that position. I can give you dozens of

Justice committee  I'd like to follow up on the issue of the nature of organized crime in Nova Scotia. Organized criminals go where the money is and where their markets are--Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and Fort McMurray, when cash was going in there. Nova Scotia has attracted organized crime, a

Justice committee  There are at least 12 different varieties of telemarketing frauds, according to the American Marketing Association. It includes everything from saying “You've won a vacation, but you have to send us $1,000 first”, to insurance fraud, to simple high-pressure sales of real products

Justice committee  Yes.

Justice committee  Certainly it will be identity theft, without a doubt. Identity theft is actually a technique. It's a means to an end, because you steal someone's identity to apply for credit cards or mortgages. It's as much a means to an end as an end in itself. But without a doubt, you've seen

Justice committee  Absolutely. There's no panacea to organized crime. Legalization is not a panacea; you're exactly right. Even if we legalized marijuana and we taxed it, organized criminals would find the same route as for cigarettes, and they would smuggle from low- to high-tax provinces and into

Justice committee  I didn't mention child exploitation, but to address that point, we are seeing a greater organization of—

Justice committee  To some extent we've seen a rise in young men trying to prostitute young girls, both of the age of majority and under. Really what I was concerned with, and I think this is obviously a problem throughout Canada, is what I call this underclass, the at-risk communities, which are n

Justice committee  We have a disproportionate amount of telemarketing fraud, and again it mirrors economic realities. We have the technology where someone in Toronto can phone senior citizens in Florida or California. We have our laws on commercial crime, and Robert can probably address this better

Justice committee  Some are and some aren't. You have a lot of opportunistic criminals who see this as a way to make easy money and where the punishment is quite lenient. There's also evidence to show that the Rizzuto family in Montreal has ties to telemarketing fraud and that the Hells Angels has

Justice committee  It's all three. Part of it is a historical lack of cooperation between police. It is an issue of confidentiality. The last thing a police officer wants is to expose an informant or an agent. That's the kind of information that's absolutely critical to ACIIS. Then there is also em

Justice committee  The causes of crime and violence are very complex. There is no one causal factor, but what you've seen in recent years, not just in Nova Scotia, British Columbia, or Ontario, is the confluence of a number of factors. First of all, you have increased competition between small gr

Justice committee  As an addendum to that, I agree with everything Robert said. The idea of technology is to me almost ancillary to the bigger issue, and that is of law enforcement resources--in particular personnel. The most effective organized crime enforcement is not in technology, and it's not

Justice committee  Okay.

Justice committee  Thank you very much. It's an honour to speak to you today on this obviously very important issue. I'll break my presentation down into three parts. The first is to provide a historical overview of organized crime in this country; the second is to look at some of the lessons lear