Justice committee  It certainly takes a lot of resources, and it's beyond the resources of the police as well, I might add, because there are hazardous substances in there, so you need other professionals. You need electricians and you need haz-mat people to come in and work with you, and that's just on the marijuana grow operations.

Justice committee  Well, certainly, some of the release provisions don't end up being able to sufficiently control a young person's conduct. I think that's what this Bail Reform Act and the release is aimed to do: not to punish, but to exercise some restriction or control over the behaviour of an individual.

Justice committee  I'll begin. Certainly, within the system, our ability as a country to deal with organized crime, violent street gang crime, etc., relies on our justice system. Our justice system won't work unless we have people who are willing to testify against offenders. We all know of cases across the country where people have been reluctant to testify because they fear for their safety.

Justice committee  Well, it would certainly be to have the resources in place where you need to provide a range of different protections, depending on the type of case. I wouldn't say that every witness necessarily needs to be uprooted and relocated, but we need to have a range of alternatives that would address the different types of cases we face as police officers.

Justice committee  I agree with Chief Hanson. The other thing that I think is important to recognize is that it's all about having enough resources to tackle organized crime. We get bogged down on redoing and working and working and expending resources and that takes away from our efforts to focus more on organized crime.

Justice committee  For those people who are out on bail, who are before the courts facing charges, there are limited conditions written into the Criminal Code, which I think need to be modernized. That was my point. We need to look at where the world is now in 2010 rather than where we were in the late seventies or early eighties.

Justice committee  The people I was referring to were arrested for a variety of offences: break and enter, certainly; theft of auto, or stealing cars; and theft from auto. Sometimes, though not in all cases, there were robbery arrests, violent crime. A lot of that, in comparison to murder, sounds like minor crime, but if you get enough of it, it can really affect an entire city.

Justice committee  In 2006 we did a study here in Edmonton. We looked at it and identified 137 people who had been arrested over 100 times in five years. Now, we stopped at 137, but we probably could have gone up to 237. When we brought the backgrounds forward and diagrammed them out quite differently from the justice system partners' traditional look at it, it was just horrendous as to, first of all, why that level of crime existed, and then why our justice system was so bogged down and clogged up with what was going on.

Justice committee  It's hard for me to fathom how a person could be out of custody and operating in the community on 10 existing bails. It's just beyond my imagination how that could happen. That mere fact tells me that we have a repeat offender. To disregard that kind of information.... By the way, within the province of Alberta, I think fewer judges are involved in dealing with bail because of the process that's been set up here with justices of the peace.

Justice committee  Well, I think the words are just so overused that they don't mean anything anymore. I'm not sure whether I would replace those words. I think any of us who work in the system understand what that's supposed to mean, but it doesn't seem to have the kind of effect we would hope for.

Justice committee  First of all, I would say they have come to pretty fertile ground here in Alberta. Organized crime goes after the money. Certainly in the past, and even more so before the tougher economic times, the money was here in Alberta. That would provide the opportunity for individuals committing crimes--and especially for organized crime--to come to a place like Alberta.

Justice committee  Of the old gangs, there are the obviously traditional organized crime gangs, but in recent years a lot of other new gangs have been formed. One of the things that's interesting is that we're seeing mergers of interest, whereas at one time, some years earlier in my career, I would say, most gangs or organized crime groups stuck to themselves and did their own thing.

Justice committee  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.

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

Justice committee  I can't tell you how many cases are on the go now, but I can tell you that we made our first case a little more than a year ago, probably, and we continue to investigate that crime. There's been an increasing movement of people from other parts of the country and from other parts of the world to Alberta.