(This column was published in the North Shore News on June 16, 2004)
Organized crime grew under Grits
By Leo Knight
AFTER I spent a week of golfing in the simmering Arizona desert, I found that news of the election campaign has been rather limited.
Which, I might add, is probably not a bad thing, depending, of course, on your point of view.
The news here has been all Reagan, all the time, which has given the media a break from their desperate efforts to pin the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse on Bush if possible or, failing that, Rumsfeld.
The conspiracy theorists are running on overdrive.
The Internet has kept me abreast of the astonishing campaign antics in our dysfunctional Dominion. I especially liked the photo of Paul Martin in Ottawa on Saturday, looking like he'd just stepped in something the dog left behind, right in front of a protester holding a sign that said: Caught Red Handed. Perfect.
On Saturday, a story broke out of Quebec that left the CBC breathless. It was all about a supposed Tory document which "suggests" the possibility of blending the intelligence gathering efforts of CSIS and the RCMP, which operates a parallel section. Sounds like an eminently logical idea to me.
Eliminate a clear duplication and get rid of some shockingly expensive bureaucracy in the process.
Bring it on.
But while the CBC was in agony trying to reconcile why anyone would even suggest such a thing, it got me thinking about how the issue of crime, or more specifically, organized crime, has been largely ignored thus far.
West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast MP John Reynolds pointed out when I asked him the question Sunday, that the Tories have made it an issue when they said they would dismantle the gun registry and fund the RCMP enough money for 200 more police officers.
True, but that really depends on how those resources are deployed. Reynolds agreed.
"The Liberals are soft on crime," he said.
Largely, I suspect, because they seem to have been committing a lot of it, judging by the 25 police investigations still ongoing into the antics of Liberal friends and insiders over the last 10 years of corruption and power abuse masquerading as government.
It seems to me that the Conservatives should be hammering the Glibs on the issue of organized crime.
While it is an old political maxim that when a government is in free fall, you should step out of the way, there's nothing wrong with having a killer instinct and ensuring there is no safety net.
Organized crime has grown unfettered in the last decade. I said at the beginning of the new millennium that organized crime is the single biggest threat to our country. That statement is more true today.
Be it the huge industry and vast wealth created by grow-ops or the illicit manipulation of stock markets, prostitution, sex slavery, auto theft, identity theft, extortion or cold blooded murder, the gangsters are slowly taking over.
They operate with apparent impunity in Canada and we let them.
And the bullets still fly.
Another day, another body is found.
Shots are fired from guns brought in from the United States in exchange for B.C. Bud, our largest cash crop.
The death toll in the Indo gang war is approximately 75 and counting. There were four in the last month alone.
When do we start taking the problem seriously?
When the Liberals are gone from power is the simple answer.
Right from the get-go, I think that the corruption signs were present.
When Chretien first appointed Alfonso Gagliano to the executive council, the automatic security check done by the RCMP, that was the red flag.
As the former bookkeeper for Augustino Cuntrera, the defacto head of the Carauna-Cuntreras, dubbed "the Rothchilds of the Mafia," the Mounties knew we probably shouldn't let him have access to all the secrets of the state, the levers of power and the keys to the company car.
But somehow, whether they were manipulated, threatened, ordered or cajoled, the RCMP acquiesced.
And that led directly to Adscam and the missing millions of taxpayer money.
It will take substantial political will to combat what the Liberals haven't done in the fight against organized crime.
It's time for Stephen Harper to take the gloves off.
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