Toronto Star/
Quebecers have been getting daily
lessons in how deeply organized crime has become embedded in their
province’s construction industry. At the Charbonneau commission hearings
into the industry, they’ve heard allegations that the Mafia routinely
took a cut of municipal contracts. Even the mayor of Montreal has been
tarnished by testimony that kickbacks were paid to his party. The
scandal threatens to spread throughout the province — and possibly to
Ottawa.
Ontarians watching this unseemly
spectacle should not be complacent — especially those tempted to assume
that Quebec is somehow more prone than other provinces to this sort of
thing. The evidence is quickly mounting that we have a bigger problem
than we thought right under our own noses.
At the Quebec inquiry, a police Mafia
expert let it drop that Peel Regional Police may be investigating
government contracts awarded to organized crime groups. More disturbing
still, an ongoing investigation by the Star and Radio-Canada finds that
police here and in Italy are concerned that Ontario has become a haven —
a comfortable “penal colony,” according to some — for alleged Italian
crime figures associated with the Calabrian syndicate known as the
’Ndrangheta. Senior RCMP investigators and Mafia hunters in Italy tell
Star reporters that the ’Ndrangheta uses the province as a major base
for money laundering and, possibly, political corruption.
That’s certainly alarming. But it
also appears that Canadian and Italian police are stuck in a pattern of
finger-pointing and mutual distrust that has let this situation fester
for far too long. The Italians complain they have sent information about
wanted criminals who have taken refuge in Canada, but get no action
from Canadian police. The Canadians, in turn, say they can’t act on
charges under Italy’s sweeping law forbidding “Mafia association,” but
need evidence of specific crimes under Canadian law.
Italy has been fighting the Mafia
under its various guises for generations, so it’s understandable that it
has special laws targeting those linked to these outfits. Canada isn’t
about to go down that path, but it could do better with the laws already
on the books. The Canadian law on criminal organizations has been used
against biker gangs, but not against Mafia groups. That should change.
Police forces also need to keep their
focus on the Mafia. Kevin Harrison, superintendent of the RCMP’s
Combined Special Forces Enforcement Unit in Toronto, acknowledged to the
Star’s investigative team that at one point police let their attention
drift away from what they officially call “traditional organized crime.”
Their intelligence got “stale,” he said, and “it’s a big hill to climb
to get back to where we need to be.”
That can’t happen again, given the
troubling new evidence of how pervasive mob influence may well be in
this province. At this point there’s no smoking gun we know of in the
form of evidence about specific crimes or corruption. But that should be
cold comfort, given the pattern of events next door in Quebec.
For a long time, the crime headlines
there were dominated by wars among rival biker gangs. But as testimony
at the Charbonneau commission is showing, old-style Mafia groups were
burrowing deeper into the life of the province and quite likely
corrupting public officials. Ontario must not stand by and risk the same
thing happening here.
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