BLOC'S TOUGH BIKER STANCE HITS A NERVE IN QUEBEC

Gilles Duceppe Finding Support For Stronger Laws

QUEBEC -- The growing sense of menace from the Hells Angels and the Rock
Machine, the two warring biker gangs that have recently made a public show
of a truce in their Quebec drug war, has become a powerful theme in the
Bloc Quebecois election campaign.

The biker war has resulted in the death of 157 people since 1994 and has
sent fear through communities across the province.

So far, the call for action against the biker gangs is resonating more
widely than any other issue in the election campaign in Quebec. In almost
every speech on the campaign trail, Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe gets his
strongest reaction when he calls for a tough anti-gang law and vows that
the Bloc will stand up to the gangs.

Duceppe has been so effective that Liberal leader Jean Chretien has joined
the fray, pledging that he will do everything legally possible to control
the violent gangs.

But Duceppe has seized the issue and is gaining support from Quebecers of
all political stripes. Though not renowned as an orator and with a lack of
intensity that often leaves audiences cold, Duceppe became passionate
yesterday on biker gangs, accusing the government of being timid in the
face of the Rock Machine and the Hells Angels.

"That's enough. We're going to attack. We're not backing off. We're not
timid," he shouted, getting a standing ovation from several hundred
supporters packed into a high school auditorium in his home riding of
Laurier-Sainte Marie.

He said teenagers were turning to prostitution to pay for drugs in the
neighbourhood and biker gangs had to be stopped. "You know where you can
shove the constitutional rights of the Hells Angels," Duceppe said scornfully.

The ovation was immediate and emotional a hot button that Duceppe has been
hitting again and again, day after day: talking about the bikers in Granby
who have just affiliated with the Hells Angels, and biker properties
outside Lennoxville or in Trois-Rivieres.

The emotion that Duceppe feels is genuine. He knows young people personally
who have been caught in the brutal spiral of heroin addiction, and he has
watched teenagers selling their bodies on the streets of his constituency
to get quick cash for drugs.

Quebec's motorcycle gangs have sufficiently rattled politics in Quebec that
the security will be tighter than ever at the Quebec National Assembly today.

Michel Auger, the crime reporter at Le Journal de Montreal shot five times
and left for dead in the newspaper's parking lot, is being given a medal by
the Quebec National Assembly and no-one is taking chances. The newspaper
and a Montreal charity, Sun Youth, have offered a $75,000 reward for
information leading to an arrest of the gunman in the Auger case.

Since last summer, when Quebec pop star Ginette Reno sang at a biker gang
wedding, bikers have become more and more cocky.

After rock singer Eric Lapointe said he would never have done what Reno and
others have done, he was beaten up at a boxing match in Montreal.

Then, Lapointe fans trying to buy tickets to one of his concerts were
roughed up, intimidating them so much a subsequent concert was cancelled.

On Oct. 8, when Maurice "Mom" Boucher of the Hells Angels met Fred Faucher
of the Rock Machine in a Montreal restaurant, they called the crime weekly
Allo Police, and posed, grinning, for the tabloid. The apparent truce was
front-page news.

On Oct. 21, the day before the election campaign began, hundreds marched in
the streets of Terrebonne, accompanied by Auger, in commemoration of
Francis Laforest, a young bar owner who after resisting attempts by a
criminal biker gang to sell drugs in his establishment, and to call for
tougher laws on biker gangs.

And last week Boucher launched an appeal to the Supreme Court to try to
block his re-trial on charges that he ordered the murder of two prison guards.

As a result, it is not surprising that the National Assembly is taking
extra precautions, and that Duceppe has agreed, for the first time, to
accept RCMP security protection. The sense of intimidation has spread.

Quebec Public Security Minister Serge Menard has said that as many as 50
per cent of the bars in Quebec are controlled by biker gangs who use the
bars to sell drugs. Yesterday, after meeting with bar owners, he told
reporters that regional committees are being set up to deal with the problem.