BATTLING CRIME WHILE PRESERVING OUR RIGHTS

It's curious how, in any discussion about giving police and the courts more powers to combat crime, it's always proposed as a way to protect public safety. That's certainly the case in the current debate over what powers police may need to deal with the threat, real or perceived, from the criminal biker gangs. But it is the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and association and of protection against arbitrary invasions of privacy or search and seizure that are the most fundamental protections for the citizens who collectively are the public.

Police calls for more powers, invariably referred to by the benign term "tools," rely on people being so fearful about the immediate threat of crime that they're willing to sacrifice less substantive protections. And yet ...

And yet, there is increasing evidence that organized criminal activity in Canada is not being kept in check by current legislation. Criminal organizations, including the biker gangs that have their hands in virtually all the drug trade in this country, operate without serious impediment from the police or courts.

More than 150 people have been killed since the Rock Machine and the Hells Angels went to war in 1994. Most have been bikers or their friends, and there is little public mourning over them. But the casualties also include an 11-year-old boy hit by bomb shrapnel and two murdered prison guards.

The shooting of journalist Michel Auger last week is most telling, and scary, for its signal that so-called "civilians" are now considered fair game by organized crime. Legislators, police and judiciary cannot be blamed if they do feel intimidated.

The current debate barely includes the more publicity-shy drug smugglers using Canada as an entry point to the U.S. market, Asian and Caribbean gangs and Eastern European and Russian mafia. They operate virtually unchecked and increasingly in co-operation with each other.

There are no easy answers to what measures are needed for police and courts to control or even contain these increasingly sophisticated yet paradoxicallymore violent gangs.

It is essential that Ottawa and the provinces co-operate now on a national examination of organized crime in Canada, with a focus wider than MPs can bring to the current Commons committee, and a mandate for real recommendations for legislative action. It must include police, representatives of the legal profession and of the judiciary and, indeed, civil libertarians.

Making biker gangs such as the Hells Angels illegal would require circumventing the constitution. Police, and Quebec's solicitor general, say it is necessary, and note that, during the 1970 October Crisis, it was made illegal to belong to the Front de Liberation du Quebec. We remember, however, an editorial cartoon of the time showing Montreal Mayor Jean Drapeau with a pile of telephone books. "We have the list of suspects," he was saying.

And therein lies the question: What are we, as Canadians, willing to do, willing to risk losing, to fight the multi-headed monster of organized crime? This will not be an easy discussion, but it is increasingly important that we have it and have it soon.