WAR IN MONTREAL

It is an appalling, open, and savage gangland war that has claimed 150 lives
in Quebec in just six years.

This week, it reached into the newsroom of our sister paper, Le Journal de
Montreal, almost claiming the life of Quebec's famous chronicler of that
war, the legendary crime reporter, Michel Auger.

He was shot five times in the back in the parking lot of his newspaper in
broad daylight Wednesday morning, by a cowardly gunman who fled the scene by
car. Le Journal had just finished running his latest expose on the ongoing
drug and turf war that has claimed not just bikers and members of the Mafia,
but even an innocent child.

Miraculously, Auger survived and is now recovering in hospital.

Of course we applaud his courage and dedication and join with our colleagues
in Quebec in wishing him a speedy recovery.

But as Michel C. Auger, Le Journal's respected political columnist and Sun
Media's Quebec affairs commentator, writes on page 16 of today's Sun of this
brazen attack that almost claimed the life of his namesake, colleague and
friend, even more is at stake here.

As he notes, it's an outrage when anyone is murdered.

But when criminals - some of them well-known celebrities in Quebec who walk
the streets with apparent impunity - feel bold enough to attack a journalist
who has devoted his career to exposing them, then press freedom and
democracy are under attack.

Both before and after this latest outrage, Quebec Public Security Minister
Serge Menard has complained about a lack of tools from Ottawa with which to
fight organized crime. Similar concerns were raised recently by Ontario
Attorney-General Jim Flaherty.

Menard and others are now calling on Ottawa to amend the Criminal Code to
make it a crime to belong to a criminal organization such as a bike gang.
Some have even suggested Ottawa invoke the Constitution's notwithstanding
clause to protect such a law from a Charter challenge as a violation of
freedom of association.

Admittedly, this would be extreme, legally difficult to implement and
potentially open to abuse. That said, if tougher federal laws are not the
answer then what, exactly, does our always soft-on-real-crime federal
government propose to do? Provide the police with better resources? Close at
least some loopholes in existing laws?

Or will it again do what it so typically does in these situations, which is
nothing? While the toll of the dead and wounded rises.