THE DIRTY WAR ON 'CRIME'

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Exactly what public cause is served when a government-paid police
officers, dressed up as a hooker, set a trap and snare one of the
world's leading heart surgeons, release his name to the media, and
then watch while he is forced to resign in embarrassment? Dr. Wilbert
Keon's crime, apparently, was to solicit a prostitute, and for this he
stepped down as head of the University of Ottawa Heart Institute,
declaring that the public disclosure had been so troubling he didn't
feel capable of entering an operating room.

Across the country, meanwhile, prostitution is a big business that, to
all intents and purposes, is completely legal. When it comes to
soliciting, newspapers and telephone directories are jammed with ads
like the one nearby, from a Toronto weekly. The ability to print such
ads is considered part of freedom of speech. Emilia need not worry
about any undercover police trap shutting down her operation. In
Canada, we let her get on with her work and pay GST and income taxes
while we shut down a heart surgeon who can save lives. As National
Post columnist Roy MacGregor wrote yesterday, a leading conversation
is against the law: a "business transaction" is not.

Of the many injustices done to Dr. Keon, the greatest may be that he
is being punished under laws that are an infringement on personal
freedom and privacy. The laws against prostitution, like the laws
against drugs and tobacco, are unenforceable monstrosities whose sole
impact is to increase the intensity of state intrusion and repression.
Such laws turn personal behaviour into crimes and thousands of people
into criminals. Dr. Keon is a victim of the utter failure, the
inability, of government to control the private lives of its citizens.
When one law inevitably doesn't work, politicians insist they need
still tougher ones that convey even more power to bureaucrats,
politicians and the police.

Which brings us to Bill C-22, an act introduced in the House of
Commons last Wednesday by Jim Peterson, federal Secretary of State
under Finance Minister Paul Martin. If passed, Bill C-22 would
dramatically increase Ottawa's powers to trap the innocent, infringe
on privacy, collect information, put routine money transactions under
suspicion. It would also, in the name of fighting organized crime,
endow a new agency - the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis
Centre of Canada - with a wide range of powers that can be expanded at
will by regulation.

Under the act, lawyers, accountants, bankers and other professionals
will be required by law to report currency exchange and cross-border
transactions of $10,000 or more. They are also to be on the alert for
"suspicious" transactions by their clients.

If some of Bill C-22, such as the $10,000 reporting threshold, seems
familiar, there's good reason. Ottawa is in this money-laundering
crackdown at the behest of the United States. The government says the
objective is to "combat organized crime" and enhance Canada's
contribution to international efforts to deter and detect
money-laundering." What the bill is really about, however, is plugging
Canada into the notorious American "War on Drugs," a decades-old and
futile campaign launched by Richard Nixon and pursued by every
president since. The result has been a war on U.S. citizens, a war on
freedom, and the conversion of Third World countries into war zones.
As Harper's Magazine said this month: "Initially applied only to the
buyers and sellers of drugs, exceptions to our fundamental rights have
been quickly enlarged to include every [U.S. citizen]."

Canada joined the money-laundering division of the War on Drugs at a
G-7 meeting in 1989 - even though there is no real evidence that
Canada is a major money-washing machine. Even if billions are sloshing
through Canada, it is mostly a self-inflicted U.S. problem that does
not justify building up major intrusion into the business affairs its
citizens and corporations.

Ottawa claims the volume of money-laundering activity is "between
$5-billion and $17-billion," but the number is at best a wild guess,
if not total fiction. Another document talks of "between $7-billion
and $10-billion." The global figures on drugs alone are said to be
between $100-billion and $500-billion, a range so vast it has no
meaning. Most of the numbers on money-laundering come from a
professional cadre of police activists and crime-fighting consultants
who ply the lucrative organized crime beat. It's a beat largely
created by the original laws against drugs, prostitution and the like
- - in other words, totally artificial. The War on Drugs is as much of
an industry as the drugs themselves.

But drugs are not enough any more. Sam Porteous, the Canadian
consultant who wrote the federal government's study on the impact of
organized crime, sees money-laundering as part of a pattern of
"economic crime" and "environmental crime" in the country.

Whatever money-laundering is going on, it does not justify the scale
of intervention proposed in C-22. It is also mostly the creation of
initial laws - which are already unacceptable intrusions into the
lives of Canadians.