QUEBEC MUST ACT QUICKLY TO PREVENT A NEW BIKER WAR

Provincial authorities were slow off the mark at the start of the
biker wars that raged across Quebec in the 1990s, leaving 160 people
dead in a wave of bombings and shootings.

As the ugly phenomenon grew, police forces took a long time to get
organized to work together a common target. And Crown prosecutors were
so overworked and underfunded that it was a miracle anyone was
charged, never mind successfully prosecuted.

It was not the province's finest hour. Among other horrors, a
12-year-old, Daniel Desrochers, was killed by car-bomb shrapnel in
1995. And the head of the Hells Angels, Maurice Boucher, was able to
stroll out of prison in 1998, acquitted of ordering the killing of two
prison guards.

Quebecers' confidence in our justice system - and our government - had
been badly shaken by 2002, when Boucher was finally sentenced to life
in prison for his role in the killings.

New headlines now seem to signal that Quebec is headed for another
biker war. Last week, police seized more than 1,200 kilograms of
explosives and detonators in Mont Joli and Montreal. They have
arrested three people linked to biker gangs . And then, this weekend,
a fuel tanker truck was used to destroy a Hells Angels' bunker in
Sorel. The town's mayor, Marcel Robert, said that although Hells
Angels seemed to have been inactive at the bunker, "can we say behind
the scenes they have been inactive as well? I'm not so sure."

We need to make sure. Let's not wait as long as we did last time to
get an anti-gang squad into action. In theory, it seems, the province
should be able to crank up the machinery quickly. It should be able to
rely on its hard-won experience of the first biker wars.

And now all Canadians have new criminal laws enacted precisely to help
fight organized crime. In 2001, Ottawa brought in Bill C-24, which
legally defined a criminal organization as three or more people
benefitting from serious offences. Convictions under this anti-gang
law let authorities seize assets and impose stiffer sanctions. Five
years later, Ottawa enacted a companion law, Bill C-25, which allows a
number of government agencies, including Revenue Canada, to share
information about suspected money laundering.

No one is recommending that police or prosecutors rush to judgment. If
this is an isolated incident and not the start of a new gang war, so
much the better. But it certainly does appear that a simmering gang
dispute is boiling over into violence, now fuelled by techniques
copied from those used in some of the worst trouble spots in this
troubled world.

The anti-gang law is supposed to make surveillance and asset-seizure
easier for the authorities. If what's missing is manpower, the
province cannot stint. Quebecers have had more than enough of little
boys blown up by car bombs.