BRITISH COLUMBIA LOSING ITS WAR ON DRUG GANGS

There's one area of B.C. business investment that's seen a boom in rural
areas.

Unfortunately, it's organized crime.

You may have heard the saga of Likely, a tiny community east of Williams
Lake.

Last fall, RCMP confirmed results of a two-year investigation that found
eight properties with buildings fitted for large-scale marijuana growing.
At least one of those has been seized under civil-forfeiture legislation,
a powerful new tool in targeting proceeds of crime.

Nine Lower Mainland residents, all with Asian names, were charged.

Are there more Likelys out there?

No doubt the gangs learned about the hazards of creating a cluster in one
place.

Just before New Year's Day, police used snowmobiles to raid a property
near Clearwater, north of Kamloops. They described it as a machine shed
with industrial-style wiring that appeared to have been built for a
grow-op.

Further north, Houston RCMP resorted to using their holding cells to store
masses of seized hydroponic equipment.

That's according to deputy RCMP Commissioner Gary Bass, who spoke to a
conference on the hazards of grow-ops in Surrey last May.

The problem goes beyond marijuana, a relatively benign drug.

Bass noted the popularity of "B.C. bud" has led to many new players in the
cocaine trade.

Even small local groups tend to have ties to bikers in southern B.C. who
have developed lucrative bud-for-blow arrangements reaching down to South
America.

And when bullets fly in B.C. communities, there are generally hard drugs,
often cocaine, involved.

Surrey Fire Chief Len Garis spearheaded a new approach that targets safety
hazards of bad wiring and high electricity consumption.

In 2006, the B.C. government passed legislation allowing municipalities to
obtain hydro records showing high-consumption properties, then inspect
those properties.

Piloted in Surrey and Abbotsford, the approach has since been adopted in
Coquitlam, Langley Township, Mission, Pitt Meadows, Port Coquitlam,
Richmond, Surrey and Vancouver.

Recent hydro records show a 20 per cent drop in high-consumption
properties around the Lower Mainland.

Now Garis fears the problem has simply been displaced to more remote sites.

Gangs adapt quickly, buying power instead of stealing it, or going off the
grid with generators in remote places. Small towns have few police
resources and can't afford electrical-inspection teams on their own.

Garis points to a recent survey of hydroponic equipment stores that found
more than 80 in all regions of B.C., compared to 13 in Alberta and nine in
Washington state.

Police, firefighters and business groups supported a resolution at a
recent municipal convention, calling on the B.C. government to require an
electrical permit for buyers of high-powered lights and hydroponic gear.

So far the government is noncommittal.

I asked Solicitor General John van Dongen why.

He said his priority lately has been finding ways to regulate another
illicit trade - metal theft.

(A court decision two years ago said municipalities can't require pawn
shops or scrap dealers to record sellers' identities.)

He's also concerned about restricting legitimate hydroponic farming.

"I'm going to take a bit more time to look at the hydroponic issue," he said.

Garis says other provinces are acting. In 2006, Manitoba agreed to pay for
electrical inspections, instead of leaving it to communities that can't
afford it, as B.C. is doing.

"We're a world crime superpower predicated on marijuana," a frustrated
Garis told me.

"Eighty per cent of what we're growing here is being distributed
corporately to other provinces, the United States and elsewhere.

"We've made a booming business out of it because we're resting on our
laurels, saying, 'Oh, we don't want to regulate.' And yet this thing just
spirals out of control. It's ridiculous."

Prohibition doesn't work

Before you start e-mailing me about the ultimate futility of prohibiting
marijuana, let me say I agree.

Former prime minister Paul Martin's government came close to
decriminalizing possession of small amounts of pot, which could have begun
to replace violent gangs with small-scale, benign growers. Needless to
say, Stephen Harper's Conservatives aren't keen.

They prefer mandatory minimum sentences for offenders, which sounds great
until you look at the state of our court and prison system.

If we could somehow solve drug-gang violence, our courts would soon be quiet.

Last week, an Abbotsford man was sentenced to 12 years for attempted
murder. He shot another man four times over a $140 drug debt.

Ethnic gang realities

Before you start e-mailing me about the reference to "Asian names," here's
how the RCMP broke down gang activity as of 2005.

They identified 108 groups, one-quarter motorcycle gangs, nine per cent
Asian triad-related (focused on heroin and diversifying into chemical
precursors for meth and such), nine per cent Indo-Canadian, eight per cent
Eastern European and the remaining third independents, mostly Caucasian.

As of last year, police had the capacity to investigate about one in four
identified groups, so they rank them with a threat assessment.