LOTUS GANGLAND

Vancouverites Keep Heads Down As Drug War Body Count Soars

VANCOUVER -- Vancouverites awoke to their radio alarm clocks with
unease the morning I wrote these words. Something was missing.
Something... strange, elusive, indefinable. What... what?

By the second cup of coffee, even the slowest caught on. Ah, that was
it -- no overnight report of a gangland slaying in Vancouver Metro.
(A hostage-taking and ransom, which ended without bloodshed doesn't qualify.)

There have been 10 such slayings, and counting, in February, and 14
since the new year. Even Al Capone's St. Valentine's Day Massacre in
1929 scored a paltry seven.

Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer usefully pointed out that fewer
people were killed in Chicago in the entire Prohibition period than
in recent years of Vancouver's drug wars -- arguably the last
frontier of pure capitalism.

At this point, not one thug has been charged. Survivors of shootings
suffer remarkable memory losses and cannot identify their assailants.
(At least one survivor was clad in body armour -- which, bizarrely,
is legally available in Vancouver retail establishments.)

The more sensational of Vancouver's two slayings on Feb. 17 alone was
that of a woman, 23, shot in broad daylight in her white Cadillac.
The killer(s), out of sensitivity or in haste, spared her
four-year-old son in the back seat.

The gangsters tastefully favour such costly vehicles. One died at the
wheel of a Range Rover. A father scoffed at a police mistaken
identity involving his son -- how could they dumbly arrest and jail a
young guy in work clothes, a drywaller, driving a Chev Cavalier?

The phrase "in Surrey, known to police" is a media template -- Surrey
being a Vancouver suburb and fond locale of criminals, and "known to
police" being the degree of familiarity the victims and the suspects
enjoy with the cops without buying tickets for the Policemen's Ball.

In recent years, other formerly slumbering and often devout farm
towns like Abbotsford and Langley have echoed with gunfire.

The situation has touched the heights of the surreal.

Police fixed surveillance cameras around the Surrey home of two known
gangster brothers -- that they are identified as such and still drive
the streets is a commentary on society's limp will and the paralysis
of the justice system -- lest competing gangsters drop by, with
unfriendly intent. The brothers are also methodically followed by
police wherever they drive.

Protective overkill, so to speak.

Vancouver Sun reporter Kim Bolan wrote that they ship their cars to
Toronto for bulletproofing. Some furious neighbours conclude they are
in fact under police protection, safer than the law-abiding.

The citizenry, gnawing their knuckles with fear that vagrant bullets
might strike the innocent, take some comfort or even veiled pleasure
that the gangsters seem to have honed their shooting skills so
admirably. To date, they have only off-ed each other, sparing bystanders.

The one exception, the bloodiest event so far, was the slaying of six
men in a drug dealer's Surrey apartment in 2007. Two innocents died,
one a next-door neighbour, the other a tradesman checking a gas
fireplace. In the cliched phrase, they were in the wrong place at the
wrong time.

The two principal disputants over the lucrative drug turf are the Red
Scorpion and the ironically named United Nations gang. Members are
young and many live at home with mom and dad. Families of the slain
invariably extol their loved ones as exemplars of good conduct. The
mother of one who reportedly sold undercover police $138,400 worth of
sub-machine guns, pistols and ammunition, described her son as "a
role model for youth to emulate." And no doubt ate his spinach without protest.

What to do, what to do? If hand-wringing were effective action, the
problem would have been snuffed out long ago. The drug dealers look
sharply organized, the authorities in blundering disarray.

One talk-show host, Christy Clark, a former deputy premier in Gordon
Campbell's Liberal government, crisply summed up the situation: "They
(i.e. everyone in sight) want somebody else to do something about it."

Blame has been put on soft judges, conditional sentencing, stayed
prosecutions, scared witnesses, stupid policies like the double
credit for time served in custody before trial, the absence of the
death penalty, ineffective and poorly deployed police, the weakness
of the once-popular attorney-general -- Wally Oppal, a former
appellate court judge who has had the jam to berate his own
Indo-Canadian community for more than 100 violent deaths among
themselves -- and, unsurprisingly, the futile criminalization of drugs.

Reliable figures about B.C.'s marijuana industry understandably are
impossible in the absence of heavily armed ministry of agriculture
researchers. The gaze blurs at various, often polemically driven, estimates.

But there is no doubt it's a big employer and exporter.

The ethical resistance to legalization of marijuana (and more to
come?) has frayed, and now the opponents' default position is that
unilateral action by Canada would slam down the U.S. border big time,
at crippling cost to legitimate commerce.

Broadcaster Clark's favoured remedy, a regional police force, is
backed by the city of Vancouver chief -- predictably, since the
suburbs send much of their costly-to-police problems, including drug
use and homelessness, to the big city. Opponents doubt whether
shuffling the deck would do much good, and at great cost in
rationalization and morale.

More of the same is an obvious quick fix. The premier, humiliated at
breaking his lifelong vow never to bring in a deficit budget, has
since found money for 10 new Crown prosecutors and 168 more police
over the next two years.

The police currently are not in high regard hereabouts. The cops (and
the entire operation) are fighting towering cynicism as the inquiry
into the death of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver
airport unfolds, and their seven-piece-suit lawyers fudge and becloud.

Then there is the unpleasant recent coincidence of two cops charged
in an astounding drunken assault and robbery of a Vancouver newspaper
vendor. These are our protectors?

Well, columnists are obligated to advise, not merely to recapitulate.
So a modest start would be to roll back the liberal and faux-liberal
ideology of more than 200 years and return to the concept of man as
inherently sinful, and of good and evil, and of punishment beyond
this earthly life.

Trevor Lautens lives in the richest municipality in British Columbia,
which, its police chief claims, has the highest youth drug use in the
Vancouver metropolitan area.