POLS HAPPY WITH POSTURING ON GANGS

B .C.'s law and order ministers took off to Ottawa yesterday on an
emergency mission to fight gang violence, just before Prime Minister
Stephen Harper jets from Ottawa to Vancouver today on exactly the same mission.

Could there be a more perfect example of the trouble governments have
when gang violence reaches the point where political action is needed?

But there's another good example of how much trouble politicians have
dealing with this problem. It's the ongoing debate in the legislature
about what to do about the wave of killings.

It's been a series of shallow, superficial exchanges and sniping, not
unlike the drive-by shootings that prompted the arguments in the first place.

The New Democrats have blamed the Liberals for the gunplay. The
Liberals say there was lots of shooting when the NDP was in power.

New Democrats point to a three-year fiscal plan indicating public
safety budget cuts. Liberals say they're in the middle of bulking up
the police response in a big way.

They have spent days counting cops and comparing force levels, while
several more people have been gunned down.

Two words for both sides: Get real.

It would be enormously refreshing to see them drop all the partisan
point-scoring and take a cold, hard look at the causes behind all the
shootings. The debate so far is like watching an argument over how to
apply first aid on the battlefield. What about ending the war?

It would be good to see someone address this idea. Gangs are not the
problem. Gangs are a normal and expected outgrowth whenever an
enormously profitable illicit market is created and allowed to flourish.

I'm open to the argument that gangs have actually regulated and
imposed some order on B.C.'s booming drug trade. If the
multibillion-dollar dope trade that runs through every facet of
society was in the hands of thousands of criminal entrepreneurs, we
would have descended into anarchy years ago.

It's the gangs that have made the whole system work properly, at
least from the criminal point of view. By way of threat, the gangs
divvy up an entire illegal economy, enforce the flow charts, impose a
pecking order and keep the system running smoothly.

The immediate problem in Metro Vancouver is that the system is out of
whack. Something is out of balance. Price fluctuations or power
shifts are creating friction that's resulted in all the cold-blooded
murders in the last few months.

But blaming the gangs for the killings is like blaming your local
credit union or chamber of commerce for the economic meltdown.
Systemically speaking, it's not their fault. They are geared to work
toward stability, not chaos.

Same with the gangs. The leaders probably don't enjoy the murder
spree any more than we do.

I would listen with rapt attention if someone started talking about
the fundamental problems underneath the recent gang spats. Those
include an incredibly attractive lifestyle that beckons a sizable
number of young men who have parked their sense of right and wrong.

It's all based on unimaginably large sums of drug money sloshing
around the province. And all that profit is based on a completely
artificial distinction society made generations ago between legal
drugs and illegal drugs.

The source of all that profit is the most uncomfortable point of all.
It's us. The criminal gangs are feeding off mainstream society's
insatiable appetite for drugs.

It's an awkward, uncomfortable argument that would put any politician
who tackles it at great risk. And it leads toward decriminalization
as one means of erasing the profit that seems to be at the root of it
all, which is even touchier. Much easier to talk tough, promise more
"crackdowns" and pretend that police agencies have some kind of grip
on this situation.

B.C.'s ministers will fly back home issuing news releases saying
they're satisfied with their meetings. The prime minister will stage
some event and promise some hardline tinkering with the Criminal Code.

But let's not pretend we're anywhere near the root of the problem. We aren't.