B.C. TO COLLABORATE WITH MEXICO ON GANG VIOLENCE

B.C. Marijuana Traded For Cocaine And Guns, Says Attorney-General

B.C Attorney General Wally Oppal will meet tomorrow with his Mexican
counterparts to find ways to collaborate to stop escalating gang
violence in the province.

Oppal, who had just wrapped up meetings with ministers from the
Western provinces last night, told The Province his "information
session" with the Mexican officials will take place in Victoria.

"They have had over 9,000 killings in Mexico," Oppal said of the
drug-based deadly gang wars taking place in parts of Mexico right
now. "There's a common thread here.

"British Columbian marijuana goes south -- and cocaine and guns come north."

Oppal said that with the unprecedented violence in the Baja and
northern parts of Mexico, "A-Gs down there are in a real bind."

In Calgary, Western attorneys-general and solicitors general met to
hammer out an action plan to tackle organized crime and gang violence
in western Canada.

They decided against the idea of a regional remand centre to house
high-risk adult gang members.

Provinces will continue with existing remand models, they decided,
but will share best practices on intelligence gathering and explore
cooperative approaches to gang management at correctional facilities.

And they'll examine joint training opportunities for police and peace officers.

The provincial politicians said they want to lobby Ottawa as a group
to make changes to wiretapping, sentencing, bail reform and
disclosure of evidence.

They'd like to speed up the time it takes to get a judge's permission
to listen to telephone conversations, and to modernize the country's
wiretap laws, which were written in 1974.

"Right now, the police cannot wiretap suspected criminals unless
they've gone through a laborious exercise of telling the authorizing
judge that they've gone through a whole bunch of steps. By that time,
the trail is cold," Oppal said.

"We want police to have the right to wiretap people immediately and
to get authorization from judges immediately after the commission of a crime."

They also want to do away with the practice of giving credit --
sometimes two to one or three to one -- for time served in prison
before sentencing for a crime.

They're looking to make the new ratio one to one.

The politicians said they want bail reformed to give judges less
leeway for bail tests.

"Once a person has demonstrated one time that they're not prepared to
respect a court order, the second time they go in for breaching those
conditions, there shouldn't be an assumption that they're going to
respect the court order the second time," said Alberta justice
minister Alison Redford.

As well, the Western ministers want the disclosure process sped up,
arguing it needs to be codified so that the process of describing
evidence gathered in an investigation doesn't push back trials needlessly.

"The problem is, our trials never get on. It takes us forever to
disclose all relevant evidence to the defence," said Oppal.