Premier David Eby says the B.C. government has stretched provincial laws about as far as they can go to combat organized crime, and he now wants the federal government to enact laws similar to those in the United States under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, commonly known as RICO.
“I’ll be blunt: currently in Canada, I do not believe that we have the full capacities we need to attack organized crime,” Eby said Friday.
America’s RICO law was created under President Richard Nixon in 1970 to give police and prosecutors new tools to go after the leaders of criminal organizations who previously managed to keep themselves far enough removed from actual crimes to evade prosecution.
The laws both expand who can be held responsible for a pattern of racketeering within an organization and add new and stiffer penalties, including a maximum of 20 years in prison for a RICO violation. Under the law, a “pattern of racketeering” must involve two instances of racketeering in the past 10 years.
Eby pointed to these laws as a reason for the FBI’s success in investigating India-based transnational organized crime linked to extortion and shootings in B.C. The joint “Operation Hard Ball” investigation between law enforcement in the U.S., Europe and Canada led to the arrest of 24 people, 11 of whom were in California. Several more are still wanted.
“It is much easier for the FBI to do these kinds of investigations than it is for the RCMP,” Eby said.
The B.C. government is now moving to seize some of the property involved through civil forfeiture, but any changes to the law to align them more with how these cases are investigated in the U.S. would need to be made by the federal government.
Eby plans to bring the issue up at the upcoming Council of the Federation and First Ministers meetings.
Independent MLA Elenore Sturko, a former RCMP officer, supports creating RICO-type laws in Canada, arguing that international investigations such as Hardball are more successful when countries’ laws are similar enough for the types of crimes and disclosure rules to align.
But she also urges Eby and his federal cohorts to look at recent failed prosecutions of transnational organized crime to figure out what went wrong in those cases. She gave the example of recent money-laundering investigations, such as the RCMP’s E-Nationalize and E-Pirate cases that were unable to secure convictions.
“We’ve actually not been very successful as a country at successful prosecutions of major transnational crimes,” Sturko said.
She also points out that resources must be in place to conduct these complex investigations and prosecutions.
“You can write all the laws and the books that you want, but unless you actually have the physical mechanisms, the people, the courtrooms, the experts, the technology investments that they need to make it happen, then they still won’t be effective,” Sturko said.
And while she agrees with Eby’s contention that the province is doing all it can to go after criminals using civil forfeiture, she says this does not substitute for sending someone to jail for their crimes.
“Believe me, these criminal organizations, they have endless money,” she said. “You take away a $10-million house, they probably have another somewhere.”
Steve Kooner, the B.C. Conservative Party’s attorney general critic says he supports these sorts of changes, but asks why it took Eby so long.
“This extortion crisis has been going on for three years now,” Kooner said. “And what we are seeing is a reactionary approach from the premier.”
Like Sturko, he says B.C. needs “as many measures as possible” to deal with the extortion crisis, but it also needs the Crown prosecutors to argue the cases.
“The attorney general’s ministry is underfunded,” he said. “Crown counsel are underfunded.”
All in all, he called Eby’s efforts a lot of rhetoric without much substance.
Eby expects these types of changes to garner opposition from groups such as the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, an organization that he himself used to lead. Black Press has reached out to the Canadian Civil Liberties Association for its perspective.
But at this point, Eby argues for a Canadian version of RICO to give police the tools to protect the rights of people who live in communities experiencing gang violence.
“The right to live in peace and to conduct your business in the community is a critically important right as well,” he said.