Juno News - April 11, 2019


RCMP staffing issues hindering organized crime money-laundering investigations

Mentioned
Peter Germanos Surrey Doug McCallum Brenda Luckey David Eby
Ethics investigator is Liberal cabinet minister's sister-in-law Trudeau government will consider handgun ban if re-elected

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

135.95

Word count

806

Sentence count

49

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I discuss organized crime and money laundering in the casinos in British Columbia, and why the Mounties are not doing enough to combat it, and what needs to be done about it. I also discuss the need for municipal policing across the country, and how municipal policing can help solve the problem.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 It's been two years since reports were made public about the significant money laundering
00:00:10.540 done primarily by Asian organized crime through the casinos in British Columbia.
00:00:15.840 In that two-year time period, the Attorney General, David Eby, commissioned a report
00:00:23.060 done by former RCMP Deputy Commissioner Peter German to look at the issue.
00:00:28.280 And Peter German identified at that time in that report, which was made public last summer,
00:00:37.180 $100 million had been laundered through BC casinos.
00:00:43.600 I know for a fact that that number is not even close to being accurate.
00:00:48.860 As long ago as five years, a report was authored for the BC government that identified over
00:00:56.780 $100 million in 20s alone being laundered through the River Rock Casino in Richmond, BC.
00:01:03.320 That's five years ago.
00:01:05.160 It's taken government an awfully long time to do nothing.
00:01:09.960 In just last week, or this past week, Peter German authored another report in which he looked
00:01:15.440 at the RCMP response to this problem.
00:01:18.880 In that report, he identified that there were 26 positions that were federally funded that
00:01:26.560 should have been working on the money laundering issue.
00:01:29.660 Of those 26 positions, only 11 were filled.
00:01:33.300 Of those 11, only five were actually gainfully employed during investigations, and they weren't
00:01:38.760 actually working on money laundering.
00:01:40.300 They were working on seizure proceeds of crime issues.
00:01:47.520 This is crazy.
00:01:49.360 The issue of money laundering and organized crime in this country has been, or should have
00:01:55.520 been, on the front burner for many years.
00:01:57.840 At the turn of the century, in December 1999, I wrote a column saying organized crime was the
00:02:03.840 biggest problem facing this country going into the 21st century.
00:02:08.800 Now, that was obviously before 9-11 and what happened in the days that followed, but still, organized
00:02:17.020 crime is and should be a front burner issue.
00:02:19.920 The problem is that the Mounties, at this point in time, are just simply not able to staff
00:02:25.680 their commitments from coast to coast.
00:02:28.880 They have over 150 municipal contracts where they provide, essentially, city policing across
00:02:35.940 the country, in eight provinces.
00:02:39.480 They are incredibly short-staffed when their primary focus should be on federal policing
00:02:47.400 issues, organized crime, terrorism-related incidents and intelligence, and issues like
00:02:54.980 that.
00:02:56.220 In order to keep the country safe, I don't know that responding to barking dog complaints or
00:03:00.920 break-and-enters that occurred last night in towns and cities across the country is an
00:03:08.140 appropriate use of resources.
00:03:10.680 And the other problem is the Mounties just can't recruit to keep up with their current
00:03:15.080 commitments.
00:03:16.340 In BC, which is the largest complement of RCMP, there's over 5,000 members in the province,
00:03:24.160 they're short, as many as 500 or more officers.
00:03:29.220 Every single squad and every single detachment, including the federal sections, are all running
00:03:35.620 short.
00:03:36.840 Is it all as short as the money laundering section, which is less than half strength?
00:03:43.060 Probably not in all of them, but certainly all of them are running probably 10 to 20% short,
00:03:49.740 if not more.
00:03:51.300 This is a problem.
00:03:52.160 The RCMP has commitments, contractual commitments, in all of the provinces, well, eight of the
00:04:01.720 provinces, to provide these men and women. 0.56
00:04:05.900 And if they cannot do this, then those contracts should really be looked at.
00:04:10.560 The city of Surrey is going through the process right now.
00:04:13.860 The new mayor of Surrey, Doug McCallum, has said he's going to replace the RCMP with his own
00:04:18.620 municipal police force.
00:04:20.940 Vancouver Police Force is actually working with the city of Surrey to help them succeed
00:04:26.180 in that.
00:04:27.260 There's a whole lot of rethinking, in my view, that must be done about the RCMP.
00:04:31.640 And the primary focus of which is, should they even be involved in contract and municipal
00:04:36.820 policing?
00:04:37.700 In my view, they should not.
00:04:40.160 There needs to be an organized attempt, if you will, or political attempts, to right this
00:04:48.980 wrong.
00:04:49.420 Because as it continues, as it goes on, the RCMP will fail.
00:04:53.700 I have long referred to the RCMP as 144 years of tradition, unhampered by progress.
00:05:00.160 And that is essentially the problem.
00:05:02.360 The whole attitude about this is how we've always done things is a significant problem
00:05:08.720 in that organization.
00:05:10.280 And the other part of the problem is that the Prime Minister put in place Brenda Luckey as 0.92
00:05:14.680 commissioner of the RCMP to move the force forward.
00:05:18.260 And there's really nothing in her background to suggest that she is anything but an affirmative
00:05:22.520 action hire.
00:05:23.960 And I think that's another problem.
00:05:26.360 Somebody really needs to address this issue.
00:05:29.100 And it, unfortunately, needs to either come from within the RCMP, or they must be mandated
00:05:34.960 to make some changes from the federal government cabinet level.
00:05:39.580 And frankly, I don't see anybody doing anything about that in the short term or near future.
00:05:46.680 For True North, I'm Leo Knight.
00:05:52.520 Thank you.
00:05:53.000 Thank you.
00:05:53.720 You