February 17, 2009
Minister says gang problem worst in Lower Mainland
A minute’s walk away from where Abbotsford gangster Kevin Robert LeClair was ambushed in a gangland slaying on Feb. 6 the federal Minister for Public Safety announced on Tuesday morning what has become patently obvious: B.C. has become the capital of organized crime in Canada.
Peter Van Loan, invited by Langley MP Mark Warawa and senior Lower Mainland police officers, spoke at a press conference behind the Walnut Grove Sandman Inn, separated only by a new apartment building from Thunderbird Village shopping plaza where LeClair, 26, was shot in his pickup. He died two days later.
Against a noisy background of traffic on 202 Street, construction hammering and vehicle backup alarms, Van Loan said that Metro Vancouver has the highest number of gangs in the country.
“There are still a lot of things we need to do to take action,” he said, and these include making any gang-related homicide a first-degree murder offence.
Condemning opposition parties which have confounded his government’s plans to get tough on criminals, Van Loan said that it’s bad enough that there are innocent victims of gang warfare “but worse than that is that you have communities living in fear.”
He urged the public to tell the other parties that “the time has come to re-balance our justice system.”
Asked if he thought bail laws were tough enough, Van Loan noted that the government has enacted the “reverse onus” provision of bail hearings. This means that it’s no longer up to prosecutors to demonstrate why bail should be rejected: it’s up to the accused to show why bail should not be denied.
When it was suggested that, as the drug trade is at the root of gang violence, it might be timely to re-examine Canada’s drug policy, Van Loan suggested that decriminalizing drugs might aggravate an already serious problem: “Eighty per cent of inmates that are doing time have substance abuse problems,” he said.
Van Loan was joined at the podium by Sunil and Eileen Mohan, whose 22-year-old son, Chris, was one of two innocent bystanders murdered in a Surrey apartment in 2007. The other innocent victim was Ed Schellenberg, 55, whose business partner, Steve Brown, was at the Mohans’ side at Tuesday’s press conference.
