Narco-Terrorism
Time for Trudeau Style Emergency Measures!
I think Canadians want their senior governments to stop pussy-footing around with criminal gangs. Talk is cheap; what we need now is "DO". Implement the Emergencies Act of 1988 NOW! This would allow special temporary measures, ensuring our safety and security while law enforcement regains the upper hand.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see what's happened in Mexico from 2001 through to last weekend as a particularly ominous harbinger as to where we could be five years hence. How many more kids have to be hooked into the insane lifestyle of psychopaths, killing each other Al Capone style, before BC becomes a slaughterhouse? The Prohibition Era gangs of the 1920s and 1930s were not all that different from today's BC Bud Syndicates who are dedicated to smuggling and other more nefarious activities. The 130+ criminal gangs are now morphing into a new and extremely more dangerous species - Narco-Terrorists. The machine gunning of a Chilliwack business together with death threats to all bar watch businesses is a dire prediction of what's to come! Sitting around chiding while our country slides closer and closer to becoming no better than most so called less enlightened, tropical banana republics is not an option in my book.
Who is responsible for this mess? We are! Who is accountable? We are! Because we have allowed those we elected to govern to abdicate their responsibilities. Our current Emperor, Premier Gordon Campbell, on his 2001 ascension to the throne, first abolished photo radar -- an action I strongly supported -- but then, almost in the same breath, closed numerous court houses throughout this Province. At the time it was estimated that BC had 6 organized crime gangs and 15000 grow ops, producing a contraband crop with an estimated value of $1,000,000,000.00 (billion). Jumping ahead 8 years, today 1 in 60 homes is a grow op, (1 in 9 in the lower mainland) feeding roughly 130 criminal gangs, all fighting over what is now thought to be a $10,000,000,000.00 (billion) a year pie! That's more than ten times the security budget for the upcoming Olympic games.
There is a connection between constricting the resources of the legal system, reducing deterrence and all but fully eliminating punishment of criminal behavior as contributory, and fully predictable, for the bloody mess we now face. If we don't learn from what we know, we deserve what we get. Pierre Trudeau faced down the Front de Libération du Quebec (FLQ) terrorists that threatened national security in 1970. Yet this small terrorist organization only kidnapped a British diplomat and murdered one single person, Pierre Laporte, a Quebec Cabinet Minister. Trudeau, like him or not, imposed the War Measures Act when action was required, which quickly eliminated that threat.
Today's low life drug mobs are out of control. They have killed many more than the FLQ, inflicted substantially more damage, and are threatening the long-term stability of our society. Do we have to wait for a current sitting member of the BC Provincial Cabinet or one of their Federal counterparts to take one in the head before today's situation is seen as a crisis?