The Emergency in Vancouver

So far there year there have been at least nineteen gang-related murders in metropolitan Vancouver. There have been four in the last week. Fifteen people have been killed – in what police characterize as four or possibly five simultaneous gang wars – in the last two months. Events are escalating. A major leader of a criminal syndicate was assassinated outside of his home a few days ago. About a week before that, six people – including two civilians – were brutally slain inside of a Surrey apartment. This is a crisis.

Just the other day, the members of two gangs went tearing down the highway shooting at eachother just a little ways down the road from where I live. This wasn’t Compton or downtown Detroit. They were a more or less adjacent to a Stapes, an Office Depot, a Wendys, a theatre super-complex, a massive grocery store, a Toys-R-Us, a McDonalds, an Ikea, a Chevy dealership, and a park.

This is suburban Vancouver, folks. It isn’t supposed to be this way.

For all of the wrong that he did, Pierre Elliot Trudeau did one singular service to the people of Canada. When the threat of an extended urban terrorist insurgency emerged in the form of the FLQ, he stomped upon it with a level of force which even I approve of. Had the movement been allowed to fester, it is entirely possible that Quebec and Canada might well have suffered the extended horror of an Ulster. Quick and decisive action – marked by the overwhelming use of force against an emerging threat – allowed for Canada to escape from evil. Now, I believe, that the time has come for such force to be used again.

“The supreme function of statesmanship,” said Enoch Powell, “is to provide against preventable evils.” Ladies and Gentlemen – what we are faced with today is just such an evil.

The natural reaction of many Canadians, when faced with evil, is to wring our hands and cry that this is simply not the way things ought to be – and then to more or less leave it at that. The modern Canadian is, by nature, passive and submissively accepting of wrongs of all sizes, shapes, and colours. We cry out that this is unacceptable and then we respond by blaming the guns, or by promising research, or by holding community meetings. The police organize some new task force and the media jumps to some new topic and soon we read in the newspapers or hear on the TV that a tenth of our economy is in the illicit drug trade and that there have been twenty murders and fifty shootings as if that was the way things are supposed to be.

This is Vancouver. This isn’t Detroit or Washington, DC. That means a lot of things to a lot of people. But, most significantly, it means that we lack the geography, the methods, and the systems with which to cope with violence on a mass scale. This violence isn’t – and won’t be – largely restricted to ghettos and other places which might be safely written off. It crosses countless ethnic and cultural lines. When gun battles and assassinations are taking place in front of my grocery store and in our richest neighbourhoods, it becomes impossible for us to adopt the attitude of Apartheid-era white South Africans and brush the whole matter off as simply one of the others merely fouling their own nests. As good as they may be, our police have not the staffing, the equipment, the training, or the experience to deal with a problem on this scale. And, even if they did, the court system is – as we all know – entirely either unwilling or unable to deal sternly with offenders of all sorts. At least in American urban cesspools no one is ever operating with a full bench. The police and the courts here already know who at least half of these thugs are – many of them are awaiting trial on one charge or another. It won’t make any difference. We can hardly expect our judicial overlords to be moved to reconsider their leniency by something as petty as blood soaking the streets.

So, the question remains: what is to be done?

The province and the municipalities are nearly powerless in this regard. Their well-meaning and totally ineffectual proposals for all of this can, I believe, be safely ignored. No life was ever saved by a town hall meeting. But, then again, none – so far as I can recall –was ever taken by one either. The power to act here peculiarly rests upon the Federal Government in Ottawa. It is strange indeed that it is incumbent upon the Prime Minister and his Cabinet to deal with anarchy in Vancouver and its environs – that would seem to be the proper function of the Mayor of Vancouver and the Premier of British Columbia – but our nation’s unusual constitutional arrangements make that odd state a reality.

Ottawa says, correctly, that its new anti-crime measures will do some good in combating the crime spree. They’re probably right. It will benefit us some to have some criminals in jail rather than practically none. But, I would add, while we could debate for ages whether these measures go far enough none of them offer any prospect of immediate relief. Implementing these laws will take months – and effecting the change in judicial culture and composition in this country which will make these laws actually useful is the work of many years.

And, of course, the foreign origins and ties of these gangs – most of which appear to be ethnic or national in danger – must be addressed. An expedited effort to detain and deport foreign criminals – and then to keep them out of this country – is vital. But, again, that is an extended project. Moreover, the subject is so uncomfortable and taboo that it seems unlikely that any politician who seriously aspires to national office will dare to speak to the issue directly.

So, the narrower question looms: what can be done today?

The spiralling violence is seemingly beyond the ordinary powers of the police – and certainly beyond the imaginations of our courts. Allowed to escalate, the violence will surely result in more deaths – including the deaths of more civilians. We have no idea how far it will go. It is possible that the criminals who are assaulting our city will tire themselves out, slow down, and that that will be that. But it is equally possible – and far more likely – that these criminals, who are fighting for control of the drug trade in a city which is the gateway from Asia to North America, will wage an escalating battle for supremacy in this land of lax laws and laxer enforcement.

We have a choice here. We can either sit and pray for the best – or we can stand up and fight.

The Prime Minister has the legal right to invoke the updated version of the law that Pierre Trudeau used against the FLQ. It’s now called the Emergencies Act.

As a result of a judicial system which sets criminals free and an immigration system which has stocked our fair city with criminals from all over the Earth, a situation has been created that the ordinary legal and criminal processes is clearly incapable of resolving in a rapid and orderly fashion. The police know who many of these gang members are – they know who the leaders are. But they are forced to stand aside and watch as bullets fly and the innocent fall. That can be changed, if we will it.

The Emergencies Act gives the government the power to “designate and secure protected places.” I propose that the Prime Minister avail himself of the powers granted to him under the act and, using those powers, to order all gang members – and again, the police have a fairly good idea as to who many of these people are, where they live, and what gang they are affiliated with – to remove themselves from the protected area. Indeed, my proposal is that the Prime Minister designate the whole of the Province of British Columbia – save for a small and well-guarded camp – as a protected place. Once this legal formality has taken place, all known gang members who do not voluntarily remove themselves from the designated area could then be detained by the authorities and held for as long as possible. Further, once they are detained, the government could look into deporting many of these people as rapidly as possible.

Some will doubtlessly denounce this proposal as a violation of the rights of criminals. And so, perhaps, it is. It has always been my belief that the protection of the public is an immeasurably higher priority than the rights of bloody murderers and, while I recognize that that opinion is not universally shared, I will not apologize for it. As Trudeau said, “it is more important to keep law and order in the society than to be worried about weak-kneed people.”