SNUD Committee Meeting

SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON NON-MEDICAL USE OF DRUGS

COMITÉ SPÉCIAL SUR LA CONSOMMATION NON MÉDICALE DE DROGUES OU MÉDICAMENTS

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Wednesday, November 21, 2001

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[Translation]

The Chair (Ms. Paddy Torsney (Burlington, Lib.)): We are very pleased to welcome witnesses from the RCMP, the Montreal Urban Community Police Department and the Canadian Customs and Revenue Agency. We welcome all our witnesses.

I believe that each of you has something to say and there are slides as well.

Yes?

[English]

Mr. Pierre Primeau (Investigator, Royal Canadian Mounted Police): We could say it in English, if you want. My name is Pierre Primeau. I'm with the RCMP.

We have a presentation in regard to the criminal situation in the port of Montreal. The way it is structured, we go back and forth between me and Mr. De-Riggi. We go into the commercial aspect of the port of Montreal and also into the criminal aspect of the port of Montreal. There are 25 slides. It will last about half an hour.

The Chair: Excellent. Then we will have some questions from our members of Parliament around the table. As you know, most of us were in the port of Montreal yesterday, so we're quite familiar with your facility anyway.

Mr. Pierre Primeau: We built the presentation in English. The text is in English, and we could switch from French to English, whatever suits you best.

The Chair: You know that we all have simultaneous translation, and we will get that for you when you are ready for questions, so c'est comme vous le voulez.

Mr. Pierre Primeau: As I said, my name is Pierre Primeau. I'm with the RCMP. I've been with the RCMP for almost 25 years, and for the past two years I've been working as an intelligence officer with the organized crime task force in Montreal. Our specialty, as we could call it, is to investigate individuals and criminal situations that occur in the port of Montreal.

As you can see, our logo has not really any colour that belongs to any police departments because we are a joint force, made up of Montreal police, Canada Customs, provincial police, Sûreté du Québec, and the RCMP. We decided to go with a colour that would not represent anybody in particular, to be politically correct, I should say.

Mr. Angelo De-Riggi (Intelligence Officer, Canada Customs and Revenue Agency): My name's Angelo De-Riggi. I'm with Canada Customs and Revenue intelligence in Montreal and I've been part of this task force for about two years. We've been working together for the past four years. I have over 20 years of experience with customs, 15 of those years with the intelligence section.

We wanted to demonstrate here that at first the activities of the port of Montreal centred around the old port, or the Old Montreal section. With the years when the container modes began with international maritime shipping, the container terminals had to be built in the east end of Montreal, and it is at this location that these major container terminals are located.

What is exceptional about the port of Montreal is that it is 1,600 kilometres inland. The cargo that is unloaded in the harbour is quickly distributed by rail or by truck to important locations in the Midwest markets, like Chicago and farther down, or Detroit and the Toronto and Ontario market, and it goes down to the New England states.

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The port of Montreal is 20 to 25 kilometres long, but the terminals that basically interest us are the Racine Terminal, the Cast Terminal, and the Termont Terminal. Those three terminals are located between the Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine tunnel and Pie IX Street, which is about a four- to five-kilometre span. So we would say that it is in that four-kilometre span that organized crime makes their centre of activity for facilitating the exit of containers out of the port.

The Bickerdike complex, which is at the extreme western tip of the port of Montreal, is used basically for vessels arriving from Cuba and Haiti with a very low volume of cargo. The Cast Terminal has vessels coming in from the Mediterranean, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and the Racine Terminal has vessels arriving from Antwerp, Rotterdam, Felixstowe, and all the northern European ports.

It is these terminals, basically the Termont, the Racine, and the Cast Terminal, that organized crime make their centre of activity. They feel very comfortable in these terminals, because, as we will demonstrate further on in the presentation, they occupy key positions when the vessels are unloaded in the ports, and being in these key positions, they can manipulate the boxes or the containers at locations in those stacks you see there, and hide them and facilitate the exit of the containers. It makes it very difficult sometimes for the customs personnel who are working on the port to get at their containers or to get to do their inspections when we're dealing with high-risk containers that we want to inspect.

Through the years the volume of containers in the port of Montreal has increased. We're over a million, 1.2 million containers. When we're talking about 1.2 million containers, that's an equivalent 20-foot container, because on the market there are 20-foot and 40-foot containers. Everything is calculated for 20-foot containers. So the traffic is going up.

Mr. Pierre Primeau: The presence of organized crime is evident in the port of Montreal. If we look at the seizures we've had and the intelligence we've had through our investigations, it is evident that some people are controlling the movement of containers that come in through the port of Montreal.

As Angelo explained a few minutes ago, there are two types of jobs in the port of Montreal that are very important. The longshoremen are the individuals who unload the containers from the ships, put them on rail cars or trucks, and send them out. But one of the most important positions is the checker—in French they call them vérificateurs. They have what they call a stow plan, which is a document that says exactly what will be coming off a boat, and this way they'll know exactly which container must go to which place and they will have these containers placed in a stack to move them with transport of any kind.

What we have noticed in the various investigations is that some containers, which were supposed to be placed in a certain place, were moved a few minutes later, and then five minutes later moved to another spot, and then moved to another spot and yet another spot, five or six times. This is because they know that there are cameras there and they know that sometimes police could be around with cameras or conducting surveillance on them. So this way it's like the shell and nut kind of game and they're trying to avoid being detected. And we know for a fact, through our investigation and through sources—we have human sources who give us that information—that they are doing this every time there is a specific container with illegal drugs.

In the organized crime task force, the way it is structured is we have a mandate of gathering information and conducting investigations to help our different partners and our different sections who work on certain drug cases, or smuggling, or whatever kind of illegal activity is going on in the port of Montreal.

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The way we are structured right now, we have a superintendent, a sergeant, there are three of us from different intelligence agencies, and we have a few projects. We call them “projects” because when we start something and we start putting a lot of labour and a lot of time into a group of individuals, following the information we got, we'll give it a project name, and this way we'll be able, if it becomes a drug case, to transfer that project, with all its information and with all its files, to the proper section. So these are the files that we have right now.

The last one down below is Projet Cyprès. We were able to demonstrate that a few individuals who worked in the port of Montreal as checkers helped us, through an undercover operation, to get information and false documents to make a container come through the port of Montreal without being detected by police or customs. We even paid one individual, who was a checker, $10,000 for him to give us some false documents, which we played around with to make them look exactly like the original ones.

We were not successful in importing the drugs, but the conspiracy was there anyway. And during that two-year investigation, we were also able, through that individual, to buy stolen merchandise, bottles of wine, stereo systems, and all kinds of stuff that came off the port in Montreal. It is very easy for these individuals to supply us with what they steal. They are going to be charged. Some of them are going to be in court next week, and all the stolen property. They are going to be charged by the Montreal police department.

When we first started working in the port of Montreal, we received reports that something illegal was going on. Being a resident of Montreal for many years... Everybody knew that there was something going on in the port of Montreal, but nobody knew exactly what was going on. So we decided, with our task force, to go with the information we gathered through source reports or normal investigations, or normal patrol reports that we got from different police forces, and we went through the data banks of all the police and customs agencies to look at the information to try to validate our reports.

We were able to validate all sorts of things, but what was really frightening to see is that when we went through the list of employees who have worked as longshoremen and checkers this is what we found: out of maybe 1,700 employees in one case, 15% of them have criminal records; in the second case, 36.3% of the checkers—which I was saying is a very important position—have criminal records.

Through our network of contacts with people from the airport we learned that they'd arrested somebody down there who had some drugs on him, and he claimed to be a port employee. We thought that maybe he was a longshoreman. When we looked into it, he was not a longshoreman; he worked for a company called Urgence Marine or Berthiaume Marine. This company supplies service at the port of Montreal. Either they repair ships, do emergency repairs, or they remove garbage containers from a ship that comes from abroad. This company, with their employees, could often be the first contact with a boat when it comes into Montreal. Often a boat will slow down to get a pilot on the boat, but he has no law enforcement authority. He will just drive the boat to Montreal and then he will stop the boat wherever the port authority will tell him to leave the boat until it's time to dock.

Sometimes while they are there a barge will come in and they will go to the boat and they will pick up the garbage container or they will fix the boat. They are the first contact. And when we think of what we've seen by experience, that in an ordinary satchel you could fit $1 million of drugs, it's scary to see what goes on.

As I was saying, the reason we got this information is because we share the information. We let people at the airport and at the train yards, the police there, know that we were working on criminals. And we told them, if ever a name would come up that had something to do with the port, please let us know. Let us know. Give us whatever you've got, even if he's accused or only suspected of being a criminal or doing something illegal. And this is what we did.

Not long ago, after we gave a presentation to people from the train yards, they found that somebody had stolen a full container—that was around Christmas-time, if I remember well—of cocktail shrimps. A full container of seafood is worth millions of dollars, and they stole that container. Through their investigations, they found out that one of the individuals had links with the port of Montreal. We found part of the shipment. We found where they rented the trucks. We found a whole bunch of information. A lot of the merchandise had disappeared.

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It just goes to show that they know that some trucks or some containers or some trains come out of the port of Montreal on the tracks, and they go to one of the train yards to be shipped somewhere else. As Angelo said, a lot of the containers that come to Montreal go either to the western part of Canada or down south to the United States. That's what they were doing.

Just to show you what the Urgence Marine Company looks like, you don't need a very big... They do have a warehouse on the port of Montreal where they handle the garbage and things. But the part where I've circled, there is a barge, a boat. When they take that boat in the water, the office is gone. This is all they need. They have people working on that barge. They have a little shack there with an address on it and their name, but there's nobody there. That's all they need; 54% of their employees have criminal records. That's a very bad thing.

An hon. member: I thought it was 34%.

The Chair: No, 54%.

An hon. member: No, 34% are the checkers.

The Chair: The 54% are employees of Urgence Marine.

Mr. Pierre Primeau: Urgence Marine, 54%, yes.

Criminal links that we've identified with the individuals that we've seen through all the reports—these are not only things that we've heard, these are confirmed through various investigations—there is one name that we have put up there. It's a family name, the second group, the Matticks. In Montreal, the Matticks are known. They are in the paper. Everybody knows about them. This is the reason why we have put their name there. Some of them are presently in jail because of the Outlaws motorcycle gang operation this spring, Opération Printemps 2001.

We could see very clearly, through wiretaps, that one of the Matticks was linked to someone in the Outlaws motorcycle gang, Maurice Boucher. They were talking about owing him some money, back-and-forth communication. Something was going on.

The longshoremen... we have bought some merchandise from these guys. We were told that they had stolen goods and we bought some. They are going to be charged. It is a fact—union members, not the unions by themselves. We have not investigated the union structures by themselves. But most of the members who work on the port of Montreal are part of two unions, the checkers' union and the longshoremen union. A lot of the criminals we have in our files are on the boards of some of the unions, not as administrators but as representatives. We see them meeting all kinds of people, and the people they meet also have criminal records.

The checkers, in order to be able to remove a container from the port of Montreal, need contacts with all kinds of people. One of their great contact needs is a trucker, because a truck is needed to come into the port of Montreal to remove the container and deliver it to a specific place.

Not long ago on one of our operations, on the 1,500 kilos, we saw that one of the truckers had three documents that they called interchanges. They had three documents in the truck. At the first try to remove the container, he was successful. If not, he would have come back with another document. If that hadn't worked, he would have come back with a third document. So he had direct contacts with the checkers.

If we look at the unions by themselves, we have not investigated the unions. Even though people think we have, we have not gone through their books; we have not looked at what the unions are doing. We're not there yet. First of all, we have to find reasonable doubt to investigate somebody. We have not had any complaints yet about the union administration. We're looking at the individuals. Maybe one day our investigations will take us to them, but right now we do not have any grounds to go there.

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However, the thing we notice about the unions is that they are a very close society. They are not public. New members must absolutely be sponsored. To become a union member you need to be sponsored by someone who will vouch for you. Most of the employees who work in the port of Montreal get their job because they are referred by someone. They are either family members or very close friends. It is very hard for somebody to walk in off the street and get a job as a stevedore or a checker. This is a fact.

They are the ones who control all the stevedores and all the checkers, two different unions. They hire and they fire who they want, when they want. The employees who work in the port of Montreal, who take care of unloading the ships and getting the containers on boats, are not hired by the port authority; they are hired by the union.

They also have full control of the pension fund. They control the health and welfare program. Sources tell us—this is one thing we are validating right now—that in some instances employees are told to stay home, to take a sick day off, to have somebody else in their position the next day when a container is to come off a boat.

A lot of the members have been seen. We talked about Maurice Boucher. Maurice Boucher's father used to be a stevedore a long time ago. He was a member of the union. We have seen Maurice “Mom” Boucher, a full-patch Hell's Angel, in the port of Montreal while there was a meeting at the union hall. He was there.

Ms. Libby Davies (Vancouver East, NDP): What's the TOC?

Mr. Pierre Primeau: Traditional organized crime. Sorry.

Ms. Libby Davies: As opposed to non-traditional?

Mr. Pierre Primeau: Well, we have Asian organized crime. We have Outlaws motorcycle gangs—

Ms. Libby Davies: Oh, I see.

Mr. Pierre Primeau: So what we call traditional is what we used to call the Mafia, the French Canadians, and conventional organized crime.

Ms. Libby Davies: Okay.

Mr. Pierre Primeau: Traditional.

If you look over here, as we said before, the unions and the checkers hold the most important positions in the port of Montreal. Some people... I'll let Angelo talk about this, because he knows about guys waiting for some of these jobs for a long time.

I'll let you comment on this, Angelo.

Mr. Angelo De-Riggi: As we were saying, checkers occupy key positions. I just want to say that when a vessel comes into the port of Montreal, the checkers have access to what we call the stow plan. The stow plan is the outline of a vessel and where the cargo is located in the vessel. So they know at what time that container is going to come out of the vessel and where that box is located. From the moment the vessel comes into port, the checker is alongside the vessel and knows where that container is. From the moment it comes out, he can put it wherever he wants and give the location of that container. He can have it buried in a container stack.

In one particular assignment that Mr. Primeau was talking about, where there were 1,500 kilos of hashish, there was an investigation going on and the container was being watched by the RCMP surveillance team. What happened was that at one point Customs decided we were simply going to pick up the container for inspection. At that moment, when we sent in the fax at the terminal to have that container picked up, 15 minutes after we sent in the fax the transport company that Pierre was talking about picked up that container. That demonstrates that when Customs wants to have one container inspected, they're on to it because there's somebody at the terminal or somebody on the waterfront who is on the phone calling somebody else.

That is a risk for us, because if we're permitting organized crime to control these major points of entry, like the port of Montreal, which has an impact on the Canadian economy, we're permitting organized crime to control a portion of the economy. By occupying key positions, these people... You don't have to be 1,200 stevedores in the port of Montreal; you just have to be at the key positions—the gate, along the vessel, and alongside certain stacks—to make sure you know where the containers are positioned.

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Christopher Matticks is 21 years old. Christopher Matticks has been a checker for the past year and a half or two years. There are stevedores or longshoremen in the port of Montreal who want to become checkers. As you can see, if you're not part of the team, you're not going to become one. People like Wally Weir, who works at the Racine Terminal, occupies the position of inspecting empty containers. Well, inspecting empty contains isn't exactly a major job, but he's there for a reason. So these guys are players who are positioned at key places, like a hockey team who positions their key players at certain places to make sure the job is done.

So 90% of all the containers unloaded at these terminals are controlled by these checkers who are at these major terminals. When we look at the port of Montreal, these are the terminals and this is where they centre their activity.

Pierre, you're going to talk about the user fee.

Mr. Pierre Primeau: Yes, the user fee. This looks quite funny, but it is a fact that we were told by three different people who worked in the port of Montreal and an individual who we met in jail that anybody could use the port of Montreal to import illegal merchandise, but there's one condition: if you want to go through the port of Montreal with a container with drugs in it, you have to pay 25% to 35% of the value of the container, and it's not in money, it's in product.

One of the Matticks people said in a meeting one day that there's only one group of people who pay with money, and that's the police. He said they will never pay you with drugs; they will only pay you with money. So that is the reason they only take money from people they know. If they do not know somebody and if they are approached to help somebody import a container and make sure the container goes through customs and police, they will charge 25% to 35% of the value of the container.

Mr. Angelo De-Riggi: We put up just a few of the seizures to give you a sample of the seizures that are being done in the port of Montreal and to give you an idea of basically what is being seized. If we look at the last one there, the one that was done on November 4, 2000, that was the seizure of 1,098 kilos of hashish that we were talking about that was coming in from Belgium. That was the one where we had sent in the fax to the terminal and the boys on the waterfront knew about it.

There was another major seizure, the 5,485 kilos of hashish out of South Africa. That was in conjunction with the MUC police. I must underline that with major seizures like that, there are seizures where there are cold hits by customs and there are seizures where there is a joint effort by different police forces together with customs to target a container. We had 5,485 kilos of hashish coming in from South Africa. Originally, that hashish was coming in from Pakistan, transiting through South Africa and coming to the port of Montreal. There are direct shipping routes.

Basically, the activity in the port of Montreal, the containers that are coming into the port of Montreal are not coming from Colombia or Puerto Buenaventura, Colombia; they're coming from European ports like Antwerp, Rotterdam, Felixstowe in Great Britain, and the Mediterranean. Cargo coming from those ports could originate from places like Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan, because they transit certain countries. They're boarded on certain vessels. They go to the Mediterranean. They're re-manifested onto other vessels and brought to the port of Montreal. They could see this was a seizure, a chocolate seizure, and on that hashish palette it's written “Freedom of Afghanistan”.

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Mr. Pierre Primeau: When we were talking about criminal activity, criminal employees, and criminal individuals, I mentioned the truckers. The trucker plays a very important part, even though most of the time he's not even aware of exactly who the merchandise belongs to and who's involved. He knows he's doing something that is illegal, and he knows he's getting a fair amount of money to do it.

What we do is that through our investigations we always, or most of the time, arrest the trucker. We throw the trucker's name in the data banks and try to compare it to names our partners have. Montreal police had a file that they called “Projet Grolo”, where they have identified some individuals who were part of trucker groups conducting all kinds of illegal activities. They were hijacking, they were selling stolen property, they were stealing trucks—if it was anything illegal, they were involved. A few of the names we had were on their list as being bad guys, and we had them as suspected drivers of certain drug importations.

I talked about the project we had that just concluded on May 24 of this year. We arrested a group of individuals. What we've seen is that we have two checkers and one trucker. We have four individuals from Colombia. They are still in jail in Colombia. They're waiting to be extradited to Canada to be charged here. The individuals were charged with conspiracy, counterfeiting, possession of illegal firearms, possession of stolen goods, and theft.

The plan was for an undercover operator from the RCMP to pose as a coffee importer. He was to frequent a restaurant in the western part of Montreal, where he had been brought by an informant who was under contract to the RCMP. Somebody approached him and said, listen, are you just into coffee, or are you into anything else? He said, well, I could be into something else. They tried to work out the importation of two different shipments of cocaine, 1,000 kilos and 2,500 kilos.

It did not work out because the individuals were not able to strike a deal with the Colombians down south, but we were ready, willing, and able to transport the merchandise for them. It was not any fault of ours, it was because of time and because of the weather, the stormy time of the year. If it had started in January, probably in July, we would have done it, but it concluded in September or October. We kept on going until the following May, but it never happened. It just showed us that people were approaching transport individuals to carry their merchandise to Canada.

A lot of people will say yes, but what happens with security? What's security doing in the port of Montreal? What are police doing? As you might have found out this week, there are no police in the port of Montreal. There is a security agency that is under contract to the port authority, but they are not law enforcement officers. The only powers of arrest they have are like a normal citizen's. They still do a good job because they protect properties owned by the port authority, but they have nothing to do with law enforcement, with what goes on with the bad guys, or with the criminal activities. They are told so by these bad guys.

Montreal police have at least three stations that surround or border the port of Montreal. They respond to calls as police do anywhere else, but they do not patrol the port of Montreal. The port of Montreal is not considered part of their territory.

We still do get great information from the Montreal police. When something happens, when they do get a call, or when they arrest somebody who has come out of the port of Montreal and they find out that he has a huge criminal record, they will share the information with us to help us try to understand things that are going on.

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We met last year with the port authority administration, and we talked to them about the problem. This is what they answered, and this is also what they have on their web page. They say that they're there to build and maintain infrastructures and to rent them out to companies that own those ships. They have nothing to do with the employees who unload the boats or with the checkers. They have their own employees. We have not conducted any background checks on their employees because nothing tells us at this time that any of them are criminals.

Our goals and objectives at the unit are the following: we want to get a better understanding of the ongoing criminal activities within our Canadian ports, especially in our case the port of Montreal. Vancouver and Halifax are establishing task forces like ours. We are networking at this time. We are meeting. As a matter of fact, this week we are part of a conference here in Ottawa, where we are talking with these people. We want to know exactly what is going on.

We want to have a greater sense and a better analysis of all the criminal activities and compare them from one port to another. We want to see if there are any links. We want to see if something is going on in Vancouver that has something to do with Montreal.

We want to share information, and we're doing that on a great level because we're sharing information with our Canadian partners. But we get a lot of requests from American partners who have ports on the east coast because they want to establish task forces like ours. They want to do the same thing because we see that when criminals are trying to import some merchandise into Canada, if it doesn't work, they just turn around. They have no boundaries. They will import it into the United States or wherever they need to.

What we would really like to see is the reinstatement of police patrol in the port of Montreal.

Ms. Libby Davies: And Vancouver.

Mr. Pierre Primeau: And Vancouver, and all over. As I said, Canada-wide. We do need police patrols of whatever kind because we have nothing right now, and we need somebody with authority. We have great success with our task force and we're a JFO, a Joint Force Operation. It may be that a Joint Force Operation in the ports would be good too, or something similar to that.

We would very much like to arrest and prosecute the bad guys who have full control of our ports. As Angelo said before, if we let them have control of the ports in some way, they have great control of the economy around our ports.

That is the message we wanted to share with you today. If you have any questions, in French or English, it's no problem; we'll have the answer.

[Translation]

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Primeau. I am certain that there will be many questions.

[English]

Now members will ask you questions, and anyone who wishes to comment is welcome to do so.

Mr. Sorenson.

Mr. Kevin Sorenson (Crowfoot, Canadian Alliance): Thank you for coming. We appreciate your expertise on this.

We spent two days in Montreal, and it was two days—I know from our party's perspective and from my perspective—that was well worth the time. I think we could all agree on that. We not only saw what you were doing, when we were there we saw the reasons for a lot of the frustrations you obviously have.

You're with the RCMP. I have a couple of questions. How many officers would be on the drug file or on the smuggling file? I guess there are two parts, the smuggling and drugs and also the organized crime file, both of which you are closely involved in at the port of Montreal.

Mr. Pierre Primeau: Do you mean with the RCMP?

Mr. Kevin Sorenson: Yes. Obviously—and you mentioned it in your presentation—we don't see police cars driving around and we don't see a presence there, but obviously there must be those who are assigned to organized crime and to the drug file right there at the port.

Mr. Pierre Primeau: As a matter of fact, you are right. You will not see any police cars. You will not see any investigators' cars because the way we have established our task force in Montreal, our group is set up on the 12th floor of RCMP headquarters. There are some twenty of us, as I showed you on the organizational chart a few minutes ago. Our specialty is to try to gather as much information as we can to help our drug section, which is 93 members strong.

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Mr. Kevin Sorenson: You say you are twenty-some?

Mr. Pierre Primeau: Yes, there are 22 or 23 members altogether.

Mr. Kevin Sorenson: What were you three years ago?

Mr. Pierre Primeau: Three years ago the organized crime task force was concentrating its efforts on the motorcycle gangs. Since 1999, when they created a new group, which was the Wolverines in Montreal, they went to équipe régionale mixte, which is made up of Sûreté du Québec, some city police, and the RCMP. When they went off their side under the responsibility of the Sûreté du Québec, we kept some of the members and we added members and we decided to shift our intelligence work toward the port of Montreal.

Mr. Kevin Sorenson: The RCMP has had a huge loss in personnel; they've lost close to 2,200 positions across Canada. They're trying to gain some back.

Obviously with the organized crime they've been very involved, and now with terrorism. Our commissioner has been here and told us that they're taking police officers off different files and putting them on the terrorist file. Has the resourcing affected you there at the port?

Mr. Pierre Primeau: For the intelligence side of the job, no, we have not been touched yet. It's been important to our administrators in Montreal to keep us as intact as they can. Our drug section in Montreal has been tremendously cut because of individuals working on the terrorist file. It is temporary, though. I know that in Montreal they're working to get their people back to the drug section.

Mr. Kevin Sorenson: When you say tremendously cut, what would you be talking about?

Mr. Pierre Primeau: By half, I would say.

Mr. Kevin Sorenson: Obviously the threat then is that right now organized crime fully understands that the numbers are left wanting as far as the RCMP and as far as those on the drugs are concerned. Now would be a glorious opportunity for those involved in organized crime to make sure that the supply hits Canada fairly heavily, with the resources that the RCMP have seen diminished.

Mr. Pierre Primeau: It could be. As I said a few minutes ago, we are also partnering with the provincial police, with the Montreal police, and they also have drug sections. Since we are a unit that has no colours, if we have a drug file we will share it with the provincial police or the Montreal police.

The criminals in Montreal right now do not know how many personnel were removed from our sections, but if something were to arise, I'm sure we would do as we've done before: we would shift personnel to go back to the drug section to be able to work on that specific case.

Mr. Kevin Sorenson: Montreal seems to have fairly close ties with some of the different terrorist stories we've been hearing about lately—Ahmed Ressam was in Montreal. So I would submit to you that the chances of having a great number of resources pulled off the terrorist file in Montreal... I wouldn't even say that's wishful thinking. I think that has to be a priority right now. Obviously our resources are a great thing for those involved in organized crime.

Matticks is a name that came up when we were in Montreal. It seemed like everywhere we went we heard about the notorious or the infamous Matticks family. Are these individuals who you listed there today presently employed, or are they in prison?

Mr. Pierre Primeau: Angelo can answer that one.

Mr. Angelo De-Riggi: One of them is in prison presently; 95% of them are presently employed.

Buddy wasn't working on the port any more; he was off the port. All of them are employed.

The Chair: Perhaps I could just interrupt for one second.

Are you aware that this meeting in not in camera? Do you want this meeting to be in camera, meaning à huis clos?

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Mr. Pierre Primeau: The names that we are coming up with right now are public figures. The Matticks family has been all over the paper, and this is the reason why we chose not to remove that name. We are not going to talk about anybody else, because, as you know, we have all kinds of investigations going on. Some of them are fairly much advanced. Some of them are at the beginning and some names have not been validated.

So the Matticks family are public figures. Their names are all over. We have no problem with that.

Mr. Kevin Sorenson: Does the RCMP do random investigations on customs agents? Organized crime may reach deep within different parts of communities, obviously, within the longshoremen, the checkers, all those. What about infiltrating right into customs?

Mr. Pierre Primeau: Presently I have not heard of any investigation going on. I know we investigate our own. Of course, if something would come out, we would surely investigate them, but right now I'm not aware that there's anything going on.

Mr. Kevin Sorenson: So there has never been an instance where a customs agent has been found—

Mr. Pierre Primeau: I'm not saying there's never been, but not to my knowledge, since we have been up and running.

Mr. Angelo De-Riggi: Perhaps I can answer that question.

I've been involved with many controlled deliveries at the port of Montreal, with assisting the RCMP in the investigation of these controlled deliveries. This is what we mean by “controlled deliveries”. For drugs that have been seized at the container inspection centre, we reinsert the container into the traffic of the port and see who picks up the merchandise. In this we work in a joint team effort with the RCMP.

With all the assignments that have been done on the port of Montreal—and they were very important, major seizures through the years, like 10 kilos of hashish and 82 kilos of ecstasy—we could have had the occasion where we could have had leakage from current customs personnel, and nothing has revealed that it was customs personnel until now.

I have to also say that prior to three years ago, before we made this joint task force, customs had a part of the puzzle, the RCMP had one piece of the puzzle, the MUC had one piece of the puzzle. By our working together we were able to share our intelligence, and that's how we are able to get a clear picture of the situation. Now we're able to make it much more positive for the law enforcement agencies to identify the organizations on the port.

Mr. Kevin Sorenson: Thank you, Madam Chair.

The Chair: I think the clerk wanted to talk to you on your way out.

Ms. Davies.

Ms. Libby Davies: First of all, I really appreciate you coming today and providing us with fairly frank information. I represent Vancouver East, which includes a big chunk of the Vancouver Port Authority, so a lot of what you have to say probably pertains to Vancouver as well.

I think one of our big problems was the termination of the port police. Again, I don't know necessarily the differences between Vancouver and Montreal. There were port police. The termination of the port police had a big impact on our ports. In Vancouver we don't have those kinds of patrols any more. At least the Vancouver port police could focus on that situation and they could be familiar with what's going on. But since 1997 we haven't had that, so we have to rely on the coordinated law enforcement efforts. So that's obviously one issue we may want to raise at some point.

With all the intelligence that you gather, and even when you are able to make successful interventions and actually arrest people, prosecute and get them convicted, if you look at the bigger picture, the people you're dealing with are quite far down the line, right? From a law enforcement point of view, how far up the line are you able to get?

• 1635

You put all of this energy into trying to figure out what's happening with these checkers or the longshoremen themselves. They are the end connection in terms of their entry into Canada. It has obviously happened in some other jurisdiction. How easy or difficult is it for you to make those connections?

The second question is maybe something you can't answer. One of the issues we're struggling with is that when it comes to drugs, we're dealing with illegal substances. It seems to me that prohibition itself has created this massive entry for organized crime. Prohibition itself allows this whole underground economy to develop. From your point of view, do you feel that we need to have some review over our policies? It seems to me that prohibition itself is causing more and more damage. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack. We're not even close to dealing with the problem.

We know the seizures you put up there—we see them on TV from time to time, the big seizure at the airport, the port, or wherever—are probably less than 1% or maybe less than 10%, I don't know. Do you have any comment on that aspect as well?

Mr. Pierre Primeau: There is one thing I could say regarding your first remark when you ask what you can do about the drug problem. The drug investigations are conducted by the drug sections. We don't have much to do with these people. They are still conducting their investigations as they used to. The criminal situation in the port of Montreal and in all different ports had not been addressed the way we are doing it right now. For the past two years we have specialized in trying to find out and to better understand what is going on in the ports. By doing so, the intelligence that we are gathering will help our investigators conduct better investigations.

Ms. Libby Davies: Is your information telling you that most of their activities are focusing around a drug trade, or is it not? Is it a minority?

Mr. Pierre Primeau: No, not only around the drug trade, but right now this is what we are looking at, because one of the easier commodities for us to investigate is the drug trade. We have vast experience. The RCMP, the Montreal police, and the Sûreté du Quebec, all have experience in working individuals. We have some kind of a network where we know about a lot of people who are involved in those kinds of activities.

By better knowing the individuals who work in the port of Montreal, by getting better profiles, we will be able to see what kinds of activities they are involved in. From there, we will be able to see if they are involved in something else. We are talking about drugs, but the port of Montreal is only a door. The airport is a door. Somebody comes through that door and goes into our city, our province, our country.

Ms. Libby Davies: I guess I'm a bit confused then. Is your primary focus to look at this picture and ask how the activity there is relating to other criminal activities, or it's a gateway to whatever, or is your primary focus to actually deal with prosecutions or arrests and seizures in the port of Montreal?

Mr. Pierre Primeau: One leads to the other, because once we understand what they are doing, once we know the bad guys, instead of trying to open a million boxes or containers a year to try to find illegal products, we'll be seeing the individuals conducting themselves in a way, so that we will find out that something is going on.

As you can see, all around the country and in the United States, they are reinstating patrol officers and community policing, so that police officers get to know their people. This is what we are trying to do in the port of Montreal also. When we get to know these people, we'll know what they are doing. By doing so, we'll be able to probably find more. We hope so. This is our goal—to find more illegal products, such as drugs, counterfeit, you name it, or maybe all kinds of weapons or products that could be used by terrorists or by bad guys.

Mr. Angelo De-Riggi: I just want to add on to this.

• 1640

These guys control... Basically, they don't see themselves at the tail end of the organization. They see themselves as a player in the situation. They see themselves as controlling a door of entry. They control the door that permits the merchandise to come in. And they sell their services to do that. That's the way they see themselves. They feel very comfortable where they are on the port, because that is a grey zone. It's like a village in itself.

It's a grey zone, because if we compare it to the airport, the employees at the airport working for Air Canada or XYZ airline company are all wearing a name tag, have been identified at the airport, have been fingerprinted, and all. For these guys in the port of Montreal, there's nothing. They go wherever they want. They go in whatever terminal they want, according to the arrival of the vessel. And if one of the Matticks boys wants to be at the next such and such a vessel when it comes in the port, he'll be there.

Ms. Libby Davies: Can I ask one more question?

I think it does raise a lot of very interesting questions. If you think of a hospital, which also has a very distinct culture in terms of how it operates as an institution, if there were information that somebody was going in and poisoning all the patients or doing weird things, there would be an investigation that basically would focus on the individuals involved. You'd begin to make links and you'd try to figure out what's going on. Yet here with the port authority it almost sounds as if nobody is in control. So you focus on the union members. I don't know who theoretically their employer is, whether it's an individual stevedoring company or whether it's the port authority. I don't know.

Mr. Pierre Primeau: Unions.

Ms. Libby Davies: Okay. But it seems to me that even through labour standards or employment centres there must be some issues around quality control. You guys send a fax, and somebody intercepts it, and then you have no control over it. Doesn't the port authority itself have rules and regulations about quality assurance, about monitoring? It sounds as if you are describing a situation that is completely out of control.

Mr. Pierre Primeau: The port authority has nothing to do with it, and they told us so. It disappeared from their web page, but I saw it clearly and I had pasted it at one time. It said they have nothing to do with—

Ms. Libby Davies: Well, then who is paying those union members? I'm just not getting this.

Mr. Pierre Primeau: The maritime companies.

Ms. Libby Davies: Okay.

Mr. Pierre Primeau: The maritime companies get money—

Ms. Libby Davies: So are they not then responsible for some sort of quality control?

Mr. Pierre Primeau: Well, they should be. The employees belong to the unions. They provide them with a service. As long as they don't see anything happening, they don't complain.

Mr. Angelo De-Riggi: They're a service. The longshoremen and the checkers are a service, and their union is paid by the shipping line. The shipping line pays that terminal, in other words, to have their vessel unloaded. And it's the longshoremen and the checkers who are there to get those containers unloaded as soon as possible and put on the rail boxes.

Ms. Libby Davies: But I just don't understand why we don't think there's some accountability somewhere. In any other place we would see that.

The Chair: I guess you're trying to get some accountability.

Mr. Angela De-Riggi: Yes.

The Chair: In fact, yesterday at the port I asked one of the guys who is representing one of the private companies whether all the people who are working there are bonded employees. The answer was kind of ambiguous.

Mr. Angelo Di-Riggi: If we look at the employees, let's say, for the Racine Terminal, the Racine Terminal has its personal employees working for the Racine Terminal, who are employees indirectly of the terminal. They are not stevedores or longshoremen. These employees could be bonded or verified by that terminal—their clerical staff and support staff and administration, accounting and all that. But if you look at the longshoremen and the checkers, who work in the yard where the unloading is done, they have no control. That's all they do. They know that the vessel that comes in has to be unloaded as soon as possible and reloaded as soon as possible to go outbound. And then the stevedores receive that order and have to do it in such a—

The Chair: And the port authority is the collection of the companies and the terminals. It's an organizational structure.

Mr. Pierre Primeau: That's right. They have their own employees, but they are not involved in emptying the ships or loading the ships. They take care of the yards, the rails, the fences, and the buildings.

• 1645

[Translation]

The Chair: Mr. Côté, do you have something to say?

Mr. Yvan Côté (Investigator, Montreal Urban Community Police Department): No.

The Chair: Nothing at all?

Mr. Yvan Côté: Nothing at all.

The Chair: I believe that there is an opportunity.

Mr. Yvan Côté: All I can say—and I will say it in French to be certain that I will be well understood—is that for us, in the Montreal police, the only time there is a police presence in the port is when there is a complaint, when there is an incident that requires the police to be present, either for a report or to follow up on a major incident. That was the case, for example, when some containers arrived in which dead people were found. At that time, the police must be present and reports must be made. In such a case, we go on the premises to establish the facts and draft the necessary reports. That is the only time when the Montreal police is present in the port. The Port of Montreal is somewhat like a private property, and our leaders are telling us that it is simply not a place where we should go.

There are certainly different stations covering different parts of the harbor, but we go there only when we are called in. That is what I wanted to add for the Montreal police. People are wondering how it is that the Montreal police is not patrolling in the port, but it is somewhat of a grey area, as Angelo was saying. It is more of an administrative problem than anything else.

[English]

Mr. Angelo De-Riggi: You mentioned the fact that we've centred our intelligence around narcotics and all that. If these guys facilitate the entry of narcotics, what makes us say that they wouldn't facilitate the entry of a nuclear device? Anything goes for them. If it's not a nuclear device, it will be narcotics. The other times it will be shrimp, containers of wine going to SAQ—

Mr. Pierre Primeau: Stereo systems.

Mr. Angelo De-Riggi: Anything. Anything that will make a buck. For them it's a shopping centre.

[Translation]

The Chair: Thank you very much.

Mr. Lee.

[English]

Mr. Derek Lee (Scarborough—Rouge River, Lib.): Thank you.

I want to sympathize with your objective here in making us aware of this policing challenge. I would acknowledge as well what I have always regarded as the institutional complicity in Montreal and in some other Canadian cities—it's not just a Montreal thing—with organized crime's presence.

My father was a founder of CISC back in the 1960s and was not a stranger to Montreal in the intelligence-gathering field, in policing. He was a former Mountie, a career Mountie. Right from the municipal, provincial, and even the federal side, there is an acquiescence at every level in that port. If you take a shot at the Laurentian Pilotage Authority, the phones start to ring. If you take a shot at the port, or the policing around the port, the phones would start to ring. Municipal, federal, provincial—it makes no difference. I'll say that publicly.

Mr. Stephen Owen (Vancouver Quadra, Lib.): You just did.

Mr. Derek Lee: I'm sympathizing with the role of the police who see the crime and have difficulty getting resources and getting people on the ground to deal with it. You don't even have brothers and sisters in the ports police now because they are all gone and it's a wild west out there.

On the positive side, would you agree that in a sense it's all happening in one place? You know where they all are. You know where they all work. The new legislation dealing with organized crime at some point is going to come into the hands of the policing authorities, whether it's joint or one organization. The guys who are doing business there are probably going to have to find new ways to do their business. I would suggest that you are going to be on the leading edge of those initiatives when they eventually become a public priority.

• 1650

Up to now, it's been the motorcycle gangs. It's something else in B.C. In Toronto it's something else. But in Montreal there will be a pecking order, and I'd like to think it won't be long, for the reasons you've outlined, that the port will become the target, and it's actually a relatively small place. There are just so many cell phones, and so many phone lines, and so many cars and trucks, and other means of communication that will eventually be targeted.

Our focus is drugs. If drugs were to drop from your list of contraband items, your job would still be there, wouldn't it?

Mr. Pierre Primeau: Yes, our job would still be there. At one point in time drugs were the priority with the police forces. Now it's terrorism. But drugs are still there. We had organized crime last year. But one leads to the other, and one serves the other, so that's what we're doing.

By identifying the people, we'll be able to see what they are involved in. As Angelo said before, they don't mind what's in the container, as long as they can make a buck out of it. In organized crime, we'll be there. And I think these people are part of organized crime, even though you call them checkers, stevedores. Call them what you want, they are organized and they are criminals, so they are organized crime.

We need to know these people. We need to know them better. We need know where they go. We can't track them. We can't do as they do with some wild animals and put a collar on them. We can't do that. But when we know where they hang around, what they do, who they meet and what kinds of activities they're into, we'll be better equipped to help our investigators in the drug section, counterfeit, smuggling, or whatever kind of section there is for terrorism. We'll be better equipped to help these people in arresting and prosecuting these individuals and cleaning up the ports.

Mr. Derek Lee: Do you have now, in the Montreal area or in that part of Quebec, a recognized institutional leader in terms of the organized crime targeting?

Mr. Pierre Primeau: You mean a group of investigators or the target by itself? I don't understand your question.

Mr. Derek Lee: We recently completed passage of some new legislation. Parliament has essentially said to the attorneys general across the country, or the solicitors general, here are the new legal tools, now go ahead and use them. Is there an institutional grouping that you would work with or relate to that makes a decision about targeting and resourcing of investigations?

Mr. Pierre Primeau: It might be our bosses who are doing that, because we as members are down the line here. We are the investigators, so we go toward where our administration goes with intelligence. Our investigations are—and we try as much as we can—intelligence-driven. We are not just popping a name out of a hat and saying we're going to investigate this guy today. We go toward the information that we have. So some people—high-ranking officers in all our agencies—are deciding where to shift. But as I said before, with all the events that come up, things happen so that sometimes we have to move some of our personnel somewhere else.

We are lucky in our task force: right now we have not been touched yet. So we're still 20-some members. Actually, I'm not sure of the amount. I think it was 16, and we went up to 22, and I think we're in the neighbourhood of 20 right now. I have not seen the latest org chart, but we are probably going to stay around there.

Mr. Derek Lee: Do you ever get the impression, or has it ever been said among you, that you are resourced up to a point, and it's “Go along, fellows, and do your job. Do as well as you can, but we're never going to let you succeed wildly. We're never going to resource you wildly. Just do your job, play the game, ensure your presence, don't embarrass us, make your busts, have your successes, have your failures.” In other words, do you ever get the feeling that there really is no end game here, it is just a chess game and we're all just pawns?

• 1655

Mr. Pierre Primeau: I've never had that impression within the RCMP. I can't say. It's very hard to comment on that. They've always let me do my job. I always did what I had to do, and my partners, and I think it's the same thing with Angelo and with Yvan. We know we have limits; everybody knows about limits. There are 16,000 of us in the RCMP in Canada. Sometimes you need 45,000, and sometimes in some section one guy is too many.

I have no feeling, and I have never felt anywhere, that my boss has told me just go show the buffalo, as some would say. I've never done that, and I don't think it's ever happened. I can't really comment on that negatively or positively.

Mr. Angelo De-Riggi: Our priority with customs is the intelligence that we get. We're just dealing with the RCMP or dealing with other forces, because I deal with different police forces, with the MUC or the Sûreté du Québec. Our priority is, first and foremost, to intercept the drugs at the point of arrival. That's our priority. For those customs officers on the line, or those customs officers working the port of Montreal, or even Halifax or Vancouver, the priority is to get the information or intelligence as soon as possible to intercept that box so that it doesn't come into the country. From there, the investigators do their job and do what they have to do, and it goes on up the ladder.

[Translation]

The Chair: Thank you very much.

[English]

Mr. Owen.

Mr. Stephen Owen: Thank you.

Thank you very much, all of you, for being with us today. The enforcement side of the drug dilemma is one of the critical pillars, so it's very important for our work.

I'd like to make a few observations first based on our discussions, and then learn a little bit more about your structure, because I'm very interested in joint force operations.

First of all, I'm very pleased to hear that you're going in that direction. Certainly Ontario has done quite a bit of work in that direction, as has Alberta, and British Columbia with its new Organized Crime Agency. I think that's the way we have to go to mimic the new reality of organized crime and terrorist groups, in that they work in networks and they work in cells, and they uniquely compose themselves for particular operations and then break apart, with people being isolated with only on a need-to-know basis having some information on it. The challenge posed to any one law enforcement agency in being able to crack one of those cells or one of those operations is a very difficult one, so the joint force is really the way to go.

Whereas two years or three years ago it was only a suspicion, there seems to be increasing evidence before us right now that there is a direct link between terrorism and organized crime. We were hearing information a few years ago, suspicions that criminal organizations were actually funding terrorism to create the very effect we're now observing—that is, distracting law enforcement agencies so they'll have to divert resources over to deal with terrorism and therefore pull them away from the organized crime. I'd be interested to know if you've had any direct evidence of that kind of planned link. At the moment it seems to be a phenomenon we're observing, in any event.

The question of ports police is interesting. It's invidious. It's been going on for years, and it continues to go on. We're going to see it in Vancouver as well as Halifax, I'm sure. One of the reasons the ports police, and certainly in Vancouver, were disbanded was not simply to download responsibility or save money, it was because they were incompetent or widely felt to be incompetent. They were trying to do everything. They were custodians, commissionaires, and supposed to be investigating and taking operations against crime, which they weren't doing, and they were rightly or wrongly being highly criticized even in internal reports across the country.

In Vancouver, if you talk now to the Vancouver Police Board, to the Vancouver police, to the Organized Crime Agency, to the RCMP, they will say good riddance to ports police. And we got additional resources to allow us to hire additional policemen in Vancouver police to take up that slack. At the same time, there's a broad realization that this perhaps isn't the most appropriate way to go. So I think the advances you're making are very interesting and perhaps instructive to us in Vancouver.

• 1700

The other observation is around the policy line. It came up from Ms. Davies' comment. Wherever we draw the policy line on criminal enterprise crime, organized crime will operate just on the other side of it. Whatever we prohibit by way of policy, they're going to take advantage of by breaking the law, by increasing networks to sort of get the vacuum just over on the other side of it. That's true whatever we say about prostitution, about drugs, about alcohol, and about guns. They will move into that space.

In terms of the mandate of this committee, this raises the question, do we distinguish between soft and hard drugs and between recreational drug use and severe drug addiction? Can you distinguish? I see in your charts where hashish and ecstasy were mentioned. Cocaine and heroin weren't. That may be just because they were examples that weren't being used. I wonder what the relationship is there.

I'm interested in your command and control structure. What I took from your description was—and I may be totally wrong—that this is an RCMP unit with secondments from other agencies. I am interested in how that's resourced, whether there's a joint management board, whether there's an RCMP commander, and what sort of resource contribution formula you might have for actual manpower, equipment, and direct funding.

The other structural question I have is whether you are an intelligence-gathering unit or both an intelligence and operational unit and how that might be distributed within the 20 positions. With respect to the intelligence side, which clearly is a real focus of what you're doing, the major challenge as I understand it among law enforcement agencies is one of trust. Will you and other people actually share the information, both getting it in and also sending it out? Then in the middle, I'd like to know whether it can be analysed, and if so, how it's analysed. That, both the sharing in and out and the analysis, of course requires compatibility among computer systems.

I noted up there that ACIIS III with a question mark beside it, and I wonder if you're moving toward that. Do you have compatible systems among the four, or is that something you're just moving to? Those are a few points.

Mr. Pierre Primeau: I could comment on the org chart, the task force. Yes, this task force is RCMP-driven. The commanders are RCMP. When it was created in 1996, it had been agreed upon that the RCMP was going to hold the lead role for management and personnel. We let the Sûreté du Québec go on their side with what they call the “équipes régionales mixtes”, the regional mixed task forces that concentrate on motorcycles. They have the lead role in that.

We have the lead role on organized crime within the port of Montreal. We have personnel down there according to what they agreed, and they have personnel with us. With our task force right now we have three Sûreté du Québec members. We have three Montreal police members. We have one Canada Customs member because his role is not the same. His role is as an intelligence officer because we build around what he came with at the beginning and what our intelligent officers came with at the beginning. But as to investigators, it's mostly RCMP, provincial police, and Montreal police.

As you were saying about trust, for data sharing and information sharing we do have our separate data banks, but the report is on the table and you take whatever you need out of it. Put it in your data bank, and I'll put whatever I need in my data bank. The files are open, and anybody could look into them. There are no secrets. Everybody works together.

The only documents that will be kept secret from the rest of the crew are informant reports. They concern the handler, the co-handler, and the person who uploads that information into the data bank—and of course high-ranking officers. The investigators do not see these reports, as is the case with all other confidential reports. They're put where nobody can have a look at them, and information is shared on a need-to-know basis.

• 1705

We have demonstrated that our type of partnership is one of the best. As you said, in B.C., Ontario, and a lot of other provinces there are all kinds of JFOs that work fine, and we are doing the same thing right now in Montreal. They work fine with the ERMs of the Sûreté du Québec, and they work fine with us in Sherbrooke, in Chicoutimi, and in Montreal, but our task force right now is in Montreal.

We are networking with individuals who are putting together task forces in Vancouver and Halifax because there we have the three major ports in Canada. We are also liaising with people from Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Toronto, and Churchill Falls, even though it's not an important port. We are talking to these people. We are sharing information with them, and we are trying to come up with a system so we will be able to share a log on a daily basis. This is what we want.

ACIIS is something that is similar to the RCMP's NCDB. NCDB is the RCMP's database, and we can upload a complete document, a complete police report, into NCDB. We are going to a newer version right after Christmas, and all other police departments across Canada are invited to join ACIIS, their own data bank.

We will be uploading documents into that databank. I will have access to it. Angelo and Yvan will have access to it, and so will a lot of people in our building and across Canada. We're getting there. We're getting away from humungous numbers of databases and going to a few, which will help us very much.

Mr. Stephen Owen: But are you, sir, an intelligence-gathering unit, or are you involved in operations at all?

Mr. Pierre Primeau: We are trying to construct a file with the information we have and to give it to the section that is appropriate for that type of investigation.

Mr. Angelo De-Riggi: I just want to answer with respect to the fact that we mentioned the cocaine—no cocaine—and heroin seizure. You have to understand the situation in Montreal. First of all, the drug of choice in the province of Quebec is hashish. That's why we're seeing large quantities of hashish coming in those container loads.

Second, the shipping routes that come to the port of Montreal are directly from those ports I mentioned, Rotterdam and Antwerp, and may involve transshipments that come in from Pakistan and all that. In Vancouver, on the other hand, you'll get cocaine seizures because they have vessels coming in directly from Colombia, and they'll get heroin seizures because of vessels that come in from Hong Kong, and so on. That's why they're getting those seizures, because of the locations they're coming from, and that's why the port of Montreal will get mostly hashish and ecstasy seizures.

The Chair: If I could, I'll just stop you for two seconds.

We have a little administrative detail to go through. If you're interested and if there are some more questions for our guests, then we can ask them to stay for a few more minutes. But we have, unfortunately, an issue we need a quorum for, which we now have, and I'm about to lose some people. It is the issue of our terms of reference for the committee. So if it's okay with everybody, if our witnesses could stay here—if you don't mind and if we can keep you for a few more minutes—and if we can adapt these terms of reference to the possibility that we are going to get to Vancouver, we can actually advance to the groups the type of information we're looking for.

[Translation]

Ms. Carole-Marie Allard (Laval East, Lib.): Madam Chair, I have not asked any questions. Will we have the quorum later on? Are they here for a while? Can they stay for a little while?

The Chair: It is not necessary to have the quorum to ask questions.

[English]

Ms. Carole-Marie Allard: I know, but how long are they going to stay here?

Mr. Derek Lee: Just a few more minutes, but we will lose our quorum and we will not be able to do our business.

The Chair: So if we could, we'll take two minutes.

[Editor's Note: Proceedings continue in camera]

• 1710

• 1716

[Editor's Note: Public proceedings resume]

The Chair: Meaning no disregard to our witnesses, there are a couple of people who I know have prior commitments and are going to leave. But there are still some people who do wish to stay and ask you a couple of questions. If we could keep you until 5:30, is that okay?

Mr. Owen.

Mr. Stephen Owen: I want to talk about the intelligence-sharing issue a little more because this is the crux, of course. Is there an agreement among the law enforcement agencies in Quebec, the Sûreté, the Montreal municipal police, and the RCMP in particular? I can see it certainly in the port situation involving Customs. Is there a formal protocol that there must be an intelligence officer in each detachment and that the data must be pooled for analysis and feeding back on a need-to-know basis? How is that working? Are you satisfied with how that is working?

Mr. Pierre Primeau: I don't really know if there is a protocol, but I can tell you, from my 20-some years of experience, that when you are working in a larger section, like the drug section in Montreal... when they conduct investigations and they have major files going on, they will have as part of their group an intelligence officer and an analyst. Of course, in the beginning, when they first start, that analyst could be used on different projects, but eventually, if it becomes a major file, that analyst could be tasked only to that file, if it's a major case.

In our group, at the organized crime task force, there are three intelligence officers from three different agencies, and we have an analyst. Is there a protocol? I think it's more of an understanding that the information we gather we share among us, being from different agencies. So it belongs to each member of each force to make sure that information is broadcast to their own members. That is one of the reasons.

It's very important to have people from different agencies, for two reasons. The first is to help us on the level of their expertise. The other is to share with their own people what they have discovered within the JFO.

So yes, there is information sharing. Of course, in some places they do not, but they have resources. We have an intelligence section in Montreal, with the RCMP, with Canada Customs, and with the Montreal police, where their own employees, their own officers or their own members, can call and have the information that is available in their data banks.

[Translation]

Mr. Yvan Côté: I will answer that. I will give the information in French.

In the Montreal police department, we have a network of police officers in each district. There are 49 of them in Montreal, and these people have the informal title of information officers. We have met with them, especially in the police stations that cover the Port of Montreal, and we have asked them to provide us with all the necessary information, even when they are not certain whether it can be useful or not.

• 1720

We want to know about everything that goes on in the Port of Montreal: the longshoremen, the checkers, the companies, the truckers. When you consider that there is one information officer for each shift, that there are five shifts for each police station, if you multiply that by 49, that makes for a lot of information that we can obtain. Of course, some police stations are far from the Port of Montreal, but there could be an incident involving a longshoreman and we will still know about it.

We have not signed a memorandum of understanding as such, but as information officers from the MUC, these people are reporting to us, to the central information office of the MUC. The information comes to me and I share it with the people with whom we are working in the UMECO.

You were asking whether there is a link between organized crime and terrorism. There is something that we should not lose sight of. Organized crime is always on the lookout for some “contracts”, anything that can bring in money. Some years ago, 50 years ago, it was strictly alcohol. Later on, they went into cigarettes, and then drugs. Today, there can be something else that is of interest to organized crime.

People often thing of organized crime in terms of drugs trafficking. That's not the only thing. Following the events that we have seen on September 11, it is reasonable to expect that security may play a role as well. I have worked personally on the East European file for four years, and we had information that the Russians were dismantling the Chernobyl reactor and they were trying to sell contaminated parts here. Those threats do exist and you don't need a 40-foot container for that. It can fit in a handbag such as this one. We have seized some at the Ottawa Airport.

So it is not only drugs. There is also the security aspect. Organized crime is always seeking such opportunities. Mr. Lee raised an important issue earlier. When you consider the Montreal police department, it would seem that the people in charge are somewhat ignoring this aspect. They seem to forget that organized crime still exists. Patrol officers are being asked to do community work, to deal with the public, which is very important, but while police officers are doing that, there is something else happening on other fronts. One must live with the reality of the year 2001.

[English]

Mr. Stephen Owen: Thank you very much.

One brief question, and it goes to technology and your estimation of how soon major container ports will have X-ray machines that every container goes through. I think they are doing some pilots in Florida on the use of that, but it seems to me that one of the unique aspects of containers is their biggest threat to us, in that they're in such large numbers and they're so movable, and so on.

Mr. Angelo De-Riggi: I'll answer that question. It's proven until now that the most popular method of bringing in drugs is still by containers, because organized crime and the people involved in it can start a fictitious company, or even use the name of a legitimate company that has been importing for some years, without them knowing, and bring in these containers. If we look at all the seizures throughout the world, in the World Customs Council, the container method still comes out as the most popular method of bringing in drugs.

When we start putting pressure on container methods and they start losing drugs at the seaport, they'll start bringing in drugs at the airport, by cargo, or they'll start bringing them in using some other method, or offloads off the coast of Newfoundland or off the Pacific coast. They will reorganize themselves. At the end of it all, organized crime, the minute they lose money, will reorganize themselves.

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On technical equipment, we had an X-ray vehicle being used in Vancouver. It was a test pilot project. It's being perfected, because the technology has to be perfected. I believe Customs wants to use this tool to better detect drugs and other forms of contraband.

I just want to add that this is the second JFO I've participated in. I participated in one JFO at the airport for two and a half years and this one. It seems that once you work on these joint forces operations, a team spirit builds up and the team works pretty good. If there's a good team effort, you do a pretty good job.

The Chair: At which point they all had a group hug. The team we saw at the airport was quite impressive.

[Translation]

Ms. Allard.

Ms. Carole-Marie Allard: Good afternoon, Mr. Primeau, Mr. De-Riggi and Mr. Côté.

I am the member of Parliament for Laval East. I am happy to have the opportunity to discuss with you because I visited the Port of Montreal with the committee. I was terribly surprised, first of all, by the limited means that customs officers had at their disposal to intercept drugs and, secondly, by what I learned about the union structure.

You seem to say that the whole population of Quebec knows about the situation in the Port of Montreal, but let me tell you that I have been a journalist for 20 years and the first time I heard about the Matticks was when the trial was dismissed at the Montreal Superior Court.

I wonder if we do not take for granted that the population knows about some things. Perhaps these things have to be repeated over and over again. Could I ask you this: Have you tried previously to publicize the situation somewhere, through press conferences or other venues, as you have done today?

Mr. Pierre Primeau: We, in the organized crime investigations joint unit, have not publicized the name of that family because it was not our objective to do so.

Inquiries were made. Other police departments have dealt with crimes that have been committed by these individuals. They have made investigations and are certainly still doing so, given the results that were obtained during the Spring 2001 operation, which involved more than 1,000 police officers.

I believe that it was at that time that the Matticks gang and their shady business came to be known publicly.

Ms. Carole-Marie Allard: In fact, my question is this. When you learned what the structure was, when Mr. Taddeo told you that he had nothing to do with it, were you surprised?

Mr. Pierre Primeau: No.

Ms. Carole-Marie Allard: No? That did not surprise you?

Mr. Pierre Primeau: No, because it's true. It's true that he has nothing to do with it. I met Mr. Taddeo last year—

Ms. Carole-Marie Allard: By whom is Mr. Taddeo appointed?

Mr. Pierre Primeau: By a board of... I believe the Port of Montreal is a corporation. It is a quasi-public entity.

Ms. Carole-Marie Allard: Could the federal government have some control about that?

Mr. Pierre Primeau: I believe that he reports indirectly to the Department of Transport and that he is appointed by a board of directors, but Mr. Taddeo cannot be blamed. His responsibility—

Ms. Carole-Marie Allard: Yes, but—

Mr. Pierre Primeau: —is not to deal with the police. He dealt with security. Mr. Taddeo does what he has to do and he cooperates. When we ask him questions, when we tell him that we must agree... We met briefly with Mr. Taddeo, but his employees talk to us when we meet with them. His employees cooperate with us up to a certain point, up to the limit we bring them to.

Ms. Carole-Marie Allard: We are in this situation where we want to increase the resources of customs officers. We would like to give them X-ray machines and so on, but I am asking myself this question. When the system is rotten at the core, as it is in the Port of Montreal, is it not the case that what we need is a commission of inquiry, such as we had for organized crime, where we set up the CIOC?

I am wondering what is needed. We believe that the population knows about it, but people think that they are protected and that everyone does his or her duty. If business people who go through the Port of Montreal knew the scope of the situation and the problems that they are exposed to with their containers, perhaps they would be worried.

Mr. Pierre Primeau: I agree. You have asked whether a commission of inquiry would be required. Yes. That was one of our goals at one point.

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However, in order to create a commission of inquiry, you must first demonstrate to the government that there is a problem. For years, we, in the police, have heard about the problems in the ports, but we are not on top of the issue. We have given ourselves the mandate of knowing the port inside out. Certainly, adding equipment and tools for customs employees to help them detect illicit cargo among the million of containers would be useful.

However, we must know the individuals involved. When you know the individuals, you can see where they are going and what they are doing. We will be better equipped to know what they are up to and what illegal acts they intend to commit.

Thereafter, when we have made several arrests and demonstrated... It does not necessarily need to be major projects. We have already started with the operation Spring 2001. Several people have been arrested. We will be able to show the government that there is a need, that the government needs to deal with these situations. As you said, perhaps the solution will reside eventually in creating a commission of inquiry.

Mr. Angelo De-Riggi: I want to underline that in the 1980s, when Customs started playing a more aggressive role in the fight against drug trafficking through containers in the Port of Montreal, the hunt was easier.

The approach to find containers in the terminals was easier, because organized crime was not used to the situation on the waterfront. But over the years, we have made some seizures and we have worked jointly with the different police departments and the members of organized crime have seen that their containers were being seized and that they were losing some of them. That is when the internal conspiration to hide containers and make them disappear and get them out of the terminals started to be more and more complex. The hunt is becoming more and more difficult for Customs officers. Given the budgetary cuts in the last few years, Customs did not have the required manpower or equipment to deal with such a large problem, when a huge volume of cargo is coming into the port.

Minister Cauchon made some recommendations. He took action to add more personnel. That it was we need, as well as specialized equipment.

Ms. Carole-Marie Allard: Yes, but I have the feeling that this union should be put under trusteeship, much more than—

Mr. Pierre Primeau: In the future, yes. I agree with you, Madam, but we must be able to prove it. That takes time. It took us two years to come up with what we have shown you here.

Ms. Carole-Marie Allard: Personally, I am in a state of shock after listening to your presentation. I was already in a state of shock yesterday, but even more so with this. I am wondering how it is possible that we are allowing a rotten situation such as this one to continue in a society where our children are dying in the streets because of drug abuse.

Mr. Pierre Primeau: If you allow me to make a comparison, Madam, I would say that we know, for example, about the Hell's Angels. We've known for years that the Hell's Angels are criminals. Why are they still riding around on their motorcycles with their crests on their backs? We have some problems that must be solved. It is somewhat similar. It is not as obvious because the people who work in the Port of Montreal do not have the word “criminal” written on their backs.

Ms. Carole-Marie Allard: Since I am all by myself, I can continue asking questions.

[English]

Would you mind if I continue?

[Translation]

You don't mind?

In the case of organized crime, it was the attempt against Michel Auger's life that really rang the alarm. I believe that it was at that time that the population woke up and said that something had to be done.

In the case of longshoremen, are you also studying the legal structure of these associations in order to come up with ways to force them to follow some cleaner standards of operation, if I may say so?

Mr. Pierre Primeau: We will certainly consider it. We have legal advisors. One of them will join our team. He is an experienced prosecutor for the Department of Justice of Canada in Montreal. He will advise us when we come to that. As I said, firstly, the work that we are doing presently just to identify the individuals is an enormous task in itself.

Secondly, it's all very well to say that an individual has a criminal record, but that does not necessarily means that he is still committing criminal acts. In order to check if he is still active, things must be done. So we are sensitizing our investigators to that reality and we are telling them that they must try to find evidence to prove their case. That takes time. We are doing that. It is going well. We have some success. One day, we will go to the next phase and, certainly, we will make some drug seizures by the time we get there.

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So we will go to another phase and we fully intend to examine in the future everything that surrounds the illegal activities.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

[English]

I have just a couple of questions. I don't know if Mr. Sorenson's going to add any, but we're pretty well wrapping up at this point.

Is there anywhere else in the world that has this under control? Clearly, you've identified that Amsterdam, Rotterdam, some of these other ports, Le Havre...

Mr. Angelo De-Riggi: We met with Dutch customs from the port of Rotterdam. The way they describe their method of operating is first of all they have far more customs officers in the harbour. They have control over the personnel working there, such as the stevedores and the checkers. Their system is totally different. It's not under customs control; it's under the control of the administration of the port. The administration of the port has a say in where these personnel—the stevedores or the checkers—work. They know where they work. So they police it that way. In the port of Montreal, these guys can work anywhere.

The Chair: But drugs are leaving Rotterdam and coming to Canada.

Mr. Angelo De-Riggi: Yes.

The Chair: So how great a control do they really have?

Mr. Angelo De-Riggi: We're not saying there's not an internal conspiracy problem there. What they're saying is they also have one, but they put on a stricter control. The problem with Rotterdam is it's the fourth-largest port in the world. It has vessels arriving there from transiting. It's like an airline hub, such as Chicago, and ships come in and out. So sometimes the cargo is not even offloaded in that harbour. Customs doesn't get to inspect it. It's just transiting through that port.

The Chair: Is there an association of ports internationally that you participate in or policing of ports or some kind of joint international initiative that you participate in to try to learn the latest techniques and the latest...

Mr. Pierre Primeau: Not long ago Angelo and I went to Halifax and met these individuals from the Rotterdam port, the Australian ports, and British customs. We are starting to let them know who we are. And as I say, with the Internet and everything we're trying to put something secure together. This is one of my ideas. That's what I want to do. I want to put something secure together, such as a daily log, a newspaper type of thing, to be able to share information, to let us know what's going on. Maybe one day we will find links to some criminals around the world.

The Chair: You haven't mentioned the U.S. in that list. Are there initiatives? Clearly, Miami must have a terrible problem. Some of the ports along...

Mr. Pierre Primeau: Very much so.

The Chair: I was just in Vera Cruz. They have a massive port, a huge volume of ships coming in and out of Mexico.

Mr. Pierre Primeau: Very much so. We are talking with people from the United States, but of course being from Montreal at this time of the year and asking to go down to Miami—

The Chair: It doesn't look good.

Mr. Pierre Primeau: —would look suspicious. So we are working our way down. We have talked with people from Boston. We went to New London, Connecticut. We met people in New Hampshire, in Vermont, in New York. We are working our way down. So eventually we're getting known and we are showing people our best practices, our good results or bad results.

We're asking what they are doing. What we are very surprised to see is that the American ports, I'm sorry to say—and that's out of their own mouth—are not very well organized in controlling organized crime.

The Chair: Well, they're probably very organized, but not by the right guys.

Mr. Pierre Primeau: That's right. We look at Canada, and there are only four major ports—Vancouver, Montreal—

The Chair: Hamilton, Prince Rupert.

Mr. Angelo De-Riggi: Prince Rupert, yes, is a very great port.

Mr. Pierre Pimeau: —Halifax, and Saint John, New Brunswick. Those are the major ones. But if you look at the States, there are between 20 and 25 ports, and they have the same problem with internal conspiracy in their ports.

The Chair: I guess it did surprise me. Clearly one of the first things we could be looking at is just that control of the personnel, the background checks. These checks are done at airports.

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Mr. Sorenson had asked about whether there is a change in resources toward dealing with the terrorism file. But clearly, we heard from your colleagues, Mr. Primeau, that we're suggesting that the international drug trade is very much the way some of these terrorist organizations make money—Hezbollah, the Taliban, the IRA, and the real IRA. I would hope that information forms part of the basis of your argument to increase the resources and change the methodology at some of our ports.

Mr. Pierre Primeau: Of course, as you said, it is true that a lot of these organizations... As you saw in one of our slides, it said “Freedom Afghanistan”, so that means what are they doing. They're probably selling drugs and the suppliers are making their profit and financing whatever.

Of course, we are looking. And I come back again to this. We could open all the boxes. We could have a thousand police officers opening containers in the port of Montreal. The bad guys, as Angelo said before, will ship their shipments somewhere else. We'll start finding pallets floating in the St. Lawrence River. They'll start using the airfields in the north. They've done it, and it's easy for them to do it if they want to. But it's very easy to do it the container way. The reason we are doing it discreetly is because we want to know these people and we want to achieve greater success.

Mr. Angelo De-Riggi: I just want to say I worked also at a container inspection centre for some time as a supervisor. When you increase the volume of inspection, it doesn't mean necessarily that you're going to get better results.

The Chair: Better being...

Mr. Angelo De-Riggi: Getting better intelligence, working together with different police forces, better targeting, and getting those boxes as soon as possible when they come off those vessels and not leaving them in those yards too long before organized crime gets their hand on them—those are the most important things.

The Chair: So you wouldn't advocate necessarily for an increased number of personnel, but rather a change in process.

Mr. Angelo De-Riggi: No, an increased number of personnel, but used in the right way.

The Chair: Okay. Finally, you put up some dates and some information about some hauls you've managed to do. The last one was in November 2000.

Mr. Pierre Primeau: That's right. Because of Printemps 2001 and because of quite a few investigations going on since that major round-up, which picked up a lot of main players around Montreal, we think they didn't have too many people to organize importation there for a little while. So even though the targeting, the inspections, and the investigations are good, we have not seen any significant seizure in Montreal in 2001. But we did in Halifax, and they were destined for Montreal.

The Chair: This committee is trying to figure out much broader issues than just the ones you've raised. But clearly you've given us a fair chunk of information about things that we could do to slow the access, anyway, within our country, certainly from one prime source. As you say, I'm not sure it really matters whether we're talking about Montreal or Halifax or B.C.; it's ports. It's the issue of how we organize the labour forces and the processes within ports and who is in control of the systems.

As we mentioned when the tape wasn't rolling, these facilities are massive, and that presents a challenge in and of itself. You have 22 kilometres of access. Sure, there are some specific issues where it's a bigger activity, but short of having a helicopter flying overhead, or many helicopters flying overhead in a convoy, you could never watch all the activity that's going on at any one time. So that is a bit of a challenge.

If you do have specific recommendations following this meeting, if you are interested in keeping in touch with us, we'd be more than happy to hear from you. We are going to be going to Vancouver, hopefully, the week after next and seeing what they're doing, and if we can get a budget we're going to a couple of other spots in Canada. But any feedback that you have for us, we are very appreciative of. We do wish you the best of luck with your work. We were quite impressed by the individuals we did meet in Montreal, both at the airport and at the port.

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It seemed at the airport in terms of the personnel that for people coming through they had a lot of good systems in place and that they've managed to multi-layer the systems. It's a bigger challenge, obviously, in the ports.

We wish you good luck. I'm not sure whether there are any other quickies. No. I thank you very much for coming to join us today and for your presentation.

Mr. Pierre Primeau: We thank you.

[Translation]

The Chair: Thank you very much. Good work.

[English]

This meeting is adjourned.