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Conclusions

This year’s report represents a significant departure from those of previous years as it focuses on organized crime’s illicit activities and their negative impacts on Canadians, rather than on the broad based cultural-geographic grouping categories used in previous reports.This new approach better captures the changing dynamics of organized crime and the criminal marketplace.This is not to suggest, however, that the actors and groups behind organized criminal activity have lost any relevance in improving the understanding and response to the threat it represents to Canada. On the contrary, any understanding of organized crime would be incomplete without a comprehension of both the organized criminal activities and the actors behind them. It is important to remember that the actual threat of organized crime stems from criminal groups' capacity to enter into criminal activities, which generates significant profit for them.This year’s report reflects CISC’s continued commitment to bringing attention to the wide-reaching, though often subtle, adverse effects of organized crime on the lives of Canadians.

In many ways, the organized crime marketplace in Canada resembles elements of the legitimate one, with a diverse array of actors and groups competing for a share of various markets. Like entrepreneurs in the legitimate market, organized criminals will actively seek out and attempt to capitalize on opportunities that afford a potential for profit.This opportunism, which is a central driving force behind organized crime, explains why the threat is a continually evolving one; it is a characteristic feature of organized crime that it adapts to the conditions of the ever-changing environment they operate within.The exploitation of technological advances, notably the Internet, illustrates how organized crime adapt its methods and criminal enterprises to utilize new tools and mediums for criminal activity.

The economic forces of supply and demand that drive legitimate business are just as relevant in the illegitimate marketplace.Whether the demand may be for low-cost tobacco or counterfeit DVDs, illicit handguns or child pornography, illicit drugs or counterfeit payment cards, organized criminal elements will respond to and exploit any market for illegal commodities or services. Regardless of the criminal market, however, the common denominator is always exploitation for profit.This exploitation ultimately affects the entire country: its people and institutions; its economic prosperity; and its social fabric.

While violence is often used as a form of internal discipline and dispute resolution within the criminal marketplace, it is rarely confined to this domain, as violence between criminals often takes place within the community.When the community becomes the battleground between organized crime groups, ordinary Canadians and their families also become victims of gang violence. In some cases, violence or threats are deliberate tools to create and sustain an atmosphere of fear in a community, intended to discourage citizens from taking actions contrary to the criminal group’s interests.The illicit firearm market directly affects community safety, providing criminal groups with instruments of violence that can be just as deadly to innocent bystanders as to their intended targets.Violence and intimidation in Canadian communities are often directly related to the illicit drug market.Whether a cause or symptom of the illicit drug trade, violence and other criminal activity take their form in, for instance, residential break-ins and robberies by addicts,“turf ”wars between rival gangs, and discarded syringes littering the ground in community parks.

Most Canadians would have little difficulty recognizing these more observable consequences of organized crime in their communities. The effects of organized crime, however, are not limited simply to the obvious, and go well beyond outright violence and disturbance in our communities. Organized crime has a pervasive and far-reaching impact on Canadian society, manifested in ways that range from the dramatic and unmistakable to the subtle and less visible. In fact, the more pervasive effects of organized crime are often those that are the least apparent. These effects are often subtle or hidden for a very good reason: organized crime succeeds largely by operating out of public view, hoping to avoid the undue attention of their principal victims, the Canadian public, and the scrutiny of those charged to protect them, the Canadian law enforcement community.

The economic impact of organized crime is immense.The illicit drug trade has a considerable impact on a large number of addicts and users in this country, which results in an incalculable loss of productivity, and takes a heavy toll on health care resources.Attempts to conceal the proceeds of crime can result in untold sums of Canadian money leaving the legitimate economy or leaving the country entirely. Moreover, when the proceeds of criminal activity enter the legitimate economy through businesses linked to organized crime, legitimate Canadian companies are undermined as they are subjected to unfair competition. Product counterfeiting and piracy not only have a devastating impact on various sectors of the economy, but in some cases can expose Canadians to risk of serious injury or even death from the use of such hazardous counterfeit items as electronic devices, medicines, or vehicle parts.Though certainly less dramatic than violence in communities, identity theft is nevertheless a significant threat, producing losses to individual Canadians and businesses in the multi-millions of dollars every year.The victims of violence can also be hidden from public view.The commercial sexual exploitation of children or the trafficking of persons by organized crime inflicts unmeasurable costs on the lives of the victims and their families, and represents an affront to core Canadian values and basic human rights.

Whether apparent or hidden, the adverse effects of organized criminal activity touch all Canadians.This report has sought to highlight only some of the innumerable ways in which organized crime directly or indirectly affects Canada, its institutions, its citizens and communities. Organized crime is much more than specific actors and groups, but includes criminal markets, national and transnational infrastructure and networks, methods and tools, criminal norms and subcultures. In other words, organized crime needs to be understood in this context as it is central to the principle behind intelligence-led policing – a law enforcement strategy that aims to be truly preventative and forward looking. Intelligence-led policing, guided by the CISC community, is Canada’s best tool to combat organized crime.