An increasing number of frustrated Canadians are demanding that our politicians toughen this nation's notoriously soft criminal justice system.

At least that's what I've found the past few days after an avalanche of e-mail and phone calls followed a column I wrote urging tougher laws, sentences and prisons. And especially for those laws applying to youth crime -- defined by the super-soft Youth Criminal Justice Act for those under 18.

I urged that anyone committing a crime with a deadly weapon receive a mandatory 10-year sentence. That's in addition to anything they receive for the crime itself.

Besides guns, that should include any lethal weapon such as knives, tire irons, baseball bats, martial arts devices, etc. [. . . . ]

Canada's prisons are creating sophisticated new criminal networks among the country's top gangsters -- dubbed "supergroups" -- that are making current policies on organized crime obsolete, warns a federal position paper on the future of the mob.

"Prisons today are a 'melting pot' and we, unintentionally, are facilitating the overt networking of some of the most capable predators in our society," says a paper prepared for the RCMP and Criminal Intelligence Service Canada, which was obtained by the National Post.

The paper warns that senior members of diverse crime groups -- including the Mafia, the Hells Angels, Asian Triads and Russian gangs -- are emerging from prison as amiable associates, pooling specialized knowledge and international connections to embark on increasingly threatening criminal ventures. [. . . . ]

Many terrorist organizations -- from the Colombian FARC to the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka -- have used the drug trade to get the money they need to finance their campaigns of extremist violence.

VANCOUVER - Counter-terrorism authorities are investigating an alleged Afghani heroin ring based in Vancouver to determine whether it has been involved in the financing of terrorism, the National Post has learned.

The eight-month probe has resulted in the arrests of four men in British Columbia and Ontario. Search warrants were executed last week at several B.C. homes and a business. Police seized almost $2-million worth of drugs and cash.

The heroin originated in Afghanistan, and police are now trying to unravel the alleged trafficking scheme to see if it was financing a designated terrorist organization. So far only narcotics charges have been laid. [. . . . ]

A Tamil gang member wanted for allegedly chopping off the hand of a rival in Montreal has been arrested in Toronto after six months on the run, the Immigration Task Force announced yesterday. Police raided a Toronto home on Thursday after receiving a CrimeStoppers tip and arrested Helmut Thavaselvarajah, 24. . . . Police are still searching for Colin Sellathurai, 31. The VVT and AK Kannan, gangs composed of Sri Lankan Tamils, have been battling in Canada since the 1990s. A recent RCMP intelligence report said they are now present in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Their illicit activities include extortion, home invasions, kidnapping, theft, drug trafficking, fraud, money laundering, gold smuggling and migrant smuggling, the RCMP report says. [. . . . ]

Pardon me while I yawn at the announcement by Dalton McGuinty's Liberal government that it will spend $9 million on school safety.

A new "safe schools action team" led by MPP Liz Sandals will conduct safety audits in schools across the province, Education Minister Gerard Kennedy said last week.

I recall five years ago former Tory Education Minister Janet Ecker brought in tough anti-bullying legislation in the Safe Schools Act. What happened to that?

That law gave teachers the right to suspend and principals the right to expel students who were violent, were dealing drugs or who carried weapons.

[. . . . ] The real problem with violence and bullying is that school boards refuse to acknowledge that they may have a problem. School staff who have concerns about violence are often ignored, and all too often it is the child who is bullied who is forced out of the classroom. [. . . . ]

THE VIOLENCE involving teens continues unabated. Police report a mugging outside a school, a swarming, the arrest of a 17-year-old for three bank robberies, and the robbery of a North York variety store owner and a phone card salesman by two masked and gloved teens with a shotgun -- all in 48 hours this weekend.

This follows a bloody spree last weekend when two teens were killed in Toronto and another in Oshawa. On Thursday, six teens were attacked by up to 50 peers outside a Scarborough Catholic high school. [. . . . ]

A former Mountie and UN peacekeeper has been named the first ombudsman of the Internet. . . . The appointment of Frank Fowlie a 47-year-old conflict-resolution specialist from Ottawa, was announced by ICANN, the global Internet regulatory body -- at a conference in South Africa.

[. . . . ] The RCMP had cellphone receipts for the area; investigators believed that an alleged crackhouse operator named Kevin Simmonds had been around the crime scene when Bedford was murdered. Simmonds was questioned but denied any knowledge of Bedford's demise. The police investigation stalled, and the case soon went cold.

Four years later, Simmonds walked into an elaborate police sting, one of a series of controversial but increasingly common undercover operations developed by the RCMP in B.C.

The police call it role playing: they pretend to be criminals. Twenty to 25 times a year, with little notice, selected undercover operators are sent into the criminal netherworld to make friendly contact with a murder suspect, and then lure them into a fantasy world of cash, booze and crime.

Each meeting, called a scenario, is predetermined and planned. The ultimate goal is to elicit from the suspect a murder confession. [. . . . ]

The young people responsible for the wave of swarmings and violent attacks that have left three GTA teens dead in two weeks are "out of control and accountable to no one," Toronto's police chief said last night. "Counting the bodies as we do is simply not adequate," Julian Fantino said last night after a community meeting at East York Collegiate Institute, the school Drew Stewart attended before his death at the hands of a youth mob.

"We have to find out why, at the most minor confrontation, weapons are brought out. Why there's this pack mentality," Fantino said, stressing that the large majority of kids are still hardworking, upstanding citizens who do not deserve to be "blackballed."

"But there's an element of young people that are, in fact, out of control and accountable to no one," Fantino said.

"And there is a distorted value system among them that says coming forward (to police or their parents) is not cool." [. . . . ]

MONTREAL (CP) - The 19-year-old who gutted the library of a Jewish school with a firebomb should serve two years in prison for his act of "terrorism," the Crown recommended Friday.

The firebombing last April garnered headlines around the world and prompted Prime Minister Paul Martin to call it "cowardly and racist." It came on the heels of several anti-Semitic incidents in the Toronto area. [. . . . ]

[. . . . ] Casual, non-parental observers might assume that if Ottawa is preparing to spend billions on child care, then it must be a good thing for children. Eberstadt musters a deluge of facts, studies, observations and plain common sense to demolish that notion. While her focus may be American data, her results are fully applicable to Canada.

To begin, child care leads to a much greater incidence of illness in children and, in particular, ear infections. Statistical studies also show that children placed in daycare tend to be more aggressive and less happy. Other work shows that maternal attachment is very important for young children and that this is weakened by daycare use.

[. . . . ] From daycare, Eberstadt broadens her view to consider the farther-ranging effects of the erosion of at-home parenting. Child obesity, teen sex, the growth of sexually transmitted disease, the use of behavioural drugs to make children more manageable -- are all laid at the feet of parents who are no longer there for their children.

[. . . . She] does ask the uncomfortable question of whether we should deliberately pursue new policies that further disrupt traditional family life given how important the home is to children. Surely this should be the focus of any national daycare debate. If we really care about children, what will more child care mean? [. . . . ]