[. . . . ] "We knew that many of our organized crime figures -- people with records, people without records but serious criminals – were looking to move to Canada,” says Boucher [former Royal Hong Kong Police Chief Detective Inspector Sandy Boucher].

But while Canadian authorities are supposed to keep those kinds of people out, in Hong Kong, something appeared to be going very wrong. “Some applied (for visas) and were turned back, some applied and got in,” says Boucher. “It was no secret.”

One such immigrant was Lee Chau Ping, a notorious drug trafficker who is known as the Ice Queen. In 1992, after police raided her labs and one of her safe houses, the Ice Queen got on a plane headed for Canada. Not thinking that the Canadian government would let her stay, Boucher assumed the Ice Queen had headed oversees to wait for the heat on her gang to die down a little. So he was shocked when an RCMP officer told him she had been granted landed immigrant status.

“I said, ‘It can’t be – she’s got a criminal record. I know she’s known to Canadian authorities.’”

But apparently, Lee Chau Ping – who posed as a businesswoman ready to invest $170,000 in a Chicken Delight franchise in a tiny town in northern Saskatchewan – had slipped under the radar. And Brian McAdam, the immigration control officer at the High Commission in Hong Kong, soon learned that other criminals had too.

“I discovered that these Triad people (members of secret Chinese organized crime fraternities that have ties to members of the Hong Kong business community) were regulars at getting visas to visit their families or go on holidays as the case may be, and yet clearly on the file was intelligence information identifying who they were.”

[. . . . There is more here on McAdam and Garry Clement] McAdam and Clement set out for the answers. Immediately, they found obvious signs of corruption: complaints from a Chinese couple that someone at the embassy had offered to expedite their visa application in exchange for $10,000; fake immigration stamps and a fake visa receipt. In one incident, McAdam actually saw the criminal records of Triad members literally drop off their files after he pulled them up on the computer.

[. . . .] The source told W-FIVE he was never aware of the exact price for a Canadian visa, but he estimated the entry cost for a Triad member’s family would be in the neighbourhood of $500,000 HK. And he said the corruption was far and wide within the embassy.

“Without help from insiders it won’t work. … It takes more than one person in the High Commission to get the job done, not just one single person – there must be big, big scandal behind it all.”

In 1992, the Department of Foreign Affairs sent over a computer expert from Ottawa to probe the lapses. The top-secret report prepared by that expert, David Balser, confirmed the existence of some alarming security breaches at the mission, including the fact that unauthorized staff had access to the computer system where visas could be approved with a check mark and criminal records could be scrubbed clean.

But though the report revealed some major problems, it went virtually unnoticed. In 1995, Liberal [and former Conservative] MP David Kilgour wrote a letter to then-prime minister Jean Chretien warning of the “highly irresponsible and/or illegal practices” at the High Commission and asking for a full public inquiry. It was never acknowledged.

Then, in 1996, RCMP Corporal Robert Read was assigned to review the Hong Kong file. And while he too thought there were clear problems that needed to be investigated, he says he was urged by his superiors to turn a blind eye.

[. . . .] And Read wasn’t the only member of the RCMP to be shut down by the force. In 1993, Staff Sergeant Jim Puchniak requested permission to go to Hong Kong to conduct a full investigation, but he was told by the RCMP liason officer at the mission, Inspector Gary Lagamodiere, that doing so would upset the High Commissioner.

[. . . .] While the report clearly vindicated Read, the RCMP has refused to reinstate him – a decision he is fighting in Federal Court. But because he never got the investigation he wanted into the Canadian High Commission in Hong Kong, questions about the depth of the corruption and political interference there will probably never be answered. Both John Higgenbotham, the Canadian High Commissioner in Hong Kong from 1989 to 1994, and RCMP Superintendent Giuliano Zaccardelli – people who may be able to lend some perspective to the unanswered questions -- refused to be interviewed by W-FIVE.

But regardless of who was responsible, for retired RCMP superintendent Garry Clement, it all comes down to one thing.

“Did we drop the ball? I have to take as much credit – I was a senior officer in the RCMP. … I don’t think we should try to defend it. The bottom line is, we dropped the ball in this investigation.”

1. Whistleblower Protection

2. Whistleblowers, Check out Qui Tam and the Qui Tam Information Center

3. Update: Does the Slush Fund Government Really Want Effective Whistleblower Legislation?

4. Does the Slush Fund Government Really Want Effective Whistleblower Legislation?

Are Canadians too complacent about the risk of a terrorist strike at home?

Is the $10-billion spent each year by Western nations for intelligence gathering sufficient to fight the War on Terror? When can we begin to breathe easy again? Tune in this Sunday and join special guests James Woolsey, Director of the CIA under US President Bill Clinton; Dale Watson, the former FBI Executive Assistant Director for Counter-Terrorism; and Stewart Bell, investigative reporter for the National Post and author of a new book on Canada's terrorist connection: Cold Terror.

[. . . .] No, it wasn't idyllic [1950's Toronto]. There was some violent crime, but absolutely nothing like the stuff that goes on in today's Toronto.

[. . . .] And the laws of the land were much tougher. A conviction for murder carried the death penalty. Armed robbers went off to prison for 10 or more years -- and mostly with no early parole. You did the crime, you did the time.

And Toronto's streets were devoid of panhandlers, streetwalkers and drug pushers. We had such things as the vagrancy laws. The police ran you in if you were out there with no visible means of support.

Today, capital punishment doesn't exist, for even the most vile and ruthless premeditated murders. Liberal PM Pierre Trudeau led the charge in the mid-1970s to get rid of it via a very suspect "free vote" in the Commons which won by a mere six-vote margin. And the vagrancy laws were killed by his later Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Since then, we've had such sentence-slashing devices as early parole, mandatory supervision and highly lenient special legislation for so-called young offenders. And many of the judges appointed by our political leaders have been more social workers than enforcers of the criminal justice system.

This is combined with almost 40 years of a wide-open, ridiculously soft immigration system introduced by the Liberals in 1965 to attract "the immigrant vote."

So, it's little wonder that criminals, and now terrorists, find Canada such an attractive destination to set up shop.

[. . . .] But in recent months I've noticed the Canadian worm is turning.

For instance, I suggested in a recent column that those using a lethal weapon -- gun, knife, club, iron bar, etc. -- in committing a crime should be given a mandatory 10-year sentence. And added to the sentenced for the crime itself.

[. . . .] I'd like to hear from readers about some of their own experiences with and views about today's crime threats -- and what should be done. So don't hesitate to contact me at my e-mail: bob.macdonald@ tor.sunpub.com.

The circumstances left no room for smugness. Canada might have been spared the type of attack that in 10 synchronized blasts transformed Madrid into a cauldron of despair and political anger over the past two weeks. We might even have our status as non-members in the so-called "coalition of the willing" to thank for that mercy, as some critics of the war have suggested. . . .

[. . . . ] France, once the whipping boy of U.S. conservatives for its early opposition to invasion, announced it was investigating threats by Islamic militants, possibly made in response to its legislation banning religious headgear in schools. "A heavy offensive will take place on the lands of the allies of Satan," said one letter sent to Le Parisien newspaper. "We are going to plunge France into terror and remorse." In Germany, police squads were dispatched to guard a major computer trade fair in Hanover, while in Britain undercover police officers jacked up surveillance on the London Underground, searching passengers and reminding them to watch for suspicious-looking packages.

[. . . . ] Alan Bell, a Toronto-based security consultant who monitors the terrorist threat in Canada, agrees that the danger is real, though he fears that most Canadians are unaware of its full extent. That's partly due to Ottawa's policy of secrecy, he says; for every CSIS or RCMP brief alleging terrorist activity on Canadian soil, there has been denial or reassurance by senior politicians. "These things get fobbed off as fiction," says Bell. "But the conversations I have with people who know these sorts of things suggest we've had some lucky escapes."

Would that Spain had shared our good fortune -- or the benefit of hindsight. As the investigation into the train bombings progressed last week, authorities charged three Moroccans with 190 counts of murder and two Indians with collaborating with a terrorist organization. Among the accused was one man with links to al-Qaeda whose whereabouts Spanish police knew before the blast. According to published reports in Barcelona, Moroccan authorities warned their Spanish counterparts in 2003 that Jamal Zougam, a phone salesman arrested two days after the bombings, was on his way back to Spain and that he was considered to be a "very active terrorist."