Surrey crime: feds tout new money, collaboration with community

Surrey has been the site of more than 30 shootings since January, and residents have demanded government at all levels take action.

Last week, Mayor Linda Hepner offered tough talk about those involved with the shootings — "I want to call them punks," she said — saying that tougher sentences and more enforcement was the solution.

B.C. Public Safety Minister Mike Morris also trumpeted enforcement, quoted as saying, "We're going to put these guys in jail."

So what does the federal government have to offer?

On The Coast host Stephen Quinn spoke with Ralph Goodale, Canada's Minister of Public Safety for answers to that question.

• Surrey shootings: RCMP announce five arrests
• Is Surrey growing too fast?
• Surrey shootings: Mayor Linda Hepner 'angry' about recent violence

What is the federal government specifically doing on the ground in the community of Surrey to try and bring this gun violence to an end?

I am prepared to engage in that dialogue, that ongoing community effort to think about solutions. One of the things the Government of Canada will be bringing to the table is additional funding for fighting guns and gangs.

There is already, over a five-year-period, a $3.5 million investment being made, but in our campaign, we committed to $100 million on an annual basis to provinces and municipalities across the country to increase the effort we can all make together to fight guns and gangs and drugs.

Obviously, the RCMP is already intensely involved, working on better access to surveillance cameras in the community, but it has to be a community effort.

It does have to involve communities being prepared on a regular basis to cooperate with law enforcement and be part of the solution.

What is the federal government doing towards addressing the underlying causes, the systemic causes of the violence in the streets?

The federal government has resources available for crime prevention strategies at a local level, for improving the ability to strengthen communities and head off crime before it happens.

Having police officers more visible in the community is part of that. Surrey, a year ago, asked for 100 new officers, 93 of those have arrived. There are seven more to come, but they will arrive this spring.

Police tell us that what is going on is drug crime, that we have rival groups competing for turf on which to sell their drugs. How does Canada's drug policy contribute to this problem?

The issues are often of smuggling of contraband into the country. We put some extra resources into the budget just a couple of weeks ago to improve the ability of the Canada Border Services Agency to be more effective in reducing the flow into the country of illegal, imported drugs.

We are also taking an initiative in regards to marijuana that will ultimately involve the legalization of marijuana, trying to take the whole profit element out of the hands of organized crime.

The present regime with respect to marijuana has obviously failed and failed miserably because Canadian teenagers are among the heaviest users of marijuana in the Western world.

Yet there has been no timeline set by the federal government. When will those changes come?

Municipalities and provinces want to be involved in how this is structured and how this is done. They want it done right and they want to be engaged in doing it right.

That task force involving the provinces and municipalities will be announced very shortly. We'll have a detailed announcement coming in the next several weeks.

The police have singled out kids from the South Asian community. What are you doing to ensure the youth born into strong immigrant communities have a bright future and a sense of place in broader Canadian society?

New Canadians and old Canadians, providing them with a sense of hope, providing them with a sense of opportunity, providing them with constructive places to go and things to do and people to see, giving them a life that's worth living is a pretty fundamental dimension of what the Liberal Party ran on in the last election.

I think we've made a very good start, there's obviously a very long way to go, but I think we're turning the corner on that sense of disappointment and despair that existed under the previous government.

With files from On The Coast

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.