Editorial

Why the Demands to Criminalize Membership in Organizations?

Following the wounding of a Montreal crime reporter in what appears to be a gang-related shooting, calls have been issued by both the federal attorney general and various provincial counterparts, including Manitoba's Attorney General Gord Macintosh, for amendments to the criminal code which would make it a crime to belong to specified organizations. This follows the fiasco of the Manitoba Warriors trial in which the recently-adopted "anti-gang" laws were to have been tested. In that case, all of the charges under that legislation, which made membership in a criminal "gang" a criminal offense in itself, were eventually withdrawn by the crown.

What is the purpose of legislation which criminalizes membership in an organization, whether that organization is named or unnamed in the Criminal Code? Are there not already sufficient laws against the criminal activities engaged in by the supposed targets of this legislation? In the case of the Manitoba Warriors, as well as previous cases involving biker gangs in Quebec, all of the accused were convicted of such criminal activities. What purpose, then, is served by adding the offense of membership in a criminal organization, especially when it has proved far easier to prove criminal activity than to prove membership in a gang?

Generally, when a piece of legislation makes no sense, it is because the declared purpose of the legislation does not coincide with its real intent. The Canadian Bill of Rights includes the right to freedom of association. As such, it is difficult for the Canadian government to outlaw membership in political organizations, as it did in the case of the Communist Party during the 1930s and 1940s. However, if the government can violate the Bill of Rights in the case of criminal organizations, such as the biker gangs and the Manitoba Warriors, then it is a small step from there to criminalizing membership in political organizations. The police assaults against the APEC protesters in Vancouver and the anti-OAS protesters in Windsor demonstrate that the Canadian government has no respect for the civil rights of its citizens. In fact, many organizers in Windsor were arrested and detained on the suspicion that they were involved in organizing legal protest activities. The revelations that CSIS routinely spies on trade unions and the growing oppositional political organizations is further evidence that the Canadian state views such organizations as a threat to national security. A law which could easily be amended to include such organizations as banned organizations would give the government a powerful weapon to attack and disrupt these protest movements of the people, charging people with mere membership in such organizations, despite the fact that they have committed no criminal offence.

This is the only light in which the calls for harsher anti-gang legislation make any sense - as a weapon against non-criminal organizations. The introduction of such laws to supposedly cope with a growing problem of criminal organizations is merely a smokescreen to generate public support for what is fundamentally an anti-democratic law which provides the Canadian government with powers normally associated with police states.