Thursday 5 May 2005

CITY OF TORONTO

The Chair: I would now invite our next presenter, Mr. Michael Del Grande, councillor for the city of Toronto. Mr. Del Grande, I remind you that you have 15 minutes in which to present to us. Please begin.

Mr. Michael Del Grande: Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. If the police are at the ground level with respect to this problem, I'm at the street level: first-hand knowledge, first-hand experience.

I never had to carry my marijuana binder for properties that have been busted. I've got about 60 here that are under suspicion. I've provided for the committee, in order to speed up the time, some of the tools that I feel the city of Toronto needs.

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Certainly with Bill 128 talking about the proceeds going to the province doesn't help the city very much when we talk about resourcing. They should be going back to the city police forces to undertake the activity. There is no established marijuana grow squad per se that's dedicated totally to marijuana grow-ops, because they're also involved in sexual assaults and gun calls. So there isn't a specific unit that does that.

Part of the other issue is that the intelligence isn't really going anywhere to determine the organized crime ring that's involved. A lot of farmers have been caught. We don't know who sponsored them. We can't connect the dots, from my vantage point. The police only let me know when there is a bust and how many plants, and I put out a release in the immediate neighbourhood to let people know. I sign the property. I stretch the tools we have in an ongoing battle.

What's frustrating for me is that when you get honest people saying, "You know what? The police aren't responding fast enough. At a thousand dollars a plant, maybe I'll put 10 or 20 on the window sill, because it's easy money," we have failed. When we have good people talking about joining the crime rather than preventing the crime, we have failed. The problem is, it's out of control. I have 170 streets. I've had 45 busts to date, which comprises about 26% of my streets, and they're basically just the tip of the iceberg.

There was some commentary about identifying etc. People are afraid, and justifiably so. I received death threats against my family, that there were contract hits against my children. I've used the comparison: Are we really that much different than Colombia, where we're talking about big money and the honest politicians are threatened and the not-so-honest politicians are bought? We think that's beyond us, but that's not very far. This is a very significant society problem. We have failed. I always like to say politicians are measured by the words and the speeches they make, but leaders are measured by their actions. We need a lot more leaders and we need a lot more leadership in this area.

I personally believe the crux of the matter is with the landlords. I think that's where a lot of focus needs to be done. Landlords do have the right under the Landlord and Tenant Act to go and inspect their properties. They just shouldn't be taking 12 cheques and saying, "Thank you very much." The bad guys know they shouldn't have any properties in their name. The home should be rented; the vehicles they use are leased. So when there is forfeiture, it's not their property that's being forfeited. That's a very significant situation.

To have 1,000 police officers at 50 cents to the dollar doesn't really say much to me, because I don't think anybody's taking up that offer. Toronto doesn't have the money to do that. I would rather see you put 500 police officers, at $1, dedicated to the labour-intensive work that's required by police forces in this area. At least that way we're doing something, but just to talk about 50-cent police officers, as far as I know, with our budgets etc. in the city of Toronto, just doesn't cut it.

I'll end it there and I'll be open for questions, which I think would be more productive.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Del Grande. We have about 10 minutes to distribute evenly, and we'll start with the NDP side.

Mr. Kormos: Thank you, sir. I'm interested in your reference, under ideas and recommendations, "Protect our officers' safety by not forcing municipalities to perform the inspections," because this started to come to the surface yesterday. We had folks here from Metro Toronto or the city of Toronto bylaws department, among others -- lawyers -- who made a very good presentation, a very thorough one, but who also, when I talked to them afterwards, indicated that they weren't part of the development of the bill, which was frustrating.

Mr. Del Grande: Correct.

Mr. Kormos: I think they could have provided insights in the first instance.

I'm looking at what will become subsection 1(1.1) of the Building Code Act, and that's "An inspector shall" perform a warrantless search of a property when "the chief building official has been notified by a police force," presumably not even the police force of that municipality necessarily, "that the building contains a marijuana grow-operation."

We've got professional firefighters making a presentation today. We had police telling us yesterday that they're concerned about not having the gloves, the boots, the coveralls, to go into a high-mould, high-toxic place, yet a building inspector "shall ... when notified by a police force"; in other words, without a warrant -- and that's not the crux of it -- but "shall." The police can go without a warrant, so they're using the building inspector like a canary in the mine. I'm concerned that that's mandatory rather than discretionary, because it seems to me the building inspector doesn't have the power to say, "Whoa, sorry guys, you bust that place first." I think that's what the intent probably is, but that's not what the statute says.

Mr. Del Grande: Stupidly enough, I've been in some of these grow-ops. I've been to one that had a major fire. That concerns a lot of people, because the amount of fire risk is much greater in these homes. The place does have a smell, a stringent odour to it etc. The mould is there. I had a report given to me by an outfit that did some preliminary work for the York police force about the types of toxic mould that are in there and it's not good stuff. By the way, when this stuff is vented, it vents to the neighbours as well. So, you know, we talk about kids having asthma etc. I've been in situations where the houses have been painted over. A lot of new immigrants who come in, they pile them in here with young kids etc. There's an obligation to look after these people.

To me, when you see the police going in with their spacesuits, and now you want our guys to go in -- is it really necessary for our guys to go in? The point is, the police have said that that's what it is, and they know. Do we have to say each time, "Well, our inspector needs to go in"? Can't we work co-operatively with other resources? If the police say, "This is a grow-op. There are 500 plants in here," we know what the consequences of that are. Why does the inspector have to go in? We should accept the police report at face value. It's a grow-op and it has these particular features. It has mould, it has electrical problems, it has this, it has that, etc. It's after the fact but, again, we need spacesuits for our guys as well.

The Chair: We'll now move to the government side.

Mrs. Sandals: Thank you, Mr. Del Grande. I want to follow up on the comments you just made, because I'm a bit mystified. If the outcome of all this is issuing an order which has to do with, I'm presuming, quite specific repairs that need to be made to a building, why would we think the police were qualified to make orders about requirements and repairs to electrical systems, how to repair structure, health requirements around ensuring that mould is no longer an issue? I'm wondering why the police, we would assume, would be qualified to make those judgments. I would have thought they would want the particular building officials inspecting the building and making those judgments.

Mr. Del Grande: Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. When one of these homes is busted, comparable to the other 45 that have been busted to date in my ward, we know there are marijuana plants. We know the structural changes they've made. They've broken into the concrete wall to get to the hydro. We know that walls have been built etc. We know the effect of the toxic mould that's in there. We know these things. What I'm saying is that we should take the position that when the police have said, "We've busted a home that has 500 plants," we know all the symptoms of that home, and all the homes they go after. We know that. We don't need to rediscover that. So what I'm saying is, if the police have said that they've busted a home with 500 plants, we know what the typical type of operation is. We know they've made structural changes; we know they've done all these things.

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If you want a building inspector to go in -- I've used the tools and I've stretched the tools. I've taken the position and I've told our MLS people to put up a notice saying that there's an order on this building and that we expect an engineering and an environmental engineering study before we believe that this building is safe. We've put the onus on the homeowner. That's what we've done.

Now, because of the problems with this and that, we've changed the order so that there can be something registered on title, so that when a lawyer checks this property when somebody wants to buy it, they're going to be tipped off that they should look at what this order's about and what's going on here. That's the only thing that we've done; that's the only thing that I know that's been proactive.

I want to assure people that when they buy a house in ward 39, they're buying a property that they're alerted to. If the homeowner does those things and has all those studies -- it's not cheap -- which means they have to clean up that stuff, then the building inspector goes in to verify that the order has been completed.

Mr. Klees: With regard to the number of reports where there's a suspicion that there may be a grow-op, how long does it typically take from the time that is reported until that house or property is visited, to your knowledge?

Mr. Del Grande: Anywhere from three months to a year. We had one where the residents were really upset. We had a fire at 75 Rainier. It was reported in November. I went to talk to the people who were concerned about it. It was a house next door. It didn't have all the typical signs one would have, but it had some of the signs. We had 15 fire trucks respond to that house with all kinds of other resources, police etc. That happened, I think, at the end of January or the beginning of February. The fire occurred, but everybody started complaining, "We phoned the police in November. We're into February. Why didn't the police do anything about it?"

I try to explain to people that it's a question of resources. It's not that the police don't want to go; it's just that you join the pecking order. It's very time-consuming to get the warrant, to do the surveillance, to do all these types of things. It is manpower-intensive.

The sad problem is that for the bad guys, at the end of the day, it's a write-off. They don't go to jail; they don't pay any fines. No wonder this thing has mushroomed. There are no deterrents here.

Mr. Klees: Councillor, the government's response to that is that they've made an announcement about 1,000 police officers to be shared 50-50 between the municipality and the government. That promise has been out there for months. Why isn't something happening? Why aren't those 1,000 police officers on the street?

Mr. Del Grande: The city of Toronto, first of all, can't afford it, so it's off the table.

Mr. Klees: So in other words, this promise that this government is making is absolutely empty; is that right? Because you can't afford to match the 50-50.

Mr. Del Grande: That's the problem for the city of Toronto.

Mr. Klees: So if the government were serious about this, in this coming budget, which is just a few days away, would it make sense for this government -- if in fact they've gone to the trouble of introducing legislation and they see this as a serious concern -- to carve out some of that money and say, "Look, we're going to put special squads into police forces across this province. We'll fund 100% of that, and we'll work in co-operation with municipalities"? Does that make sense?

Mr. Del Grande: I would even be happy if we got 500 OPP officers who would provide assistance to the city of Toronto to help dismantle these, and to help connect the dots. Part of the problem is that we're not connecting the dots. We're busting these houses with nobody in there, so there are no arrests being made.

Mr. Klees: Speaking of busting, under this legislation, as Mr. Kormos pointed out, the first person into a grow-op operation will be an inspector. How responsible is that?

Mr. Del Grande: As I've pointed out, this is a new phenomenon. I've watched some of the debates when I've flicked on the channel, and what bothers me is that everybody says, "It's a good first step." You know what? I'm not interested in good first steps; I'm interested in solid steps. Is this --

The Chair: We'll have to leave it there. I thank you, Mr. Del Grande, for your presentation.