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Ontario: Lawmakers Target Child Porn, Pot Growers.
By admin | July 8, 2004
By Doug Schmidt
Can West News Service.
New efforts to combat child porn and marijuana grow houses were among the intiatives announced Monday by two of Ontario’s top lawmakers to a gathering of chiefs.
Another million dollars is being injected by the province into the fight against child pornography on the Internet, and an “action group” is being set up to combat the “clear and present danger” represented by marijuana grow operations, Community Safety and Security Minister Monte Kwinter said.
The extra anti-child-porn money will pay for five additional officers for the Ontario Provincial Police’s Project P task force, and it comes in addition to $1.4 million in new funding recently announced by the Ontario government, Kwinter said.
Speaking at the opening of the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police annual conference, Kwinter said smaller police forces, in particular, will benefit from the bolstered fight against the hugely profitable child porn industry.
Adding his voice to the same forum a few hours later, Attorney General Michael Bryant said the provincial government has put Internet service providers on notice that they “are going to be held criminally liable” if they don’t assist in halting the Web-based traffic in child porn.
Kwinter also used the occassion- speaking to the top brass representing most police services in Ontario- to announce the province’s response to the chief’s recent “Green Tide” report, which highlighted the threat of public saftey of what has become Ontario’s No. 2 crop, hydroponic marijuana.
A task force comprising government, police and other agencies- including bankers, insurers and electricity providers- is being set up to “co-ordinate action plans” targeting the pot “cancer that is spreading in our neighbourhoods.”
Just last week, Windsor’s drug squad shut down six sophisticated marijuana growing operations in a single day, seizing pot with an estimated street value of $5.5 million and charging seven people with trafficking and other drug offences.
Kwinter, meanwhile, said new legislation he introduced last week, making it mandatory for hospitals to report any gunshot wounds they treat, would make Ontario the first province in Canada to do so.
The minister later told reporters he found it odd that the law requires auto body shops to report gunshot holes in vehicles but hospitals are not similarily required to report gunshot holes in people.
On the controversial police issue of racial profiling, Kwinter said, “some individual officers may act inappropriately…(but) there’s no place for it in Ontario.”
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