While agents from U.S. Fish and Wildlife lured a smuggler to a storage facility in New York’s Bronx neighbourhood with the promise of $400,000 worth of illegal rhino horns as part of a sting operation, Sheldon Jordan readied his team to raid the man’s warehouse in Canada.
The smuggling ring’s Richmond, B.C., headquarters was posing as an antique auction house, where police found piles of illegal ivory, rhino horns and coral. Animal parts were stored next to 50,000 tablets of ecstasy, bags of marijuana and cocaine.
Wildlife trafficking is a global phenomenon. Most people think of shark fins and elephant tusks on black markets in East Asia, but Jordan, director general of wildlife enforcement at Environment Canada, says it’s much closer to home. He’s is in charge of rooting it out across the country.
Jordan recovered a laptop during the sting that mapped out an illegal network of suppliers and buyers stretching across borders, proof of Canada’s connection to a global animal trafficking market that’s also tied to guns and drugs.
Black market prices have skyrocketed to meet growing demand in recent years, leading to a surge in trafficking of everything from exotic timber to the scaly pangolin, the world’s most poached animal. Conservative estimates value the industry at US$91 billion annually.
With lax international regulation and the promise of huge profits, criminal networks have been quick to capitalize.
“Animals and plants are just another low-risk, high-reward commodity for transnational organized crime” explains kelvin Alie, executive vice president of the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
While the world focuses on the usual suspects in Africa and Asia, Canada has quietly become both a destination and a source country. Turtles, lizards and birds are smuggled here for collectors. Polar bear hides and narwhal tusks, prized as trophies, and bear gall bladders and wild ginseng valued for medicinal purposes, are illegally exported.
Often seen as victimless, wildlife crime struggles to capture the attention it deserves.
Beyond the destruction of ecosystems and devastation of animal populations, it can spark violence and unrest, creating the conditions for poverty, hunger and draught, leading to human casualties, explains Jordan.
Media — and the U.S. State Department — tend to pay attention to environmental crime only when it’s connected to terrorism. The Lord’s Resistance Army in the Congo trades ivory for arms and al-Shabbab’s insurgency in Somalia is financed partly by illegal coal mining.
Alie says the connection to terrorism is overblown. Instead, governments should focus on criminals and corruption to dismantle the trading networks that breed violent crime.
That is exactly what Environment Canada is doing with a pilot project launched last year to crack down on the polar bear trade.
Using microchips to track animals, enforcement officers follow the supply chain to ensure polar bears are hunted and purchased legally. Jordan hopes to share this tactic and technology with other nations to help safeguard their animal populations.
“This is a problem that grew very quickly, like a grass fire,” says Jordan.
He says Canadians need to understand that wildlife trafficking isn’t confined to faraway jungles. It’s big business for major criminal networks and it’s happening right here in Canada.
http://o.canada.com/life/global-voices-canada-becoming-a-wildlife-trafficking-zone
Nov. 7, 2017 "A neighborly approach": Today I found this article by Marc and Craig Kielburger in the Edmonton Journal:
After fleeing Syria to settle in Winnipeg early this year, Mannan Hamrasho was beaten and robbed, his children bullied at school, and his new home tagged with racist graffiti.
A neighbour, James Favel, got word of the incidents. He rushed over with a gift basket of treats and colouring books for the children, and the promise of a better Canadian welcome.
The Hamrasho family is now under the protective care of Favel’s Bear Clan Patrol, a community organization taking the neighbourhood watch to a new level.
Following our neighbours to the south, Canadian neighbourhood watch groups started forming in the 1970s as a means of crime prevention. Designated residents called police when they spotted vandals or thieves. Today, crime rates are falling on average — 29 per cent lower than a decade ago — so you might assume the need for watch groups would dwindle.
Meanwhile, other social challenges are increasing: an aging population, more immigrants and refugees acclimating to new culture, and youth and family homelessness.
Today, watch groups that form new mandates can be even more neighbourly.
The Bear Clan Patrol was founded in 1992 to address violence against Indigenous women in Winnipeg’s North End, an at-risk neighbourhood. Since 2015, Favel and others evolved the patrol mandate.
The group is now a welcome wagon, resource service, cleanup crew, conflict mediator and youth organization all in one. Their most recent event was an open house for new Canadians, including the Hamrasho family.
“On patrol, we’re like goodwill ambassadors. We want to get back that feeling of living together as a village,” says Favel, executive director of the Bear Clan Patrol.
When patrollers encounter someone in need — any need — they act as a link to community resources. Favel tells us they’ve connected homeless individuals with housing and employment services, addicts with rehab facilities, and even helped citizens get enumerated to vote.
Along their routes, Bear Clan members pick up trash, particularly used drug paraphernalia. Since this past spring, Favel estimates his teams have collected more than 3,000 discarded needles.
All of the patrollers are volunteers who receive instruction in physical and mental health first aid. A few are also trained in non-violent conflict resolution. A local paramedic service was so impressed with Bear Clan’s work it donated a defibrillator — and the time to teach members how to use it.
Youth under 18 cannot join Bear Clan’s evening patrols for safety reasons, so the organization runs “mock patrols” for young people. These daylight excursions with elder Bear Clan volunteers provide lessons in street proofing and drug awareness, and give youth a chance to become part of the fabric of their community.
“I have 14-year-olds who want to spend their evenings with Bear Clan when they turn 18, instead of going to bars,” says Favel.
Your community may not face the same intense challenges the Bear Clan handles in Winnipeg. Still, there are many ways for a creative neighbourhood watch group to make a difference — shovelling snow for elderly neighbours, delivering meals to exhausted new parents, or welcoming an immigrant family.
That’s what watching out for each other really looks like.
My opinion: This reminds me of the TV show Riverdale where there are teens patrolling.
Also it was done of Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show where Buffy and her friends are patrolling to kill vampires.
Safe Walk: That reminds me of MacEwan where there is a Safe Walk. Two people at a time wait with students at bus stops and LRT stations.
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