A day after a Montreal police officer shot a suspect in a stolen vehicle, senior officers told MPs that organized crime groups are recruiting young people as young as 15 in the city to steal cars and send them abroad.
In some cases, young people are tortured if something goes wrong, according to Yannick Desmarais, commander of the Montreal Police Service (SPVM).
“For us, we see these young people from 15 to 25 years old, and we have seen young people from Montreal [go] to Toronto to steal cars, and in Toronto they even torture them if they don’t succeed. That’s why we think it’s very important to work as a team,” Desmarais told the House Homeland Security and Public Safety Committee on Thursday.
The committee’s deputies are studying the “growing problem of car thefts in Canada” and invited officials from the SPVM, the Sûreté du Québec (SQ), the Port Authority of Montreal and other witnesses to testify.
The SPVM commander stated that there is a link between vehicle theft and armed violence, stressing that it is not a victimless crime.
“We know that the people who participate regularly, when they are caught, have firearms. Our investigations and intelligence are showing that much of the money for firearms comes from vehicle theft operations,” he said, adding that the weapons are used in violent crimes.
Yannick Desmarais, commander of the Montreal Police Service (SPVM), speaks with members of the House Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security about the growing problem of car thefts on Thursday, April 18, 2024. (Source: Chamber of Deputies) the Commons)
While police are trying to target car thieves, what they’re really hoping to catch are the exporters responsible for shipping stolen vehicles overseas.
“Those who have contacts with the people on the ground. They are the ones who pull the strings. They are the ones who hire and recruit the recruits,” said Michel Patenaude, chief inspector of the SQ. “I think if we really want to have an impact and we really want to dismantle and reduce this crisis, we really have to go to the people who are pulling the strings and focus on the networks that export and transport and that have contacts with people abroad.”
Stolen cars instead of refrigerators inside containers
Earlier this month, nearly 600 stolen vehicles were recovered at the Port of Montreal after 400 shipping containers were searched in a joint operation by the SPVM, the Canada Border Services Agency and other partners. Most of the cars were from the Toronto area.
Between mid-December and late March, police inspected about 400 shipping containers at the Port of Montreal and found nearly 600 stolen vehicles, most of them in the Toronto area. A shipping container is loaded onto a container ship in the Port of Montreal on Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2023. (Christinne Muschi, The Canadian Press)
A port authority official told the committee that sometimes what’s on the manifest doesn’t match what’s inside. Félixpier Bergeron, director of port security and business continuity, gave as an example the manifesto that described refrigerators in the containers when in reality they contained stolen cars.
“There is no one who signs saying what is in the container really. It is all that has been presented on paper. It is fraud. But how is fraud detected? It is something that should perhaps be reviewed in the regulations for the surrender about the things that are in the container,” he said.
The port authority is open to adding new technologies to track contraband, such as X-ray machines to see what’s inside, but said there are health considerations that need to be studied.
“It exists in other parts of the world, but in those places they don’t have the same commitment to human life that we have in Canada,” he said.
Currently, container searches by port authorities take time, but Bergeron said he is open to new solutions.
“It takes four to five minutes to scan each container,” he said. “So if we have 2,000 trucks a day coming into the port in four minutes, it doesn’t work.”