Pubdate: Wed, 09 Jun 2004 Source: Surrey Now (CN BC) Copyright: 2004 Lower Mainland Publishing Group Inc., A Canwest Company Contact: http://www.thenownewspaper.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1462 Author: Tom Zytaruk Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mjcn.htm (Cannabis - Canada) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/areas/British+Columbia (British Columbia, Canada) INDO-CANADIAN CRIME A UNIQUELY B.C. PROBLEM Take it up with the feds, Geoff Plant says. Local voters should make tougher laws a federal election issue, B.C.'s attorney general advises. "I can't imagine a better time to send a message about the Criminal Code and whether it's working than right in the middle of a federal election campaign," Plant said, "where there's a whole bunch of people who want to go take a message to Ottawa on behalf of the people of British Columbia." Plant, B.C. Solicitor General Rich Coleman and seven other Liberal MLAs met yesterday with 25 leaders of the Lower Mainland's Sikh community in Newton to discuss Indo-Canadian gang violence. Over the past 10 years, more than 50 young Indo-Canadian men in Greater Vancouver have been killed over drug trade turf. "No one thinks that there is a magic wand that one person can wave and make the problem go away," Plant said. The meeting was closed to the press. Asked why, provincial government spokesman Kelly Gleason replied, "You either have people who are media shy or other people who want to make the media show, and we want to make sure they have as open and frank a discussion as possible. It's really as simple as that." After the meeting, Plant told reporters that the participants had "a good discussion about the work that we all need to do to persuade the federal government that the penalties for grow-ops need to be toughened up." Randip S. Sarai, with Virsa (Sikh Alliance Against Youth Violence), was one of the participants. He noted that Greater Vancouver's problem with Indo-Canadian youth violence is not shared by other big cities. "It's not a cultural problem, and we're trying to figure out why this problem is so epidemic here ... and not across Canada or anywhere else." B.C.'s flourishing marijuana industry is "probably one of the huge causes of this problem," he added. - --- MAP posted-by: Thunder