Why is Montreal a center for exporting stolen cars?

Content of the article

Between mid-December and the end of March, police searched nearly 400 shipping containers at the Port of Montreal and found nearly 600 stolen vehicles, most of them from the Toronto area.

The operation revealed that Canada's second largest port has become a major transportation hub for the export of stolen vehicles. According to the police, this is due to the strategic location of the port and the large volume of containers. Authorities say they are doing everything possible to curb the epidemic of car theft, but experts say limited jurisdiction, staff shortages and organized crime are obstacles.

Content of the article

Content of the article

“It's a very large port,” said Brian Gast, vice president of investigative services at Equite, an anti-crime organization made up of insurance companies. With rail and highway links to the Greater Toronto Area, where many vehicles are stolen, the Port of Montreal is “conveniently located” for criminals.

An Ontario Provincial Police investigator said for more than 20 years, Gast would pack stolen vehicles into shipping containers in the Toronto area, with false documents, including customs declarations showing the cargo was legitimate, and then be transported to the port by rail or truck.

Gast's organization took part in Project Vector, a project run by the Ontario Provincial Police at the port, which recovered 598 stolen vehicles between December and March.

In addition to its location, a large volume of goods passing through the port is used by criminals. About 1.7 million containers transited through the Port of Montreal last year, including 70 percent of Canada's legal transport exports, according to port authorities. That's about a million more containers than Canada's next two largest east coast ports combined.

Content of the article

Content of the article

Car thieves, according to Gast, “can mix their containers with these stolen vehicles into the traffic flowing legally out of Canada.”

The Port of Montreal said it is working closely with police and border services, but port officials can only open containers to save lives or harm the environment, spokeswoman Renee LaRouche said.

LaRouche said more than 800 police officers from several agencies have access cards to enter the port and open containers if they have a warrant. However, only border officers can open containers without a warrant in the customs-controlled areas of the port.

According to local police, three-quarters of the vehicles recovered during Project Vector were from Ontario, including 125 from Peel, which has become the province's car theft capital.

Brampton's Peel Region Mayor Patrick Brown said the lack of container inspections at the Port of Montreal has made exporting stolen vehicles a profitable, low-risk activity.

He said vehicle theft is a more serious problem in Canada than in the United States because American authorities use scanning equipment on far more shipping containers.

Content of the article

“Organized crime in the United States will not take that risk,” he said in a recent interview. “In Canada, we scan less than one percent of containers.”

Brown said the recently announced $28 million in federal funding for the Canada Border Services Agency should be used immediately to buy scanners at the Port of Montreal and two Toronto-area cargo hubs where containers are transferred from trucks to trains. Also, he said, police must enter the customs-controlled areas of these facilities without a permit or special permission from the CBSA.

“People will have tracking devices in their cars that will track them to an intermodal hub or track them to a port, and the local police can't do anything about it,” he said.

During Project Vector, Peel police said their access to containers at the port was limited by CBSA's “extremely limited resources,” Cst. Tyler Bell-Morena wrote in an email.

The CBSA would not say what percentage of containers are scanned each year, but the agency's Quebec regional director, Annie Bousjour, said all containers flagged by police are checked by border agents.

Content of the article

“We want to be able to scan all containers leaving the country; unfortunately, that's not true,” he said in an interview, adding that he would not allow the border agency to slow trade flows.

So far this year, the CBSA has seized 300 stolen cars from rail yards in the Toronto area, and in 2023 they found 1,200 stolen cars at the Port of Montreal.

But port interception is a “last resort,” he said, adding that it's important to recover stolen vehicles before they reach the loading docks.

That's because when a container full of stolen cars arrives at the port of Montreal, there aren't enough border guards to check it, according to the union that represents border officers. In fact, only eight border agents were working at the port last February, and the agency didn't have enough space to hold more than six stolen vehicles at a time, union president Mark Weber told a recent parliamentary committee.

Montreal's lack of resources is typical of port cities around the world, said Anna Sergi, a criminology professor at the University of Essex in Britain who studies organized crime, in a recent interview.

Content of the article

Customs authorities are focused on “imports. No one focused on export. It is impossible to invest in exports because it is someone else's problem,” he said. “The United States is the only country that exports less and less”

Sergi, who wrote about stolen car exports from Montreal in a 2020 report on corruption and crime at seaports, said only two to three percent of incoming containers are inspected, and even lower for those leaving the country.

Organized crime has long existed on Montreal's waterfront, he said. Montreal's West End Gang, known as the “Irish Mafia,” as well as the Italian Mafia, were involved in drug importation using conniving customs agents and port officials.

Insp. Montreal police officer Dominique Cote said: “We have no information to suggest that the port of Montreal was infiltrated by organized crime or that this is the reason these vehicles were found in Montreal.”

Brown said he's skeptical of claims that border agents can't do much or that organized crime isn't part of why the Port of Montreal is so popular with criminals.

“When I see the CBSA and the Port of Montreal say why they can't do this, it makes me very suspicious of why they are defending the status quo, which has been the most effective reward for organized crime in Canadian history,” he said. .

This Canadian Press report was first published on April 14, 2024.

Our website is home to the latest news, exclusive reviews, long reads and provocative commentary. Bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter.

Content of the article