As extortion threats continue against British Columbia business owners, hundreds of citizens turned out at a Surrey town hall Saturday, saying they fear for their lives and demanding changes to Canadian law.
The event, organized by the Canadian Trucking Association of British Columbia, followed a public forum in Surrey on Jan. 6 where about 700 people came out to respond to a series of termination and extortion letters.
RCMP say the shooting in White Rock last December was linked to a series of ongoing racketeering cases.
“I have received threats that if you do not pay us, we will burn your Range Rover,” Parminder Sanghera told the town hall.
It’s a strange and familiar situation for the owner of a transport company, who recounts how his father received an extortion letter in India in 1989.
Sanghera said the letter arrived a month after his father bought the car for less than Rs 10,000.
At that time, he said cars were an important product in his home country.
Sanghera said the extortionists demanded the same amount from his father as he had paid for the car.
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“My father said that whatever happens, we will not pay,” Sanghera recalls.
Instead, Sanghera said his father told him to move abroad, to Europe, America or Canada, to be safe and live a better life.
Sanghera came to Canada in 1996 and started his own company, Reliance Logistics Inc. It took a lot of hard work to get it up and running.
“Today we faced the same situation, they were chasing my car,” Sanghera told Global News. “Where do I go, where do I send my children? We don’t feel safe.”
Sanghera is one of two members of the Canadian Trucking Association in British Columbia who recently received extortion threats.
Sanghera said on a public forum: “If I get a call tomorrow, someone else gets a call, there could be a shooting in someone’s house.”
Sanghera and other Fraser Valley business owners are demanding action, months after the RCMP created a task force to combat extortion attempts.
Jas Arora of Highway King Transport Ltd told Global News he has been receiving threats since last summer and during the phone call, the blackmailer told him the police would not do anything, knowing there were officers in the room with him inside.
“The police are stuck, like they are helpless, they can’t do anything,” Arora said. “They have to change the law.”
Although arrests have been made in several extortion cases, there is public concern that suspects are not being detained pending trial.
“This is unacceptable,” said Amit Kumar of the Canadian Trucking Association of British Columbia. “We need to give the police, we need to give the courts all the tools they need to put these people in jail.”
“The law is very lenient,” Sanghera said. “They came with illegal weapons and shot at our house and we didn’t even protect ourselves with legal weapons.”
Politicians from all three levels of government used the town hall to speak out and also to target their opponents.
Community members told the crowd they wanted solutions, not conflict.
“Lower government, higher government: work together to solve this problem,” urged Satish Kumar, president of the Vedic Hindu Cultural Society of BC.
“Don’t blame yourself.”
Sanghera said he hopes other community members will have the courage to speak out and, like his father, not hand over even a fraction of their hard-earned money to criminals.
“I don’t work for them, I work for my family,” Sanghera told Global News.
“I defended myself and I defended my family.”
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