Last Thursday the NDP government introduced its gang and violence suppression strategy intended to reduce the unprecedented gang activity in the province. If this sounds familiar, it should.  It is the seventh gang strategy the NDP have brought forward since being elected to government 10 years ago.

It is clear from the increased gang activity and violence in the province that the first six plans brought forward by the NDP government did not work and there is reason to be concerned that the seventh attempt may miss the mark as well.

What the NDP Attorney General announced Thursday is that the province is now planning to “intensely monitor” 50 gang members in the province.

That leads to two obvious questions. The first question is why weren’t these gang members tracked before? Why did it take ten years of increased gang violence to convince the NDP government that they should be tracking gang members?

The other question many people will have is how many of the province’s gang members does 50 represent. That is a harder question to answer.

In the 1990’s a gang database was established to keep a count on the number of known and suspected gang members in the province. This was an important tool in determining whether the gang problem was getting better or worse in the province. In 1999 when the NDP were elected, there were about 600 known gang members in the database and about 1500 suspected gang members.

Just a few years after the NDP government was elected, the number of gang members in the database had skyrocketed to 3,000. How did the NDP government respond to the fact that under their watch gang membership was growing at an alarming rate? They responded by unplugging the database.

Instead of making a dedicated effort to break up gangs in the province, the NDP unplugged the gang database and stopped counting gang members. So today we are not sure of the number of gang members but judging by the way the problem was growing under the NDP, there could be as many as 5,000-6,000.

Putting it into perspective then, the NDP government announced last week that they are planning to reduce the gang violence in the province by tracking 50 of a possible 5,000-6,000 gang members. Tracking 1% of gang members in the province is unlikely to make any dent in the problem our province faces with gangs.

The problem of gangs impacts the entire province. The drugs that find their way into rural communities are largely a result of gangs. Illegal weapons in the province and property crime are often the result of gang activity. It is a serious problem that impacts all Manitobans.

The seventh gang strategy in ten years doesn’t give Manitobans any confidence that the NDP are ready to take on gang activity in a serious way.