Quebec woman says scammers mimicked RBC, taking $15,000 in a convincing fraud
A Quebec woman says scammers posing as RBC representatives drained thousands from her business account in a convincing fraud.
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CBC
31 minutes ago
- CBC
Confessions of a gun smuggler: How I brought weapons into Canada
Social Sharing Everyone knows guns used by Canadian criminals are often smuggled from the U.S. Not everyone knows how — not like Naomi Haynes does. That's because she did the smuggling. A native Montrealer who's been living in the U.S. for decades, she helped traffic dozens of weapons into Canada, some linked directly to drug gangs. "I wasn't thinking about the havoc I was causing in my birth land," she told CBC News last week. "I've got my kids, I've got bills. The only thing I [was] thinking about is monetary gains. I wasn't thinking about the people who are going to be affected." CBC News established contact with Haynes while she was in prison — at first communicating by email, then with a glitchy prison video app and then in a lengthy interview following her release last year. Her story helps shed light on the thousands of guns a year in Canada that police trace to the U.S. She described, in detail, tricks of the smuggling trade. And how she managed to move drugs, cash and, eventually, guns, for many years, depending on the product — either into the U.S., between U.S. states or into Canada. Rule No. 1: Only one person per car. If the vehicle gets stopped at the border, you don't want two partners tripping over each other's story during secondary questioning. "There's only one story this way," said Haynes, 45. "If you have two drivers, there's conflicting stories and that's when you have problems. … 'Oh, you're coming from Virginia, but your friend says [she's] coming from Baltimore.'" "So just one driver, so they can stick with their one lie." I wasn't thinking about the people who are going to be affected. - Naomi Haynes Rule No. 2: Find a good hiding spot. She would stash items in hidden compartments under seats; in door panels; in the trunk. She'd also move drugs in a gas tank — in triple-sealed, vacuumed bags. Rule No. 3: Get drivers who won't arouse suspicion. Haynes didn't transport guns herself; she got pulled over too often. She'd ride in a separate vehicle. "I started paying white girls and guys to move stuff for me," she said. Especially white women. They never got pulled over, she said. Until one did. Haynes was arrested in 2019, charged with smuggling, and with conspiracy to make false statements; she pleaded guilty, was sentenced, and served just under five years in prison. Hers is an unusual story. She's a vegan, millennial, Jamaican Canadian political science grad in South Florida who supports Donald Trump, became a grandma and wound up in an international conspiracy. Then again, her life story was atypical from the start. Escaping Montreal "At the end of the day, you become what you know," Haynes said. She grew up around drug dealers. Her late father dealt crack, then smoked it. In a book she's writing about her life story, Haynes describes a period when he became meaner, zoned out and indifferent, his eyes bloodshot. Her book describes one sister jailed for selling ecstasy. Another sibling, her brother, led a local street gang, according to the Montreal Gazette. She grew up in the area just south of the old Montreal Forum; her grandmother worked in the hallowed hockey shrine. From childhood, Haynes earned money in unconventional ways. Her half-complete memoir, entitled The Runner: Tripped by the Feds, begins with the words: "For as long as I can remember I have had a hustle." She ran store errands for adults and got to keep the change; collected beer bottles from their parties and returned them for cash; and, later, resold contraband cigarettes. "I made my first $1,000 in the seventh grade," she writes. She was desperate to escape the scene, to flee the bad influences. Haynes harboured a childhood dream of living in the States, and in 1997, she made it happen. She enrolled in college. She got a bachelor's degree from Florida Atlantic University, according to court documents, and also studied criminal science. She started smuggling to pay for school. And she made poor choices, she says, about whom she surrounded herself with. The man who became her husband made a $5,000 down payment on a Jeep Cherokee for her; she used that vehicle and received thousands of dollars more to move hashish, hash oil and marijuana into Canada. Over the years, she shipped contraband countless times: ecstasy, cocaine, marijuana, hash and cash, occasionally driving on her own, but usually hiring someone. She'd move products from buyer to seller, often across international lines, but also domestically, say, from Florida to Chicago. It was only many years later that she started selling guns. Around 2016, Haynes was desperately low on cash — she was divorced, with a baby, not working and with an older boy playing intercity baseball. "Everybody that I always did business with always said, 'No guns, no guns, no guns,' because there's a trail," she told CBC News. But it was great cash, about $4,000 Cdn per gun. On a nine-millimetre handgun that costs a couple of hundred bucks in South Florida, it's an astronomical profit. She'd ship about 20 at a time, and there were multiple shipments. She admits to two of them, which she figures generated about $160,000. Subtracting the cost of the purchase, the driver and her partner's share, she estimates she kept about $30,000, which helped her live comfortably for a few months. And then it cost her everything. WATCH | Major Toronto gang busts connected to Hayes's network: Law enforcement closes in Police started closing in on Haynes from different angles — arresting associates, seizing phones, recording conversations and catching her in lies. It started after she purchased 20 weapons from different Florida gun stores in February 2018. On March 1, a day after her last purchase, she crossed into Canada through New York. She was stopped re-entering the U.S. two weeks later at Champlain, N.Y., carrying $4,300 in cash, and multiple cell phones. Border officers seized her phones and downloaded the contents. According to court filings, they found fraudulent or counterfeit IDs for several associates and shared that with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. On the morning of April 27, two ATF agents arrived at her home in Boca Raton, Fla. She lied to them, insisting she'd been buying and selling guns to friends with legal permits. She insisted she had a storage unit. She took them to a CubeSmart facility and professed to be shocked when she found her unit empty. "You remember Martha Stewart?" ATF agent Tim Trenschel asked her, according to court documents. "The lady on TV that does fancy crafts. Do you remember that she spent some time in prison? Do you remember why?" Haynes replied: "Because she lied." The agent said: "Exactly." Haynes added: "About insider trading." The agent said: "You're way ahead of most people I talk to." Majority of firearms coming into Canada are from the U.S., data shows 4 months ago Duration 3:22 Donald Trump is targeting Canada with punishing tariffs over concerns about border security. But as CBC's Talia Ricci reports, data from GTA police shows Canada has to worry about what's coming in from the U.S, too. Haynes insisted upon her truthfulness. "Listen, I get it, and I respect the law… I am being a thousand per cent honest." She was not, in fact, being 1,000 per cent honest. Far from it. The agent's observation about the risks of lying to a federal officer proved prescient. A couple of weeks later, guns she'd bought started turning up in police investigations in the Toronto area, identified despite attempts to deface the serial number. 'I knew I was cooked' One loaded Taurus 9mm was found hidden in the panel of a car, alongside approximately $300,000 worth of cocaine. Days later, a Ruger .380 was found in another drug bust. The suspect tossed it aside while attempting to flee police. In September of that year, a friend she'd hired was stopped while crossing into Canada from New York state, carrying 20 hidden guns. Haynes was recorded following right behind her — crossing the border 62 minutes later. A number of the seized guns traced back to her circle. By this point, police had gained an informant. They were secretly recording conversations within her circle, even one involving Haynes's daughter. On Feb. 27, 2019, her daughter's boyfriend, Mackenzie Delmas, was caught. The informant delivered guns to him and Delmas was arrested immediately. Agents searched his home — and Haynes's. That's when Haynes knew she was done for. She was visiting her parents' home in the Montreal area. Her daughter called from Florida in the middle of the night with the news, and Haynes collapsed on the family couch. "I've never experienced a panic attack before in my life, but at that point, I started shaking. I couldn't talk, I couldn't breathe," Haynes said. "I was trying to gasp for air." Her mother tried calming her down, rubbing her back. She recalled her mother asking: "What's going on?" Haynes confessed what she'd been up to. The whole story. "My mother was so disappointed." At that point, Haynes made a decision: To give herself up. "I knew I was cooked," she said. "[I thought], I'm not gonna live on the run. I've got to face it. My time has come." Court documents confirm what happened next: She called the ATF in the wee hours of Feb. 28, and promised to return to the U.S. and speak with investigators. In subsequent recorded interviews on March 13 and April 3, she confessed everything: the fake identities, the illegal gun purchases, the shipments to Canada, the sales to known Canadian gangsters, her own trips north to collect cash and, crucially, her lies to police. She was arrested, and spent four years, nine months in prison, serving time in a low-security prison in Alabama. It was predictably miserable. She recalled guards treating inmates cruelly and arbitrarily — being decent to some of the meanest inmates, and mean to decent ones, people who got mixed up, in some cases accidentally, in bad situations. The worst was during COVID-19. After testing positive, she was sent to solitary confinement. "I was in the shoe for 13 days," she said. "I felt like a dog in a kennel. … The room was filthy. It was disgusting. The sinks — the water was brown. The toilet, it was disgusting." Her main diet in prison consisted of peanut butter. She gave up meat and dairy years ago, grossed out by it. Given the choice between baloney and peanut butter, she'd take the latter. She recalls paying $7 for a cauliflower once and air-frying it with a blow-dryer. Is there a sense of guilt? But the absolute worst thing about prison? Her parents dying, and being unable to see them or attend their funeral. Her beloved mom slowly died of cancer while Haynes was in jail. By the time her father died, she was out, but she had to attend the funeral on Zoom. Haynes can't leave and re-enter the U.S. because she's fighting deportation. A Canadian citizen, she's a green-card holder in the U.S., and of her three kids, they're either living there or hoping to live there with her. She now works an office job at a landscaping company. "My mom was sick with cancer and I failed," Haynes said. "My choices and the things I was doing caused me to not be there for the person that was always there for me." What about potential gun victims: does her sense of guilt extend to them? As a vegan who avoids hurting animals, does she ever wonder whether any humans were harmed by those chunks of steel she trafficked? Initially, no, she said. As she got into the business, the only thing on her mind was money — paying the bills. Then she had four years, nine months in prison to think. And she started thinking about other people's pain, about other families and whether her guns killed any young kids in a drive-by. She now prays that those guns are confiscated.
CBC
31 minutes ago
- CBC
City warns of surge in homeless population by 2035
A city report says that Ottawa's homeless population could surge by almost 60 per cent over the next decade without substantial investments in affordable housing. The city released its housing needs assessment on Friday. Its modelling estimates that, under a business-as-usual scenario, Ottawa could have a total of 14,734 people experiencing homelessness annually by 2035. That's up from 9,326 currently. Those figures represent people who enter a homeless shelter at any time during the year, rather than the number of people who are homeless at a specific point in time. The point-in-time number, collected every four years through a citywide count, reached 2,952 in October 2024 — 78.5 per cent higher than in 2018. Friday's report lays out the pressures that are driving people into homelessness. The city's population is growing, and more of those people are from vulnerable groups like renters, single parents and fixed-income seniors. Housing costs are growing faster than wages, creating an affordability gap. The waiting list for rent-geared-to-income units has swelled beyond 15,000, leaving people waiting years for affordable housing. "These are provincial and national trends, and they're going to intensify," said Jesse Donaldson, executive vice president of HelpSeeker Technologies, which performed the modelling for the city. "The extent to which the housing pressures will continue and escalate over the coming years — next year, five, 10 years — is so significant that it requires a proportional response." City needs help to fund thousands of housing units To keep up with those pressures, the report estimates that the city will have to add almost 129,000 new housing units over the next decade. More than 10,550 of those units should be affordable, provided through a combination of supportive, transitional and public housing, as well as rent subsidies. If that happens, the model predicts that people would exit homelessness more quickly than others would lose housing, so the number of homeless people would eventually drop to near zero. The city does not have an estimate of how much that will cost. That will come later, through an update to the city's 10-year housing and homelessness plan. But Kale Brown, the city's interim director of housing and homelessness services, said the figure is sufficiently high that there's little chance the city can handle the cost on its own. "We would certainly need more sustained and significant funding from senior levels of government," he said. The federal government has already pledged $176 million to Ottawa over three years through its housing accelerator fund. Brown said the cost of not acting — and adding thousands of homeless people to shelters or encampments — is far greater. "We would anticipate much larger costs on emergency services, hospital services, that kind of thing," he said. "It is imperative that we do the cheaper solution over the long term." The report draws from a long list of data sources, including the city's point-in-time count of the homeless population, as well as statistics from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and the census. Here are some of the key data points and findings for Ottawa: Ottawa is projected to have about 118,000 more households by 2035. Renters are expected to make up about 43 per cent of all households by 2035, up from about 36 per cent in 2021. The median monthly rent has increased 61.3 per cent from 2014 to 2024. Household incomes have grown more slowly, rising 46.4 per cent from 2006 to 2021. The percentage of renter households paying $2,000 or more per month increased from 1.3 per cent in 2006 to 17.1 per cent in 2021. 23 per cent of renter households live in housing that is unaffordable, unsuitable or inadequate. The vacancy rate for affordable rental units is substantially lower than high-rent housing; for units affordable to the lowest income households, the rate is effectively zero. Social assistance rates remain far below market rents. The waiting list of rent-geared-to-income housing has grown 36.8 per cent from 2022 to 2024, reaching 15,140 households in December 2024. The average wait varies between 4.2 years and 7.6 years, depending on the number of people in the household and whether they have children.
CBC
31 minutes ago
- CBC
Pedestrian Sunday is back in Kensington this weekend, but future of festival remains unclear
Kensington Market's popular Pedestrian Sunday festival is back this month, but its future for the rest of the season remains unclear as organizers look for solutions on safety concerns and the problem of illegal vendors. The festival has been running for more than two decades on the last Sunday of each month from May to October, when much of the market is closed to vehicles while pedestrians, vendors, and street artists fill the streets. It was halted last-minute in May after concerns over the influx of outside vendors and "unregulated food sales and unauthorized substances," the Kensington Market Business Improvement Area (KMBIA) said when announcing the cancellation. KMBIA chair Mike Shepherd says he feels comfortable holding the June 29 event because he believes outside vendors will be spread out across the city due to Pride Festival events and won't necessarily converge on Kensington. And as for July onward, "We'll see how it goes," he said. Kensington considers hiring outside help For now, the KMBIA is exploring options to help the event run more smoothly in the future. Among them is finding new organizers to run it for them. Shepherd says KMBIA is currently in talks with the team behind Do West Fest, adding it has had "really good success at dealing with these same problems." "[The] biggest thing…is what their cost is going to be to us," he said, referring to Uma Nota Culture, the not-for-profit that produced the festival for the Little Portugal Toronto BIA. The organization confirmed to CBC Toronto they had a conversation about potentially producing the event and are thrilled about the opportunity. The KMBIA increased its events and festival budget by 18 per cent this year, city records show. Each Pedestrian Sunday costs about $10,000 and May's unused budget will go into reserves, Shepherd says. The KMBIA also released a community survey on Monday asking residents and businesses for their thoughts on possible solutions such as having police on the streets, more security, or changing the festival's frequency. The results are still trickling in — and while some businesses told CBC Toronto the festival is a financial lifeline, others welcomed last month's pause. Jessica Silva of CrazyLoko Vintage says she loses roughly half her customers to illegal vendors who set up shop in front of her business selling other vintage clothes during the festival. "They're taking away from our business [while] we're here the entire year trying to make ends meet," she said. 'Only so many officers trying to do too big a job' Though there will be four extra security guards at Sunday's event, Shepherd says it's been a challenge to bring in more bylaw officers to crack down on illegal vendors. He says attempts to hire the officers through the city have been unsuccessful — something the city couldn't comment on without more specifics from the KMBIA. Illegal vendors selling things like unregulated food or art can be fined by bylaw officers, according to the city's communications coordinator, Shane Gerard. But if they sell drugs, he says the issue becomes a police matter. The most common violation related to sidewalk vendors is vending without a permit, which carries a $615 fine, Gerard says. This year, Shepherd hopes June's Pedestrian Sunday will give him the chance to have conversations with the illegal vendors and deal with them "in a nice way," before escalating things further. WATCH | Why was Pedestrian Sunday paused in the first place?: Toronto's Kensington market pauses 'Pedestrian Sundays' amid vendor battle 1 month ago Duration 2:28 'Pedestrian Sundays,' a popular tradition at Toronto's Kensington Market, has been put on pause for the first time in twenty years. As CBC's Britnei Bilhete reports, organizers say there's been growing concerns about the event. Local councillor Dianne Saxe says she's repeatedly asked the mayor's office for help with drug use and sales in the area and helped connect Shepherd with city staff to request more bylaw officers. "There's only so many officers trying to do too big a job," Saxe said. CBC Toronto has reached out to the mayor's office but did not hear back before deadline. The entire ward of University-Rosedale currently has two bylaw officers assigned.
