Three years ago this past December, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police hosted the official opening of its Vancouver integrated market enforcement team, the stock market SWAT team that was going to remedy the dearth of criminal prosecutions against stock market miscreants.

It would be wonderful to be able to report that this program has been a roaring success; that the Vancouver IMET has rounded up dozens of Howe Street crooks; and that those who escaped the dragnet are now cowering in fear. But the truth is quite different.

The IMET program was inaugurated in late 2003 with teams in Vancouver and Toronto. The following year, teams were added in Calgary and Montreal.

During the first three fiscal years, the program consumed $8 million, $13.2 million and $20.5 million, respectively, for a total of $41.7 million by March 31, 2006. This fiscal year, the budget is $24 million. Assuming two-thirds of that amount has already been spent, the total increases to $57.7 million.

This does not include the cost of staff loaned to the IMET teams by other agencies. For example, Vancouver’s 25-person team includes 1.5 people from the Justice Department, one person from the B.C. Securities Commission, one from the Vancouver Police Department and one from the Canada Revenue Agency. None of their costs are included in this total.

Here’s the score, to date, on the teams:

> Vancouver: One charge laid. Kevin Steele was charged in May 2006 with bilking 229 investors of more than $10 million in a commodities-trading scam. This case was originally investigated by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Steele made it clear from the outset that he would co-operate with the RCMP investigation. He pleaded guilty last June and was sentenced to six years in prison.

> Calgary: zero charges laid.

> Montreal: zero charges laid.

> Toronto: charges laid in three cases. In May 2004, former HSBC Securities (Canada) Inc. employee Steve McRae was charged with stealing stock certificates and laundering proceeds estimated at $370,000. In June 2005, three executives of now-defunct Betacom Corp. Inc. were charged with a relatively small accounting fraud. And in September 2006, three men were charged with fraud in connection with the alleged manipulation of an OTC Bulletin Board company called Pender International Inc. None of these cases has been adjudicated.

The bottom line: after three years and at least $57.7 million spent, only one person has been jailed.

“I am the first to admit things are not going as quickly as I would like,” Supt. John Sliter, national director of the IMET program, said in a recent interview from Ot-tawa. Added Insp. George Pemberton, head of the Vancouver IMET: “I wish we had more results. But we have made progress on a lot of fronts that I’m hoping will bear fruit soon.”

The IMET teams have been working with provincial securities commissions, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulatory agencies, for which they have received only passing credit or none at all. But they acknowledge the bottom line is criminal charges and, so far, there have been very few. Meanwhile, larger investigations — including those into Nortel Networks Corp., Royal Group Technologies Ltd. and Norbourg Asset Management Inc. — grind on.

Pemberton notes the extraordinary length of time it takes to get simple bank records, while Sliter talks about the huge amounts of electronic data they have to sift through and the lack of co-operation from witnesses. It is also clear that the courts impose excessive burdens on police and prosecutors. Evidentiary standards, particularly those required to establish criminal intent‚ are way too high. Disclosure requirements are daunting. Sentences are too light.

But none of this is new. These constraints have plagued the justice system for years. But rather than addressing the causes of this dysfunction, Ottawa has elected to throw more money at it. Predictably, the results leave much to be desired. IE