It is with regret that we announce that the Canadian Centre for Investigative Reporting (CCIR) is winding down operations after five years of supporting investigative journalism in Canada. With your support, the CCIR has supported important and ground-breaking investigative journalism projects, which you can continue to view at this site: canadiancentreinvestigates.org. However, the funding environment
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We’re excited to announce the publication of CCIR associate journalist Bruce Livesey’s important new book, ‘Thieves of Bay Street’, a rare exposé of white collar crime in Canada, published by Random House and available on a bookstore shelf near you. The CCIR gave some early material support toward the research of ‘Thieves’ – thanks to the
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Toor Jan was clearly nervous when he arrived at the guesthouse in Kandahar, Afghanistan. “If my boss found out I did this, he will shoot me,” the young heroin dealer told the Georgia Straight in an interview.

Toor Jan (not his real name) described last March how he sold large amounts of heroin to Afghan translators working at two NATO bases in Kandahar who, in turn, resold the heroin to NATO soldiers.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The United States has deported more than 250 Haitians since January knowing that one in two will be jailed without charges in facilities so filthy they pose life-threatening health risks.

An investigation by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting found that the Obama administration has not followed its own policy of seeking alternatives to deportation when there are serious medical and humanitarian concerns.

The Clinton Foundation has inspected 20 trailers installed at four locations in the Haitian town of Léogâne, after an investigative report by The Nation, The Gazette and the Canadian Centre for Investigative Reporting found a host of problems with the units designed to be used as classrooms and emergency shelters.

On June 17, 2010, the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission approved an ambitious project for emergency hurricane shelters. Proposed and financed by IHRC co-chair Bill Clinton’s own foundation, the project was to construct “hurricane-proof” emergency shelters that could also serve as schools to provide Haitian schoolchildren “a decent place to learn.” Now with hurricane season underway and tropical storm Emily battering Haiti with flash floods and mudslides, the people of Léogâne are left without a “Plan A”. An update on the investigation by the Investigate Fund of the Nation Institute, CCIR Investigates, and the Montreal Gazette.

Since 2001, the year American and Canadian troops entered Afghanistan, worldwide heroin production has reached record levels. The United Nations estimates that as much as 20 percent of this winds up in Russia, where there are over 80 heroin-related deaths a day. Russian officials blame NATO, but as Japhet and Yuli Weeks uncover in a series of multimedia reports for the CCIR, Russia offers little in the way of treatment for the country’s 1.5 million addicts.

The project was announced by Clinton as his foundation’s first contribution to the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, which the former president co-chairs. The foundation described the project as “hurricane-proof… they became one of the IHRC’s first projects. However, an investigation supported by the Nation Institute Investigative Fund, with additional support from the Canadian Centre for Investigative Reporting, raises worrying questions about how well the commission is serving its mandate. Isabel Macdonald and Isabeau Doucet report.

Alex Roslin looks at the devastating impact Afghan heroin is having in Vancouver in this week’s Georgia Straight, part of an ongoing CCIR investigation.

In a nondescript three-storey building on Cambie Street in the Downtown Eastside, Sherry Grant is at ground zero of a little-noticed heroin revival.

She hasn’t seen so many kids doing heroin since the Nexus substance-abuse program, which she runs, started tracking detailed statistics in 2005. . .
 
 
 
 

Heroin and other opiates are on the rise around the globe – thanks in large part to a 37-fold increase in Afghan opium production since 2001, when Canadian soldiers helped the U.S. overthrow the country’s Taliban government. Afghanistan now supplies 92 per cent of the world’s opium. With the Canadian government committed to staying on in Afghanistan past the scheduled end of combat operations in 2011, will there be any relief for Canada’s growing legions of addicts? A CCIR Investigation.