Seizing B.C.'s Grow-op Homes

Image by: Nik West

Peter Ameerali has been working to seize property used in the B.C. pot trade for four years, an increasingly complex cat-and-mouse game.

Buying a former grow-op can lead to big savings for 
prospective homeowners as well as big profits for the 
B.C. government, which is tasked with reselling crime-
connected homes seized through the courts. But civil forfeiture is not as simple as it seems.

The house looks out from a hillside some 30 metres up from the Strait of Georgia. From either of the home’s two decks, you can gaze past a sand-and-pebble beach, over rippling tides and out toward the green southern tip of Gambier Island. Beyond that emerge the peaks of the Lions and Cypress Mountain. It’s a million-dollar view, which cost my husband and me much less than that in money but a lot in stress. We had first viewed the home in summer 2008 and loved its open plan, string of water-view windows and seclusion in a forested cove. But we couldn’t afford the $700,000 price. After two years and another owner, the house popped up again on the listings at two-thirds of that amount, and we jumped at it. The reason it was so cheap: it had become a grow-op, one of close to 60 crime-connected houses that were seized and sold in the past year through the dogged work of Peter Ameerali, counsel for the province’s director of civil forfeiture. 


Ameerali, charged with making sure the government makes money in its battle against B.C.’s illicit drug trade, is explaining how he got involved in confiscating grow-ops like the one I bought. He is sitting behind his cluttered, Sally Ann-style desk in a Victoria-area office. I have been barred by the Public Safety Ministry from revealing the exact address out of fear that organized crime may want to harm Ameerali. When I visit, not even the security guards at the building’s entry desk know his room number. 


The young-looking 32-year-old, a graduate of the University of Victoria’s law school, says he took an interest in forfeiture issues in 2004 while working as an articling student in the Ministry of Attorney General’s civil litigation group. Ontario’s Civil Remedies Act had been in force for two years, and Manitoba was just enacting a forfeiture law. In September of that year, Ameerali became involved in drafting similar legislation for B.C. and continued working on it until after he passed his bar exams in May 2005. Once B.C.’s Civil Forfeiture Act became law a year later, Gordon Houston, manager of the Ministry of Attorney General’s civil litigation department, asked Ameerali to handle all forfeitures. In short, Ameerali became the lawyer responsible for getting property seized through the courts. Since then the forfeiture office has expanded to five full-time and four part-time lawyers. As the office’s longest-serving counsel, Ameerali has litigated more grow-op confiscations than any other lawyer in B.C. 


His work has included winning a groundbreaking case in which the court forced a dentist to give dental records to the prosecution, dealing with the seizure of the Hell’s Angels clubhouse in Nanaimo, and driving the confiscation of grow-ops as remote as a twice-busted, A-frame house in the woods near Likely, B.C. And Ameerali’s forfeiture work has yielded measurable results: from May 2006 to October 2010, the province sold 75 seized grow-ops. In every instance, the province made money. 


The civil forfeiture office has completed $12-million worth of confiscations in the past four years, including seizures of grow homes, drug labs, drug-selling houses, cars, boats, farms, storehouses for stolen property, lairs for many other crimes and hoards of cash. After operational costs, the B.C. government has netted $2 million from that take, with most of the proceeds going out as grants to victims services, crime remediation and crime-stopping measures such as the Con Air program that flies captured criminals back to their home province. The value of forfeited homes has ranged from a few hundred thousand to $1.3 million, but mortgages have to be paid out, and $2 million to $3 million per year has gone into the typically prolonged litigations. 


B.C. is not alone in its approach to civil forfeitures. Australia has seized criminal property since 1987. The United States inherited the practice as common law from colonial England and enacted modern forfeiture legislation in 1984. Today the U.S. Treasury and Justice departments together receive about $1 billion per year from property seizures. In Canada forfeiture legislation has been enacted in Ontario, B.C., Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba, Quebec, Nova Scotia and most recently in New Brunswick. During the last seven years, Ontario seized almost $13 million in property and another $40.7 million awaits resolution in Ontario courts. B.C. runs a close second in the country, with more than 150 property seizures, valued at $30 million to $40 million, currently awaiting resolution.


Of the B.C. forfeitures, Ameerali estimates, about 65 per cent are drug related, and 90 per cent of those are grow-ops. To clear the backlog of files, Ameerali and his team negotiate. Most grow-house owners agree to sign away all or some of the property, and then it gets sold. In the case of our home, 30 per cent of what we paid minus realty fees and related expenses went to the grow-op owners. Usually, the government gets “the lion’s share” of proceeds, Ameerali says. 


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