It didn’t take long for a tracking company to find Michael Walker’s truck after it was stolen from his Toronto driveway earlier this month. But as a tracking company employee waited hours for police to arrive, it was taken again. Tag Tracking zeroed in on its new location, a shipping container at a rail yard about 30 kilometres away. Police were alerted again. Border officials were also contacted. But Walker’s truck continued to sit in the container. “I’m not very happy that someone can’t get off their heinie and open the container that it’s supposed to be in,” he told CBC News last week while waiting for authorities. Finally on Monday, after CBC reached out to police, CN and the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), authorities opened the container, revealing Walker’s 2023 Toyota Tacoma inside. It had been 17 days since Walker reported his truck as stolen….
No police response after nearly 5 hours
Walker said when he bought his Tacoma six months ago, he did all he could to prevent it from becoming one of the thousands of vehicles being stolen in the Greater Toronto Area each year… Tag, a private company, etches its logo into the vehicles’ windows to deter thieves. It also installs tiny wireless tracking devices on the vehicles. If a vehicle is reported stolen to Tag, it’s instantly tracked and a Tag employee physically goes to find it, notifies police and waits for an officer to arrive. In Walker’s case, his Tacoma was stolen from his Etobicoke driveway sometime overnight on Jan. 11. Tag tracked it to a parking lot about 15 kilometres away in Mississauga, where the truck was left — likely for a period of time to ensure it wasn’t tracked — before being shipped overseas…
‘Best auto thieves in the world’
According to Freddy Marcantonio, Tag’s vice-president of business development and distribution, it’s extremely rare for police to not get to a location in time after being alerted that a stolen vehicle has been located. Since Tag’s inception in 2010, it’s recovered more than $100 million in stolen vehicles, he said. Last year, the Montreal-based company recovered 400 stolen vehicles in Ontario and 375 in Quebec. It was the first time the company recovered more vehicles in Ontario than in Quebec… “We have the best auto thieves probably in the world,” Marcantonio said of Montreal.
“What they’ve done is set up shop in Ontario through the CN and CP yards that lead them directly into the Montreal port. To them, [Ontario] is a candy store.”