York Regional Police are looking for witnesses after a tow truck was set ablaze in an Aurora driveway in the latest act of criminal behaviour involving the towing industry in Southern Ontario.

The blaze broke out shortly after 5 a.m. Sunday in a tow truck parked at a home on McLeod Drive, near Bathurst Street and Wellington Street West.

An empty gas container lay nearby, police said.

The industry has been hit by a wave of arson, and the murder of a GTA driver last year remains unsolved.

Mark Graves, president of the Provincial Towing Association, said he hopes that improving licensing will help stem the violence.

“The provincial towing association is working with the government to try to implement a provincial licensing system to try to alleviate this,” Graves said on Tuesday in an interview.

“We’ve been working on it now with them for about eight months,” Graves said. “We believe it’s going to help.”

That said, he doesn’t see a quick fix for the violence.

“I don’t that that there’s any one thing that’s a cure-all,” Graves said.

On Jan. 9, Durham Regional Police said an eight-week investigation of tow truck companies in the GTA resulted in more than 250 charges and the recovery of 31 vehicles.

That operation, called Project Bondar, came after police said they received several complaints from the public about exorbitant fees for tows after collisions and other complaints about vehicles being stolen from private property and storage yards.

Search warrants were executed in Brampton, Scarborough, Etobicoke, Ajax, Clarington, Pickering and Whitby, resulting in the recovery of 31 vehicles, including a Ferrari sports car and eight tow trucks, two of which were burnt.

There were at least seven tow truck fires in the GTA over the weekend before Christmas.

Three of those fires took place in York Region, three in Toronto and one in Peel Region.

On Dec. 17, three tow trucks were destroyed after they were set on fire overnight in Hamilton.

At least three bullets were fired on Dec. 8 at tow truck drivers in York Region at Highway 404 and Major Mackenzie Drive East by a man who stepped out of a white Ford F150 truck. The drivers weren’t hit by any of the shots.

Last June, more than 70 people were charged were offences including attempted murder, drug trafficking and robbery after a guns and gangs investigation called Project Kraken exposed what Toronto called a violent turf war among GTA tow-truck drivers.

Seven of people charged in Project Kraken were tow-truck drivers, police said at the time of the arrests.

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At the time of the arrests, police said the case involved traditional organized crime.

Scarborough tow-truck driver Lawrence Taylor Gannon, 28, was shot in the driveway of his home on Ivy Green Crescent, near Brimorton Drive and Orton Park Road, at about 10:30 p.m. on Sunday April 29, 2019.

No arrest has been made in his murder.