Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague is quite right. This is an aspect that I did not broach, and he is right to remind me of it.
I will add, to enlighten him fully, that the imprisonment of individuals costs a great deal. I think that he will agree. Much more effective monitoring systems could be established with the same money. As a result, we would not have the negative consequences that the prison atmosphere has on young people, who come out and themselves become criminals because of everything they learned inside. Because one day they come out.
Of course the comparison is ridiculous. We have to be wary of the comparison made by the hon. member between resources for incarceration and resources for outside monitoring. We should invest a lot more money, but it is more complicated to get the public to accept this, because it is more complex. It is more complex because the problem is complex.
I would add that people are always looking for models to the south of us, and forget to look around at home.
I would also note, since people seem to be saying that today’s big problem is street gangs, that these young people in the street gangs are yesterday’s juvenile delinquents from before the legislation was amended. The juvenile crime rate in Canada then was 50 times higher than in Quebec. Indeed the previous legislation gave Quebec an opportunity to adopt a philosophical principal that has shown its worth, the best measure, the right measure at the right time. One of my colleagues in the House has pointed this out on many occasions.
The rest of the country imposed on us and itself a purely objective system in order to punish young people as criminals, while we, in Quebec, tried to look at a young person at the scene of the crime and sought to find out how to stop him. A purely objective system was imposed on us.
I do not have the time, but I could tell you what some judges in Montreal told me about what the law forces them to do, even when they definitely feel that some intervention, even prison, might be justified despite the lack of violence in the offence. But they cannot send this young person to prison.
An objective system was imposed on us and we ended up with street gangs. Will we ask ourselves some questions at some point, and will we look elsewhere but the U.S. to find solutions to crime? At present, they imprison six times more people and they have three times more murders.