Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to stand in this Chamber today to talk about the youth justice system in Canada. It is a system that is going through change. It is a system that needs Canadian understanding.
I often have felt over the past years that the public perception is far removed from the reality of the legislation and of the youth and their lives in Canada as they come before the courts every day across this land. Youth 12 to 17 years of age are captured in this act. That represents roughly 8 per cent of our 28 million population.
In today's society it must be very difficult to grow up in Canada. It is much different from when I was a child. It is much different from when many members of this House were children. There is an increasing culture of violence in Canada and I believe Canadians have an increasing appetite to change that culture of violence.
Most kids in Canada today are good kids. We have to start with that premise. Most youth who are faced with drugs, alcohol, violence and fears for the future still turn out fine. They still manage. Their parents cope.
It is difficult to be a parent in this society as well. I have three young children of my own. The first became a teenager a couple of months ago and I have already noticed a change. He questions a lot more. He does not accept things the same way he did when he was five.
It is going to be a challenge for society, a challenge for the child, a challenge for our schools, a challenge for our court systems to cope with the difficult times these children go through.
We talk about violence in society. It is there in the fantasy life of our children. It is there in the video games they play, on TV, and in the news they see every day. And it is not only fantasy. They see the atrocities of Rwanda. They see the ongoing wars in Europe and no peaceful times. They have more knowledge of violence at an immature stage of their development. We have to work against that backdrop to send different signals to counteract the violence, to counteract the prevalence of those signals.
There is public concern both by adults and by youth. They are fearful of crime. They are fearful of young offenders. That is in part, I think, because crime sells papers. We read and hear a lot about crime in the media. Seventy per cent of the population believes everything they read in newspapers. I do not believe everything I read in newspapers and I am sure members of this House know there are often a few details added.
That is the other backdrop we have to deal with. We have to address the reality of the fear of violence and put the fear of violence from youth into perspective. With this piece of legislation and with phase two which will come after it, we have to find a way to address the concerns of Canadians.
The issue of young offenders is a hot topic. Everywhere I go people tell me that they have a problem with the Young Offend-
ers Act and that there is a problem with our youth today. We have some problems and we can do much better.
We also have to realize that 86 per cent of violent crime committed in Canada in 1993 was committed by adults, not youth. Only 14 per cent was committed by youth. Of that 14 per cent, a full 50 per cent was the schoolyard punch and shove. A lot of that comes because of the new reporting and new zero tolerance programs in schools.
There is a gradual rise, an increase in violent crime in youth. Depending on how the stats are read and the time periods of those stats, it can be seen as a significant rise, but it is rising and we have to address that.
In this act we will delineate the very necessary harsher system for violent crime. There is a group of incorrigibles in our country who need to be given a very clear, strong message. This act in part deals with that message.
It also delineates the other side of the coin. It also acknowledges that there are some less serious offences that bring youth before the courts. In fact, 60 per cent of them deal with property crime, often for the first time.
When we talk about the violent offences reported in the papers, on average over a decade there have been about 40 murders per year involving charged youth. Last year there were 22. Somewhere between 115,000 and 130,000 young people go through the young offender system every year. A lot of those youth are saved by our system. We have to acknowledge that.
We have a national law, the Young Offenders Act. We also have provincial and territorial situations that interpret the act differently.
We heard testimony in the justice committee which sat from September through to the end of November last year. The committee sat up to four times a week. We heard many different witnesses. We heard from school associations. We heard from parents. We heard from judges and lawyers and people who deal with youth in the probation and correctional facilities.
We heard from young offenders themselves. Some of them had come through the system and had been saved by it; some had been hurt by it. Their testimony was very revealing and informative. We heard from victims groups. The victims groups are now going to be more thoroughly addressed by this legislation. There will be an allowance for victim impact statements to be made.
This was a difficult task for the three-party committee. All the members sat around the table looking for appropriate solutions. I believe that very little time should be spent in saying what is bad and a lot of time has to be spent in asking what we should be doing better. We have to give credit where credit is due.
If I were a child in trouble with the law in Canada today, there is no doubt in my mind that I would wish I were in trouble in Quebec over any other province. Quebec has interpreted its young offenders acts much more progressively than a lot of other areas in this country and with much better success. It has employed more diversionary tactics away from the courtroom. We can learn from that experience. It is essential that we learn from that experience.
When I first started my law career in 1979 the Juvenile Delinquents Act was in force. I spent many days in courtrooms as duty counsel. Seven-year-olds were in those courtrooms. It is more appropriate now that there is this age. Phase two will revisit the question of age because Canadians want us to. We have had one debate in this House and the age question was defeated. Many people think we should lower the age for young offenders. I do not believe that. I think the ages are appropriate.
We have to consider the level of maturity and understanding of youth today. We are dealing with a very malleable and impressionable age in this Young Offenders Act. That has good and bad points. One bad point is that kids are impulsive. They do not think the consequences through. They think they know everything. They think the Young Offenders Act is a joke and that nothing will happen to them.
They think our system has no teeth. In fact the teeth are the same for youth as they are for adults. It is very important that youth understand that. It is very important that people understand that some of the breaks we give to adults in sentencing are not available for youth.
Many members opposite like to say that if you do the crime, do the time. In youth court that is exactly what happens. There is no mandatory supervision or early parole. When a youth gets three years, he or she serves three years for the most part. It is important to understand that time is a different concept for a child in the developmental years. A year for an adult seems to fly by, but a week drags on for a child.
Today in Canada when our youth come before the courts, of those found guilty roughly one-third will end up with a custodial sentence. I believe, along with many of my colleagues, that a custodial sentence, just locking somebody up and putting them away, is not a good short term answer and certainly is not the best long term approach.
It is important where we do lock people up and lock children up in a custodial setting that we provide some treatment while they are there; make sure that we are not just not warehousing, make sure the time, the money and the effort spent are directed to a change in the behaviour that in the long term will be much more effective in changing society, in safeguarding society, protecting citizens of Canada, and in changing the life of the individual who came before the court. We have to ensure that we
take the time that we take from these children and put it to good use. To me that means behaviour modification.
There will be difficulties because a lot of people say that is being too soft, that is not tough enough. It is a lot tougher to sit down at a program and work through your problems and address those problems than it is to sit and watch a TV set or lull around the house or just pass the time away counting the days until you can be free again, than it is to work with the members of your community, with the members of your family, with the professionals put there for your assistance into changing behaviours.
My community of London, Ontario, works very well with the young people diverted to it through either court order or alternate sentences. In particular I would like to commend the St. Leonard's Society of London because it puts programs into effect in the community that integrate the youth who have problems back into the community, paying back the community in ways that are meaningful in situations in which they are not pulled apart but integrated into the community, often without the community realizing it. Therefore the community helps in restoring their sense of self-worth, their sense of discipline, their sense of accountability. I will give one example of a project that works well in my community for youth and has met with success.
In the spring, summer and fall a group of youths who have come into contact with the law go to plots of land in London and grow vegetables. They work those gardens. They hoe. They do the physical labour. They do the planning. They do the nurturing. They are there helping other people around them with their vegetables gardens. At the end of that time period they deliver the harvest back to the food bank.
One of the people who worked in this project last summer reported to the counsellor who was working with them that it was a very good feeling for him because he had to come to that food bank, he and his family, to get food.
A lot of our youth in trouble with the law are not all necessarily poor. Just like crime goes across all sections of society for adults, it also goes across all sections of society for youth. It is important to understand that the socialization process has an affect on youth.
I am going to point out one thing that has bothered me. Maybe it is so obvious that we do not see the forest for the trees in this point. If I could predict what is the best predictor of getting into trouble with the law in this country it has to be being male. Our federal penitentiaries, all of our penitentiaries, are predominantly housing males.
Recently in the youth system it used to be roughly 80 per cent male, 20 per cent female. We are seeing right now a significant increase in female participation coming before our courts. It is significant and disturbing.
In the committee in phase two when we go on the road after we have these amendments through for our overall evaluation looking at what we can do better, looking at the 10-year review of the act, we can also take a look at what happens in our social culture differently between males and females because there are different results.
This is a minor point but it is certainly very obvious when you look at the number of people using our systems. The problems of females with justice are on the rise admittedly but it is still substantially less than what happens to boys. I believe we are born equal, therefore something has to happen socially.
It does not happen socially, magically when one hits age 12. Something had to go wrong long before that and we have the expertise in this country to understand what went wrong. We can predict with very young children that they are getting into trouble, that there is aggressive behaviour that needs attention.
We have the expertise with our psychologists, teachers, preschool teachers, neighbours and parents. They can see it. What in my opinion is criminal is that they see it and nothing is done. The answer often is the criminal justice system should get in there and fix it.
There are problems putting really young kids in the criminal justice system. The problems have to do with understanding, with process. We have a very formalized process for serious offenders in the criminal justice system. It is necessary because there are rights of individuals, there are rights of youth. That was one of the big changes between the old Juvenile Delinquents Act and the Young Offenders Act, that we did give children rights.
I go back to the analogy of a parent. If my child offends the rules of my household, I do not want to say: "I am going to see you next week and we will talk about it for the first time. Then we are going to adjourn this conversation for a month. Then you come back and another month later we will look at it again and then we will do whatever". I want immediacy. I want some fast action. I want to be able to cope better and faster and that is what is necessary in our youth courts.
They have a tremendous job and when we look at the funnel of people going into this very formalized process, we have to make sure that we are funnelling in the right people, the right youth, to the more formalized, stricter process and we safeguard their rights.
With lesser offences, lesser violations of the community, we should try now through this act to funnel more of them back to the community for it is the responsibility of all of us in that community to fix the problem.
They are not our children to be shipped out of our jurisdictions and sent away and forgotten, hopefully not to return. We know in our federal system part of the reason that we want to do a rehabilitation program is that on fixed term sentencing 80 per cent of the population is going to come back and reintegrate into society. Kids for the most part are all going to be reintegrating into society unless there is an unusual case where there is a murder by a youth who gets bumped to adult court and has to stay most of his life in the adult system. If that is the case, that youth is going to be subject to stricter sanctions than are there right now for the adult who commits an offence of murder.
We have to understand that kids are open to change and how difficult changing behaviour actually is. It has to be done from a base of knowledge. There have to be values put into that base of knowledge that include words like respect and accountability. There also have to be other words present like compassion and understanding.
Retribution is part; rehabilitation is a better part. If one wants to fix in the long term one's society, then one had better put some attention to the detail of changing that underpinning, interdisciplinary approach of why things went wrong. It is not that this offence merits this amount of time and we will only talk about paying back for that crime.
As a society we really have to address more and more crime prevention which is now in the preamble. We have to address long term rehabilitation which is also in the preamble. We have heard evidence at committee level that those things are counterproductive.
I submit that they are not counterproductive. They are going to be a challenging base on which our justice system for our youth will change over time.
People will say we are not tough enough. There are going to be many people in this debate today who will tell us about the tough measures in this bill. I will deal briefly with them because it is important that people understand that we did address the concerns of the public. We have increased from five to seven years the time for those offences. That is a significant increase, especially given the fact that judges throughout Canada today are not even going to the maximums on the times allocated to them under the old provisions.
We have to talk about who needs to know when the youth gets in trouble. That also was a concern of the public. It wants to be aware of who is offending and why this is happening in its communities.
Again, we have taken a responsible and reasonable approach in this area. The area of providing information about offenders has been widened, has been increased. The professionals, the school officials, the welfare officials, the people who are dealing with the best interests of that offender will have an ability to get that information.
This is far removed from branding a child by a label and giving broad based public information and shaming some child back into the right course which I have heard advocated in this Chamber. That is not what we are doing. We are going to have judicious use of information. If there is a need for protection of the public there will be a vehicle through the act and through the court system to get a wider distribution of information. That is necessary in some circumstances.
I want to take a minute to make sure that I talk about another provision of the bill. We have had the ability since 1908 to take a child and move him up to the next level, to adult court. In this bill we have moved a further step. We have reversed the onus for some 16 and 17 year old offenders. It is called a presumptive transfer. It is saying that when one commits five very serious offences in this country one is going to be taken very seriously by the system: murder, attempted murder, manslaughter, aggravated sexual assault and one other in the list.
Basically in those instances we are going to make the young offender prove to a judge that he should not be transferred, that the youth system is a better system to deal with him. The presumption will be a reversal. I think that is very harsh but these are very big offences. The reality is that people need to understand that the options will be there.
We in committee heard much testimony on presumptive transfers. It is not a concept of reverse onus that I am very comfortable with. I think it should be used sparingly. Over time it has been used sparingly in our systems. It is expensive. It will create delays. It makes process very time consuming.
It is necessary in some cases but what is important is again the delineation between harsh, strong, compassionate and behaviour modification. We have streamlined very effectively in this bill two different paths that are available. Judges will have to say why they do not choose the path of community if it is not one of those very strong offences.
It is not only the offence, though. It always has to be the individual. If I say that theft under $200 is a summary conviction offence, maybe that is not that serious in the magnitude of the Criminal Code. But if it is the 15th time there has been theft under $200, maybe stronger intervention with different tactics relating to behaviour have to be changed.
This act will still give a judge the ability to look beyond the charge, to look at all the circumstances. Consent to treatment will be changed and the ability to put more programming before an individual will also be there.
I can only reiterate it is an ongoing process that will come with phase two. By the spring the Standing Committee of Justice and Legal Affairs will take the time to go into communities and talk to those groups that have knowledge and interest in youth. We will be looking for better partnerships with the people who are involved, who have strengths in these areas.
At the London Family Court Clinic in my riding they have developed a handbook for schools funded through the department of health which was distributed to all superintendents of school boards across Canada. It dealt with integrating anti-violence messages into the curriculum from the low level grades right up to high school. It has been discovered that integrating these messages into the lesson plan on a daily basis can have a dramatic effect on violent attitudes. Studies are being done all the time and if these situations are not taken care of they will show up in our prisons later on.
During these rounds of testimony we are hearing from people who are very concerned and have different ways of looking at their problems. Specifically I think of some of the First Nation witnesses that came before the committee. They talked about sentencing circles and appropriate ways of dealing with corrections for their people. It is quite different.
They do not want to see the overpopulation of their youth in our prison systems. They have an alternate system they can engage. Perhaps in our sentencing it is time for us to look at some of those alternate systems. When we are talking about sentencing circles for native youth, we are talking about responsibility to the elders, responsibility and reparation to the community. The youth are accountable before their peers and the immediate family group.
In phase two we need to figure out a meaningful way to get parents involved in their children's lives again and to restore the harmony that has been lost in a household. We have to know that justice is more than punishment. Justice for youth has to be meaningful and include reinvolvement, rehabilitation, reintegration into a community that cares for these children and wants them back as tax paying, hard working, responsible adults. We want to make sure we have more saves than losses.
Along with my colleagues I look forward to spending time trying to figure out how we can develop better systems for youth. Bill C-37 goes a long way in addressing the concerns of the public. Violent crime needs to be addressed more strongly but we must leave a door open so that our communities can deal more meaningfully with the youth justice system.
