One of the witnesses, Peter Showler, also talked about detention centres. I listened to what Mr. Dykstra said. You're putting a 16-year-old girl in a provincial detention centre. What kind of people are there in a provincial detention centre? Probably people charged with shoplifting, drug trafficking, solicitation for the purposes of prostitution. This girl hasn't committed any crime. She isn't guilty of anything at all and we're going to incarcerate her at a detention centre. I see a problem here. It's one thing to isolate people for identification and national security purposes for two or three days, but putting someone in an bad detention setting, that's a whole other story.
You proposed the detention of people 16 to 18 years of age without ensuring you have the physical resources for that detention to be safe and as harmless as possible for a young person. It's even more serious in the case of a boy. It's important to understand that, in the provincial detention system, incarceration isn't what's favoured for small crimes, it's community work. So what we find in provincial prisons are people incarcerated permanently, and not people serving their sentence on a weekend. These are criminals who are a little more hardened, and I would even say considerably more hardened.
There, you're putting a young person in an environment where there is an enormous amount of criminality and violence. Provincial prisons don't have minimum, medium and maximum security. All inmates are in the same place. It's up to the prison guards to place them in different wings, based on whether they are more or less dangerous. But what should the guard do with a 16-year-old?
It's all very well to adopt a bill, but where are the physical resources to apply it technically? We haven't heard anyone talk about that. All we've been told is that we are going to incarcerate them in provincial prisons. That's where the problem lies. You're talking about detaining 16- to 18-year-olds, which is already tragic, but detaining someone who's 16 in dangerous living conditions, that's totally unacceptable. If you were telling us that you were going to set up reception centres especially for children and detention centres for all the inmates, that would be something else entirely. But that's not what you're doing. You're handing over the responsibility of detaining and protecting this young person to a provincial authority. That's the issue.
As long as you aren't guaranteeing that the necessary resources will be in place, it is out of the question that we will agree to incarcerating 16- to 18-year-olds in a criminal setting. I argued cases before youth courts in Quebec, and I can tell you that no judge in Quebec would accept this kind of ridiculousness, ever. It would be considered in the cases of youths in detention. Before a judge decides to try a youth 16 to 18 years of age as an adult, major action is required. But in this case, the action is simply that an individual arrived in a way we consider irregular.
No, sir, that isn't acceptable.