Good morning and thank your for being here this morning.
I'll be very brief in view of the allotted time. First, I'd like to make a brief comment. My question is mainly for Mr. Delva, who has drawn my attention more particularly.
You very much struck me when you said that a lot of five- or six-year-old children were at the school of crime and that a number of people had spoken to the teachers but that the latter didn't dare intervene outside the school yard. In Quebec, we talk to teachers through the CEQ or another union.
You raised another point, which is not entirely under our jurisdiction. You said that youths watch programs or listen to songs by 50 Cent, which is a violent group. On that group's site, there is a picture of a revolver, which I've never seen. That's what's called media treatment. We're dealing with youths from the media generation.
You also referred to another field. One public television network recently presented a Haitian group whose members had big houses in Haiti because they were selling drugs in Montreal. A youth who looks at that kind of program sees that his racial brother has big houses in Haiti and a little apartment in Montreal North. Our media create envy in that youth, who says to himself that that's what he wants to become.
So the media play a very important role in the phenomenon we're concerned with today. We're all good people. We all have an interest in protecting the victim, in seeing that criminals are punished fairly and without discrimination, and so on. But the media try to get such a powerful new story that youths of six, seven or eight years are virtually blinded. They want to become what the media transmits to them, either through a song or a Hollywood film. Earlier it was said that criminals were virtually being shown as the good guys, and the good guys as the bad guys.
The Conservative Party has spent about $10 million to fight street gangs and try to find a solution to this problem. Doesn't media technology, which virtually exalts the dark side of our society, have a harmful effect? Regardless of what will be said around this table, we may well have problems and not be able to solve them.
What do you think of that?