Yes, thank you.
I want to take this opportunity to thank you, on behalf of the New Brunswick Association of Social Workers, for inviting us to make a presentation to this committee on the Youth Criminal Justice Act.
I'm Miguel LeBlanc, the executive director of the NBASW, and with me is Merri-Lee Hanson, who is on our board of directors but is also a mental health social worker.
We have two mandates. One is a regulatory function in the protection of the public, so we control the social work practices in New Brunswick. The other one is the promotion of our profession in the sense of promoting the role of social workers, but also advocating and providing our recommendations to such social policies and legislation.
We have a current membership of 1,600 social workers in New Brunswick. I think it's fair to say that social workers, not only in New Brunswick but across Canada, recognize that working with young people is a challenging job. However, social workers also recognize that young people have the best opportunity to be reintegrated in the community and become productive members of the community. So we were very concerned when we started reading some of the amendments changed in the Youth Criminal Justice Act.
What I'm going to do is talk a bit about some of our concerns, and then I'll pass it on to my colleague, who will talk about some of the ideas on how we can actually improve.
We're concerned regarding the publication of the names of young offenders. We have great concern about these clauses. The intent of including and expanding the possibility for the elimination of the publication ban of young persons is not in the best interests of the community and the young person. Accepting this amendment will further ostracize and impede the process of rehabilitating and reintegrating young offenders.
Once they serve their sentence, we have to ask ourselves how we can honestly expect that these young people will be able to become reintegrated in the communities when all their information is made public. Accepting this amendment will only compound the issues that will minimize the youths' ability to rehabilitate and reintegrate in their communities. The fact of the matter is that we need these individuals to become part of the community.
The statement on page 14 of the legislative summary of Bill C-4 states that the court must then consider the public interest and the importance of the young person’s rehabilitation. We tend to argue that focusing on the importance of the young person's rehabilitation and reintegration is in the public interest.
Regarding youth not serving time in the adult facilities, we do commend this clause. We do believe that young people are not supposed to be in adult facilities. One of the issues, though, that we want to caution is that if you decide to go with this, I'm not convinced as of yet that all of the resources--both infrastructure and for the services--are in place in our province in that case. It will need some financial commitment on the part of the federal government. So we do appreciate that it's there, but if you do that, guarantee that funding and dollars are put back in the province.
Regarding denunciation and deterrents, we understand the objective of clause 7, but we have to remember we're talking about 12-year-old to 17-year-old people. It's generally accepted that youths don't have the same emotional maturity as adults, so understand that the consequences and repercussion of certain actions is not the same as with adults. I mean, that's point blank. We've all been young people.
So we tend to believe and argue that the reason is that we need to examine solutions as to why young people are committing crimes. This means that we need to start looking at more prevention-based efforts. But in the case of young people who do commit crimes in serving a sentence, we need to provide appropriate means to be reintegrated. That requires services--from our perspective, social workers, but also other health professionals.
What I find interesting is that the crime rate across Canada is actually dropping both for non-violent and violent crime, so I can't seem to understand the reasoning in enforcing more punitive approaches instead of providing greater flexibility in services.
I would dare say that the majority of social workers in New Brunswick and across Canada are concerned about some of the amendments that are being made. As the Canadian Bar Association argues, these changes will just increase the number of young people in jail, so why not use this investment and put it back into the community?
The public interest here is the long-term reintegration of these young people back into the community. The goal is that they will become productive members of the community if we provide them with the services. That is the basic idea that we want to put forth.
Now I will pass it on to my colleague, who will talk on how youths can actually become productive members.