If I can speak to that decrease, one of the things I recognize is that various government statistics have come out saying we've had a 35% decrease in the incarceration rate or in criminality among young people. Prior to the introduction of the Youth Criminal Justice Act, under the Young Offenders Act, breaches of probation and breaches of parole were separate indictable offences. They represented 55% of the total charges against young people in this country. When the Youth Criminal Justice Act was brought in, these separate indictable offences were no longer indictable offences. I would have expected the crime rate to drop by 55% in Canada among our young people virtually immediately. That is not the fact.
Violent crime, and I'm not talking about a crime where somebody makes an honest or silly mistake--we've all made silly mistakes and we all deserve a second chance—is increasing at an exponential rate across this country for people under the age of 18. As guardians of our young people, we have a responsibility to protect innocent children and see that those who commit violent acts receive the attention they deserve to try to change that criminality. We are not going to do it by reducing or eliminating sentencing. That is the appropriate place to make sure the experts dealing with that are able to deal with those people.