I thought you might do that.
I have a problem. I was only asked to come here on Monday, as a result of my report, so I spent the last three days reading my report again because it was four years since I had really been involved with it. Before I was involved with it, I had no experience with the Youth Criminal Justice Act, nor the Young Offenders Act, nor the Juvenile Delinquents Act, because I never had a youth in my court. I was in the Supreme Court and we were dealing with the adult situations. In Halifax, there was always a youth court of some kind. Once I started with the inquiry, I learned a tremendous amount about the Youth Criminal Justice Act and about youth justice. While I'm not an expert on the Youth Criminal Justice Act, I think I know an awful lot about youth and how they are dealt with and what problems they have and why they have them, and I'd just like to pass on to you what happened in the inquiry that I had.
As witnesses, I had police officers, I had RCMP officers, I had social workers, I had people who looked after group homes for children who had no other home, I had educators, I had mental health people, I had physical health people. I leaned about attention deficit disorder. I was fortunate that the expert from the U.S.A. was in Halifax that weekend and I attended his lectures, and so on, and I learned things that I really never had any idea about before. They all indicated to me that the problem is to deal with the child and understand the underlying factors that lead to the child being the way he is. That doesn't cover every situation, but it covers probably 98% of the youth who are being dealt with under the act--and maybe more.
I learned then that the Youth Criminal Justice Act really created a new justice system for youth. There are people in Canada who are opposed to that and still are opposed to that and think that every child who's convicted of something should be in jail. That's an attitude that I think comes from a lack of knowledge. If they understand the purpose of the act and they understand how it's working and the successes it has, the act is successful 90-something percent of the time. It sometimes needed to be tweaked a little bit so that we cover something that happened to not work. I had 50 days of that testimony that I spoke of, and not one of the witnesses turned around and said that this is a bad act, that this is an act that shouldn't have been passed. They all were supportive of it. They all wanted the thing to work; they all were trying to make it work. There are systemic problems in the institutions themselves that help to cause youth problems and to allow youth problems to develop further. One of those is delay. One of the biggest ones is delay.
The centre of attraction of my report was a young boy who, at 16 years of age, in a stolen vehicle, in a Halifax city street, was speeding to avoid the police and he crashed--it was a T-bar situation--directly into the driver's side of a car and flipped it in the air and drove it 20 or 30 feet and killed the driver, who was a supplementary aid teacher in a school--Theresa McEvoy. The boy had been in custody just a short time for stealing another car and leading the Mounties in a chase at 160 or 180 kilometres an hour at 12:30 at night down a highway towards Windsor.
He was released from custody on one morning. Two days after, in the morning, he stole another car and that's when he killed Theresa McEvoy. That boy had 38 outstanding charges against him and had never been in jail other than by being in custody for a week or two, really by his own agreement, to await the outcome of what was going to happen. There wasn't communication between people. The system faltered. As a result, the people of Nova Scotia were in an uproar. How could a boy have 38 outstanding charges and not be in jail, or not be somewhere, not be looked after? That was the situation that I had.
Now, for your guidance--and I'm not a preacher, and as I said, I've only come into this again since Monday--I think you have to understand certain things. You have to understand that the act is a complete new justice system for youth and that the treatment of youth is different from the treatment for adults. The reason children do what they are doing is based on their minds and how their minds work, and they work very differently than adults' minds. So you can't think in adult terms of how children should be dealt with. I think you should be aware that one of the underlying principles is that Canada is a party to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and that convention, really, among other things, indicates that the best interests of the child are a primary consideration, and also that custody is a last resort and should be for as short a period as is appropriate for the situation and for the person.
Now, because of the situation I was in, I came to the conclusion that the act was deficient, in that it deprived the court from taking the child and dealing with him at an early stage. In the area where I grew up, it was about grabbing him by the scruff of the neck and bringing him up short. It wasn't just to put him in prison. It was so that he'd become aware that the court and the police and authorities mean business, that they're not going to let him get away with these things. And a lot of it, as I say, was based on delay. My thrust, as I said, was for pre-trial custody only. I didn't really do anything about post-trial custody.
If you keep in mind that rehabilitation of the youth is the real aim, and you understand that that's happening in over 90% of the cases, then you have to realize that the act is working. Increasing custody in other circumstances or even in pre-trial for long periods of time is not really the way to go. The way to go is rehabilitation. That's what the act is designed to do and that's what we have to do. There are deficiencies, and the deficiencies are in funding, in what's available in the various provinces, and in what's available to provide the support and the professional people needed.
So I think that the Youth Criminal Justice Act, and you should appreciate this, contains the concepts and approaches to youth justice that should make all Canadians proud, and I think we're miles ahead of other countries in our dealing with youth justice.
Occasionally there's a horrendous case that develops and the media jump into the horrendous case, and they're like a starving lion attacking another animal. They're ready to just pounce on this thing for days and days in the media, and all they're doing is inciting those people—and I think it's a real minority—who are against the Youth Criminal Justice Act and are happy to have something to complain about.
Those were the general remarks. I don't propose to know very much about the actual wording that's there, because I haven't looked at it from that point of view, and I think I'll leave that to others. But I think the wording should follow the intent and theme of the act itself. That's my main point.
Thank you.