Thank you.
I wish I was familiar with Bill C-4, but I'm not. That being said, I completely agree that there are concrete steps that can be taken with young people to ensure prevention, to ensure that they don't get to the next stage, which is organized crime. If you don't intervene when they're a young person, that's eventually where they'll evolve to.
I'm happy to say that there are a number of concrete steps we can take within the community that would lead to prevention. One of the things we've been able to do very successfully within the Malvern and Scarborough communities is to empower the neighbourhoods themselves. That old cliché, “it takes a village to raise a child”, is very, very true, especially within the context of the communities. As I mentioned before, there are so many fathers missing and so many single parents who are not able to cope.
Another thing you touched on was the organizations that are doing critical work. There's Tropicana, Hoodlinc Youth Organization, of course, and there's Operation Springboard. There are a number of organizations within the GTA that are doing critical work in terms of prevention.
The Safe Schools Act in Ontario has been referred to on a number of occasions as the gang recruitment act. We see young people coming through the system who are different from what teachers and school administrative staff are used to dealing with. They need different learning strategies. As these learning strategies are not available to school administration staff and to schools, these young people end up in the community disengaged from school.
We need to create alternative school models that specifically address the needs of young people coming out of at-risk, high-risk, communities. In terms of successes, we currently have a ROSE program—real opportunity for success in education—which is an alternative school model that's done in collaboration with the Toronto Catholic District School Board. We see major successes from this model. I'd say 9 out of every 10 kids who come through there are able to graduate from high school. As a matter of fact, the only time we lose young people in this school is to prison or death.
From my standpoint, there are a number of things that an individual or organization can do, on a daily basis, that can lead to the betterment of a young person's life and the prevention of them getting mixed up in the criminal justice system. These are simple things. You need to act like a parent, play a parental role, where you ensure that young people get a meal in the morning. I've seen young people in my neighbourhood who have gone entire school days without having a meal to eat. That's the simple act of providing a meal for them in the morning.
Providing structure has helped a lot of young people within my community who don't feel they can accomplish anything. The history of failure that they've gone through in their lives persists today. The can-do attitude is simply not there. They don't believe they can do anything positive.
You, as an individual or an organization, can get out there, help them get their driver's licence, get enrolled in school, help them if they have a case before the criminal justice system, help them get a lawyer to negotiate that legal process. It's the simple things. Ensure that there's a homework club and that they go to the homework club; ensure that there are recreational and social activities after school. Keep them off the streets, and keep them engaged in a positive way.