I hope that when you are dealing with Bill C-4 and other proposed legislation that deals with youth justice, you take up a suggestion that I made some time ago that you hear from judges in camera who deal with these issues, because they're the best ones who can tell you about what they're dealing with, in front of you.
Generically, they can't vote for you until they're a certain age. They can't drive a motor vehicle until they're a certain age. There are rules built into society, and we make a decision, arbitrarily, that under a certain age is a child. They do not have the same level of development, maturity, or discipline. Some of them have more discipline than some people my age, I suppose. We have to recognize that these people are children, and there's nothing wrong with saying they're children, because do you know what? If you had a 20-year-old child and they were going off someplace and you didn't know where they were going, you'd want to know, because you don't think they're equipped yet to deal with...and make decisions.
We treat them differently because they are different. They have different rights. They don't have as many rights as adults do. The bottom line is that what they don't have is the life experience to make the proper decisions. Most kids are into immediate gratification. The Internet is beamed at them; there is Facebook, if they can afford it--all of the things we throw at them. If there's nobody there to say, “Wait a minute, what are you watching on television, do you understand this”....
Kids--and we've chosen the age of 18--don't have the discipline to stop and say, “I'm going to look at this two years from now.” We talked about this before. Kids who are in a motor vehicle getting ready to rev at a stop sign are not thinking about a mandatory minimum. That's not what they're thinking about. They're not thinking that far. They don't have the discipline. They're looking for immediate gratification, which is part of youth, and what we talked about once before is that sometimes you can see some of the measures that are proposed as immediate gratification, from a legislative point of view. They're making a statement.
The best people who can deal with and help you make a decision about youth are the judges who deal with them every day, and I really urge you to get some of these judges in camera to help you with what works and what doesn't. You're going to hear some judges say, “There are some bad kids who come in front of us”, but you're also going to hear judges tell you stories that are going to make your blood curdle at some of the situations these kids find themselves in that they have no power over.