I was at one of those round tables in Toronto.
In answer to your question, it seems to me that the original section 3 is preferable. I didn't talk about the changes to section 3 because I had 10 minutes and I was focusing on other things.
I think the issue here is that the focus on protecting the public is a narrow focus that is very difficult to accomplish. I rather liked the original construction because it was talking about, among other things, long-term protection and it was focusing on the long term rather than short term.
The difficulty with focusing on protecting the public is that the language implies that the only way one could protect the public or the easiest way to protect the public is through incapacitation, through locking kids up or locking people up. And rather than saying that what we're trying to do is to prevent, rehabilitate, and hold people accountable and through that complex mechanism we will have a better society, it's telling us to take bad people and put them away. So I'm certainly not in favour of this.
In answer to your final question about does this in effect, then, turn this into a simple Criminal Code, my answer would be no. And the reason is there is a lot in the Youth Criminal Justice Act. The sentencing provisions alone, for example, are important and much clearer than the sentencing provisions in the Criminal Code, and I think are preferable in many ways, not just for youth, but the structure of the Youth Criminal Justice Act sentencing provisions are superior to those of the Criminal Code.