Justice Committee on March 29th, 2010

[Bob Dechert, Conservative, Mississauga—Erindale, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ladies and gentlemen, I really appreciate your comments here this afternoon. It's very helpful to us. In particular, Ms. Chamut, I want to thank you for your comments here. They are very helpful to us. I think what you're doing here today and what you do helping other people takes a lot of courage. I really appreciate that.

I want to clarify a couple of things you said earlier. I think you mentioned that when we get the men who victimize, traffic, and abuse women into our system, we ought to deal with them more harshly that we have in the past. Was that your point of view?

[Norma Chamut]

Definitely. A man who rapes and beats a woman gets two years in jail. She's scarred for life. A lot of times they don't get jailed; they get probation.

[Bob Dechert, Conservative, Mississauga—Erindale, ON]

You think that if we make some of those sentences more severe, it will help prevent other women from being abused.

[Norma Chamut]

I do believe that. Nowadays we're not allowed to spank our children, so we take away consequences. I'm not saying that beating your children is a good thing. I'm a firm believer in discipline, because if we know what the consequence will be at the end we won't step out and do some things. My grandson's learning to walk so he's touching things. I slap his hand and tell him no so that he knows the consequence if he touches my things.

In our judicial system, I think we've removed a lot of that stuff. We've allowed a lot of these things to take place because there are no consequences for anybody's actions anymore.

[Bob Dechert, Conservative, Mississauga—Erindale, ON]

You mentioned earlier something about the way we treat young offenders.

[Norma Chamut]

If a young offender murders someone they get up to three years.

[Bob Dechert, Conservative, Mississauga—Erindale, ON]

Do you think that young people—say young men aged 16 or 17—know that if they do a crime, they'll get a lesser sentence because of their age?

[Norma Chamut]

Yes.

[Bob Dechert, Conservative, Mississauga—Erindale, ON]

Do gangs prey upon that? Do they use younger people to do those crimes?

[Norma Chamut]

Yes. That's why the younger ones are sent out to do the severe crimes like murder and stuff. They don't get as much time. They're not going to get a life sentence.

[Bob Dechert, Conservative, Mississauga—Erindale, ON]

Right. I've heard from others that older gang members will use the younger members to do the crimes, because of the way our system is.

[Norma Chamut]

Exactly, because they get less time.

[Bob Dechert, Conservative, Mississauga—Erindale, ON]

Our government has just announced some changes to the Youth Criminal Justice Act. Do you think those are things we ought to be doing?

[Norma Chamut]

Yes, I do.

[Bob Dechert, Conservative, Mississauga—Erindale, ON]

Thank you. I really appreciate your testimony.

Mr. Accord, I want to ask you a couple of questions.

Where do the drugs come from that young Somali and other young gang members get involved in selling and trading, and maybe use themselves? Who's bringing them into Canada? What organizations are bringing them into Canada? What do we need to focus on to stop the supply of those drugs?

[Mahamad Accord]

Our community has recently arrived and we don't have the means to.... We've found out that the people involved in those crimes are not the main ones; they're usually the lower-level ones. So we don't know who has got in. But in Alberta the top organization recruiting our young ones is usually the Hells Angels, the ones that come from Ontario.

But we are not only dealing with crime; we're also dealing with terrorism. For us, it's not, in a sense, those people who have nothing to do, those who drop out, and the only glamour they have is the money. It's also glamorous what terrorism offers them. A lot of our young men from Ontario went overseas...go back to Somalia to find them. Recently one of them was killed there.

So for us, it's not just them being involved in organized crime; it's also terrorism. For us, they think it's higher than the other one. If they are dealing with drugs, they will either be killed or arrested. But right now we are afraid of the radicalization of our youth, because they've been frustrated by the system.

[Bob Dechert, Conservative, Mississauga—Erindale, ON]

Who is radicalizing the youth? Who is doing that?

[Mahamad Accord]

It's al Qaeda and other groups. Right now we have the al-Shabaab threat over our heads.

[Bob Dechert, Conservative, Mississauga—Erindale, ON]

How do they recruit people in Canada?

[Mahamad Accord]

Oh, they have the Internet. They have YouTube clips. Right now we have a guy who, from America, went to Somalia radicalizing, and whether it's drugs or whatever, he's glamourizing it: Well, I'm here, I'm young, and you're not doing anything.

Do you know who's going there? Engineers. The last guy who got killed was an engineer.

So we cannot focus only on those people who drop out. It's also the people who do well.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Thank you.

Ms. Mendes.

[Alexandra Mendes, Liberal, Brossard—La Prairie, QC]

I think we have an enormous amount of material from all four of you to discuss for a long time.

You mentioned, Mr. Accord, that a lot of the children who have been recruited and brought into these gangs have been disillusioned by the fact that their parents didn't have the social, professional, or economic integration that their university education would have allowed them to dream of.

Have the children themselves been directed towards achieving higher education? Is that what you're saying, that they don't see the need for that higher education because their parents don't get the jobs?

[Mahamad Accord]

That's what those who are involved in the gangs have been telling us. So when we say, “Why don't you get out of the gangs?”, they look at the other side of it or they look at the people who are older than they are, and they do nothing. So for us it's a lack of integration as a community.

The second thing is where you direct your resources. The resources were for settlement before, but there was nothing directed toward integration. Right now we are focusing on going to 0.01% of our community, but we are forgetting about 99.99%. So for the majority of my community, a lack of integration is fostered. Even I am frustrated at the lack of opportunity that exists, even though I have spent more than half of my life here, and I hold two degrees. So the lack of integration is the issue.

[Alexandra Mendes, Liberal, Brossard—La Prairie, QC]

You mean economic integration.

[Mahamad Accord]

I mean economic. Right now, if you are settled, the agencies that do settlement get more dollars and more resources than those agencies who focus on integration. So there is a misplacement of the resources.

And then there is a mischaracterization of the youth. Who are they? They are not Somalian, obviously, because they know nothing about it, and they're not considered Canadians. So when they get killed, what we know is that they are Somali.

So mischaracterization is an issue. All of a sudden the community is also victimized.