Thank you very much for inviting me to participate in this committee.
I'm probably the only person to appear before this committee who wishes he wasn't. My 20-year-old son TJ was brutally murdered on January 5, 2003. His murder was well planned by four young men aged 17 to 20. He was beaten by two of them, injected in the neck with Drano, strangled with a shoelace while being pulled by his neck over the front seat of a car, stripped of most of his clothing, dumped in a ditch where one of them did jumping jacks on his chest, and stabbed multiple times in the neck, only to be found five weeks later under three feet of snow.
Three people were convicted. Two of them received life sentences with a chance of parole after 15 years. One is up for parole in just a few weeks. The 17-year-old mastermind was acquitted after they all refused to testify against him.
This was my beginning of a journey that brought me here today. What started with rage and disbelief ended in a devotion to prevention. My wife Karen, who is sitting behind me, and I created the TJ's Gift Foundation, now a registered charity, which raises $50,000 a year, with 100% of that money going to peer-led drug education programs in Manitoba schools.
I recently left the business world, and just eight weeks ago the Manitoba Department of Justice invested in my new organization, called GAP, Gang Awareness for Parents. My mission is to educate parents before their children get involved in gangs, and offer guidance to help them.
This journey has not been easy. It has been heartbreaking, depressing, enlightening, and rewarding. During these seven years I have talked with far too many victims and I have met many drug-addicted youth, gang wannabes, and street gang members.
How did these individuals end up where they are? There's really no greater gift than that of being a parent, and yet so many abuse and squander this gift. When our youth are abused and squandered, in many cases they end up being cared for by the system.
We've all been raised with the adage that it takes a village to raise a child, but the problem is that we throw many of these children in jail. An example of this is when we see kids stealing cars. They are incarcerated over and over again, and now we want to throw them in jail for even longer. Is that how we want to raise our children? Is that what we want to do with the gift that we were given as a community when they were abandoned? Do we continue this cycle and toss them away? No. We treat them, we stand by them, we help them, we care for them, and we believe in them.
Last week I was in a Toronto conference on gangs. I listened and talked with many former gang members who had turned their lives around. Not one told me that being in jail or the threat of being in jail turned them around. I asked what did. They told me that people standing by them and believing in them turned them around. That is what they needed, someone to care for them. Someone in the village cared. Now these abused and abandoned people are caring for others. That truly is a village raising a child.
The public is demanding that the government do something about the state of gangs in Canada, so changes are being made to the YCJA: more mandatory minimum sentences, longer sentences, and as a result, many more people in jails. The Canadian government is presently spending $1,000 a day on the incarceration of three of my son's murderers. This case alone costs $360,000 a year. This cost will go on for many, many years, and in my case justifiably so, as they murdered my son. We are not talking about the average person who goes to jail. This was murder. I can't help but wonder, though, why we couldn't have invested that thousand dollars a day--or even half of that--on prevention. Maybe I would not have to be here addressing this panel.
I use the term “investment”, and I'm glad Paul used that word as well, rather than “spending”. We invest to gain returns. We spend when mistakes are made.
This is the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. I thought it was an appropriate title. With the justice part, it needs to be handed out when dealing with organized crime and gangs. It is difficult to write laws that are specific enough to do what is intended or needed. Generally they are too broad. I believe the laws should somehow--and I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know how--be written to deal with gangs that are part of the higher-level organized gang and their puppet clubs. I do believe that this country needs to crack down on these gangs.
I personally know a puppet club member who was recently arrested in Winnepeg. I've know him since the day he was born. This person did not come from a disadvantaged background. He made choices along the way, all the time knowing what may lie ahead of him. He knew what he was doing.
He made a lot of money. He lived the life, he drove fast cars, and he had all the toys. Only now, when he is facing 12 years, is he realizing that he needs to change. He had just gotten out of jail after several years and was attempting to change, or so he told me just a month before he was arrested. However, he fell back into it very shortly, but he knew the consequences when he fell back in and he still made a choice. He is not unlike anyone else in these puppet clubs; in fact, he is the norm—and I'm sure you've heard about those kinds of gangs in other cities.
However, each province has unique gangs in their cities. The street gangs that exist in Winnipeg do not exist in Vancouver, Toronto, or other cities. The street-level gangs need to be handled differently, with an understanding of how these young people got to where they are. Today, judges take aboriginal ancestry and upbringing into play. When considering sentencing, the judge will often reduce that sentence; in fact, it's demanded of him or her. That same type of consideration needs to be given to these lower-level gang members.
When I meet with street gang members, and I have met many, they are a completely different story from the person I was referring to above. Every single one got there as a result of poverty, mental illness, being in a variety of foster homes, and a whole host of other reasons. The other presenters here today, such as Just TV and Turning the Tides, work with these young people and have huge success with keeping them out of gangs. I hope my organization will do the same. There are many groups like this that are trying to save these kids. In fact, they're all meeting today, coincidentally, two floors below us.
The other component of this committee is human rights. As a country—the village—it is our children's human rights to receive every opportunity to survive and prosper. Unfortunately, not everyone will. Some will fall through the cracks. We need to be there to pick up the pieces. Yesterday I read that the Canadian government wants to increase its prison budget by 27% to $3.1 billion. I encourage this committee to press the government to take 100% of this anticipated increase away from the prison budget and reallocate every cent into human rights, into prevention. This reversal would mean an investment in our country's future and would not even be considered by the public as a cost at all.
I know the cost of a life gone.
Excuse me....
I just wish that someone would have invested in and cared for TJ's murderers. Maybe they would have cared about themselves, and maybe they would have cared about TJ.
Thank you.