Our amendment is to replace line 6 on page 87 with the following words:
(a) an offence committed intentionally or recklessly by a young person
That has to do with the definition of “violent offence”. Again, we had a significant expert opinion on that from Professor Nick Bala, for one, and from the Canadian Bar Association. They supported the notion of defining “violent offence” but said it should not include cases of endangerment without the element of intention or recklessness, as Professor Bala said:
to take account of the limited foresight of youth; the words “young person knows or ought to know would endanger the life or safety etc...” should be added.
So he proposed a different type of amendment, but what we are proposing here is the use of the words, “an offence committed intentionally or recklessly by a young person”.
The emphasis here was that there needs to be a recognition for violent offences, but the whole concept of the Youth Criminal Justice Act is to recognize that people who are subject to the act under the age of 18 have a limited or diminished foresight because of their youth. This has been demonstrated many times. The effect of this particular definition and the consequences, of course, are that more young people will be treated in a different way, by pretrial detention and other matters, by the use of “violent offences”.
Some of the commentary that was made has to do with the number of young people who Canada does incarcerate—as suggested by Professor Bala in his brief and his comments to the committee. We had a situation in Canada where, under the Young Offenders Act, we had one of the highest rates of custody for adolescents in the world. Even with the decline since the Youth Criminal Justice Act, the rates of youth custody in Canada remain much higher than some western European countries, as well as New Zealand. He presented some charts to show Canada's situation in that regard.
We don't have any more violent a society in Canada to justify that, and I think one of the big concerns here is that if there's an incidental endangerment that's not intentional, not caused by recklessness, that it should not be included in that particular offence.
We have two separate...we're on the same clause. On page 87 there's another, NDP-50, which is also an amendment to clause 167, line 12, which is of the same effect. I'll take advantage of the fact that I'm talking on this clause to deal with that as well, making a change by replacing line 12, as well as line 6, to include that element of intention or recklessness into the offence.
Having said that, Chair, unless my colleagues have something in addition to add, I'll leave it at that.