I think what you did in Sparwood is a national inspiration. You did tremendous work there. I think having more situations in which young people actually hear from victims and hear in some cases about the tremendous damage they have done.... I would even sometimes consider this in some property offences. I think it's very important for offenders to hear about how people whose property has been damaged feel about that.
The problem, and this goes back to deterrence, is the way in which young people's brains develop. They have full physical stature but their brain is not fully developed. They don't understand the consequences of their acts, whether those acts are starting to smoke or unsafe sex practices, and in the context of violence, they often don't appreciate what it is they're doing to the victims. Sometimes that's why their acts are incredibly callous. So I think hearing from the victims is very important.
Actually, our present legislation does allow for that. It does allow for conferencing. For example, in Alberta we have the Calgary community conferencing model. The present act does have that kind of model of restorative justice. Many victims actually feel better about that than about going to court, or in addition to going to court. The reason we don't have it is not because of legislation; it's because of provincial implementation. Here in Ontario we don't have nearly enough resources devoted toward this kind of process of conferencing and engaging victims. If the issue is that we want to see changes in the youth justice system to have a safer society, I completely agree. The question is how we're going to achieve that.
In this context, is it a problem with the federal legislation, or is it how the provinces are implementing it? I think many of the problems that we see in the youth justice system are actually issues of provincial implementation, some of which have to do with resource issues, some of which, perhaps, are philosophical, and some of which have to do with the attitudes of professionals who've been in the system for a long time. So changing the attitudes of police officers, which is one of the things that happened in Sparwood, is really important, but it takes time to develop that, to get professionals to focus on the needs of victims as well as of the justice system.