You have given a good summary of my thinking.
We have to say, most importantly, that actually, if the bill had been introduced five years ago, before the pandemic and before the rise in the number of crimes, when the numbers were falling, there would have been no problem, we would have said we were going in the right direction.
Registered firearms present no problems. In the last two years, unfortunately, illegal firearms are appearing on the streets. School-aged children can buy them on Instagram. They arrange to meet up and they go get one. These young people then pick on other young people in the park because they don't like them.
We have to stress the ease with which young people have access to violence, this desire to shoot everywhere you want without fear of getting caught. These young people say to themselves that because of their age, if they get arrested for the first time, they will just get a rap on the knuckles, and then they won't go back to it.
I have started prevention programs for five-year-olds. When I was elected mayor, some students in the elementary schools in my borough, or their brothers who were members of street gangs, were assigned to oversee activities and distribute drugs in the schoolyard. We're talking about children, some of them not yet five years old.
So then we said to ourselves that we had to solve this problem and get children to understand when they are young. We had to give these children access to programs and sports, make sure they eat properly, and make sure they can tell right from wrong. We have been succeeding in doing this for15 years. We have changed the lives of an entire generation.
We are now finding that these children have grown up. Some of them are crossing the line that separates them from crime, and that is often explained by poverty and the social environment where they are living.
I'll give you an example. A father came to see me to tell me he wanted his child to go to university. The child belonged to the Haitian community—all communities are represented in my borough. This father, a taxi driver, confided in me. He told me that since he and his family were now living in Canada, he wanted his child to go to university, to get a good job. But when he tried to persuade his son, the son said: "Dad, you know, on the weekend, I made the equivalent of what you make in a month. Why would I go to university?" The boy is a member of a street gang. For him, that was the easy solution.
When we ask these young people what they want to do in life, they tell us they just want to get through the day, because they don't know whether they will still be alive tomorrow. That is what life is like every day for some young people in the Saint-Michel neighbourhood.