Mr. Speaker, I want to say a few words on the bill this morning. I congratulate the hon. member for York South-Weston on bringing the issue forward. It is one that has been very much on the minds of all members of Parliament and certainly on the minds of the general public. There are some very succinct parts of the young offenders legislation that should be given a very serious look and review.
This issue is like any other major issue that arises and becomes a public concern. There are serious events that occur that bring the issue forward in the media. People feel that nothing is working. Something is working. Something is not. The something that is not working should be reviewed and repaired.
All legislation has to be changed from time to time to meet the trends and the changes that take place in society. However there is one thing I disagree with. As a former educator I hear some people saying that young offenders do not understand the implications of what they are doing. I can say, having taught many teenagers in my earlier days before coming to this institution, they understand what they are doing. No one needs to throw that argument out. It will not work.
The other sad part of this argument is the fact that some people automatically think that these people come from poor homes, no training and so on in the home. There are areas where this occurs. There are other cases where people are looked after in the home and they still go astray because peer pressure is very strong on them to join gangs and go in the wrong direction.
I spoke many times in the last Parliament on young offenders because we had a serious case in my constituency in the village of Barry's Bay. I think one of the major problems is that the plea bargaining that goes on in the courts is simply not justifiable and cannot be supported. I am glad to know that the justice committee at the direction of the government is making a serious review of this legislation and will probably be into it before June or, if not, during the month of June. I congratulate it on that.
The plea bargaining that goes on in our courts today has to be changed if we are going to change the Young Offenders Act and other legislation dealing with the criminal element. There is no way that we can allow lawyers to go on bargaining away the laws of the country. The laws of the country are put in the records of Parliament, put in legislation to be carried out. That is the intent of the legislators who pass them.
I am absolutely opposed to handing it over to a group of lawyers and the court and the crown and saying: "You drop this, I will take that". In the end you have a situation similar to one that was brought to my attention recently by the hon. member for Victoria-Haliburton. A person goes into a store with a sawed-off shotgun, holds up the store, gets away, is finally caught and brought into court. When he is sentenced he gets four months and he will probably be out in two and a half months. They used to get 10, 12 and 15 years for armed robbery.
That is not justice in the eyes of the public and the punishment certainly does not fit the crime. These are things that have to be changed.
We cannot have people committing crimes in this country and walking away laughing at the law. That is indeed what is going on. We cannot have people going down the streets and shooting a top-notch graduate student on a sidewalk in Ottawa, Toronto or anywhere else, destroying good lives.
The system has to be seriously reviewed, not just reviewed and looked at and talked about and so on. I wish the justice committee well as it does this later. I thank the hon. member for York South-Weston for bringing the issue before the House and giving us a chance to discuss it. I know he is very serious about having the bill adopted for further study and brought before the justice committee.
The bottom line here, and I do not like using that term because it is usually used in an unsophisticated manner, or the real essence of law is that legislators pass laws hopefully to be obeyed, hopefully to be administered, hopefully not to allow a loophole where the law can be bargained away for those who want to get the case over with and win cases for people who should not be on the streets. When someone does get out on the street early and commits another crime, up goes another big sympathy wave saying: "Oh, this person shouldn't be out on the street".
He should not have been out on the street. The law has to be administered. Some of it is already on the books so that when a person is in prison he or she should not be out of incarceration until they have had medical treatment and are deemed by medical authorities to be capable of running their own lives, leading a decent life out on the streets and byways.
If there is anything that we are going to have to improve along with this legislation, it is to make sure that the treatment, medical care and the advising are in place to bring these young people back into a productive way of life.
There are some who have come under the Young Offenders Act who are now very productive in society. We have to recognize that side, too. It is not a one-sided picture. We can only try to perfect it if we try to correct the things that are not working in it today.
I want to review briefly the things that I have touched on. There is the medical treatment of these people, ensuring that the plea bargaining system is changed so that it is going to back up the law that we put on the books, the publishing of names of young offenders as indicated in the hon. member's private members' bill this morning and the fact that these young people do know what they are doing.
Let us go at this in a very constructive way and correct what is working to complement that which is working today.