Mr. Speaker, when the government introduced the Young Offenders Act and said that it intended to make some changes to the act it was very pleasing for me because if ever there was an act that needed modified it is the Young Offenders Act. However, that pleasure quickly faded when I found out that all the changes it really had in mind was just a little bit of tokenism.
One of the major things we are concerned about of course is 16 and 17 year olds and whether they are going to be treated as kids or whether they are going to be treated as adults when they commit crimes.
The government has taken a little portion of this. It has said for 16 and 17 year olds it intends, most of the time at least, to raise them to adult court. The onus will be on them to show cause why they should not be tried in adult court and why in fact they should be tried as young offenders.
This raises two problems. One of the basic problems is if they are tried as adults while still being young offenders they are still treated differently than people who are regular adults being tried in that adult court.
The second problem, and this is the larger one, is that we have a tremendous bureaucracy now. This bureaucracy is part of what drives the deficit and debt as high as it is and climbing continually.
What is going to happen is every time one of these young offenders is proposed to be raised to adult court we are going to have them appealing this and trying to fight it. What we are going to be faced with are trials to determine where the trial is going to be held, whether it is going to be in juvenile court or adult court. That is not doing anything to the legal system. That is not doing anything to resolve the problem of bureaucracy and it is certainly not doing anything to bring justice to this act.
One of the things we think should happen is that the age should be dropped. Sixteen and seventeen-year olds should be tried as adults and should be classed as adults. We think the overall age should be dropped. If you have 10 and 11 year olds committing crimes there has to be some facility to deal with that other than saying that was not very nice and sending them home to their parents, especially when the government is also talking about changing the act so that even once they send them home to their parents the parents are powerless to do anything.
Another thing the government is touching on, but again it is only tokenism, is identifying the criminal activities of young offenders. What we had proposed is that all crimes of 14 and 15 year olds should be readily available through the media and for those 10 to 13 they should be made public if, in the judge's opinion, the need for the public to know and protect itself is greater than the need for confidentiality on the part of the offender.
If you would consider a situation in which one of these young offenders may be exhibiting some form of violent behaviour and is released back to a classroom full of other children, should not the school authorities for one and the parents of the other children there know that there was a potential problem and take the necessary steps to ensure the safety of their own children?
Another area that did not get touched on at all is the need to change the face of the way our correctional facilities work. What we need is a facility that bases its primary actions on education, skills training, community service and one other thing that the government seems loath to introduce, discipline. We do not have a structured type of system that is going to provide some type of education, some kind of knowledge so that they can become useful people instead of sitting in what often are considered country club resorts compared with what many law-abiding
young people have on the outside. We are doing absolutely nothing but making a mockery of our entire system.
The final area where we believe there has to be some major change and something where the government did not even involve itself in tokenism on is the concept of parental responsibility. We believe that whenever there is a young offender and it can be shown that lack of parental control is a factor in the crime being committed then those parents must be responsible for identifying the victim for their losses.
We will have some people arguing as to whether that is fair to the parents. Maybe the parents could not stop the problem. Maybe it is not really being fair to the parents of this young offender. We have to look at the two sides of it. On one side we have a parent, in the situation we are suggesting, and it has been demonstrated that their lack of exercising parental control was a contributing factor to the offence being committed.
On the other side we have the victim. The victim is wholly innocent. There is no question of the innocence of a victim in these types of situations. Who really should have the financial burden placed upon them by the actions of this offender? Should it be a wholly innocent victim or should it be a parent who perhaps should have exercised more control in preventing that offence in the first place? If there is any injustice in this at all it certainly should be on the side of the one where there could be presumed certain responsibility for this. There is no question that it should not fall on the victim who is wholly innocent.
We believe that these are basic changes to the act that must take place. The Liberal government has not addressed this concept whatsoever.
One of the things that involves the Young Offenders Act and in fact the entire criminal justice system is what is this act in place for. Who are we trying to protect? Who are we trying to reward or make life easier for? Is it the victim or is it the person who perpetrates the crime? I suggest that we have to provide protection for the innocent people.
There may well be cause for people to say the poor youth, they have had a bad upbringing, they come from a broken home, they come from poverty. These things may all be true and may have in fact contributed to the person committing the crime.
We have to deal with those issues separately. Our first premise is that we must protect law-abiding citizens and their property. The Young Offenders Act needs to be changed and the reason it needs to be changed is for protection of society at large and also for young people themselves who are the most frequent victims of juvenile crime.
I had high hopes when they talked of introducing this change to the Young Offenders Act and I am very disappointed that they have gone half measure. On one side, we might say that something is better than nothing but on review it seems that what they are offering us is nothing at all.