Mr. Speaker, in his latest report the Auditor General took what I consider to be a major step forward in discharging the duties of his office.
In addition to the traditional accounts of waste and questionable accounting practices, this time around he pointed out that a major cause of wasted money-and in my view this is the major cause-is not overpaid civil servants, the redecorating of offices, or the wasting of staples and paper clips. The problem the Auditor General focused on this time around is that we spend billions of dollars a year on programs without ever saying what the programs are intended to achieve, or how we measure their success in achieving their goals.
It is not hard to think of a government program to which this criticism applies. Actually it is hard to think of one that it does not apply to. We have social programs that hurt society. We have family programs that destroy families. We have aboriginal programs that keep Canada's Indians from ever achieving self-sufficiency. We have trade programs that discourage free trade. We have expenditure control legislation that allows spending to spiral out of control, and so on. It is not a pretty sight.
Every time one of these programs fails, the solution is to spend more money. We never ask what we are trying to do, how we will know whether or not we have achieved it, and when we will shut the program down if we do not see some success.
Getting to the Young Offenders Act, what is it supposed to be doing? Is it doing it? How can we tell? If it is not, at what point do we change our approach?
The purpose of the Young Offenders Act is quite clear. It is intended to draw a distinction between hardened adult offenders on the one hand and juveniles on the other. Then it is intended to separate the hardened juvenile offender from the kid who got in with the wrong crowd and made a foolish mistake. Most of us would agree that the kid who made a foolish mistake and that kid alone deserves a second chance.
I am sure many members are thinking: "Come off it, Mike. In this country we do not hold hardened adult criminals responsible either", and this is sadly true. It is difficult to pick up a newspaper today without seeing some dreadful tale of an innocent person abused or slaughtered by someone who ought still to be in prison serving out their sentence. Perhaps our governments do not take crime seriously even by adults, but the public wants them to and the Liberals ignore that desire at their grave peril.
Last time the Liberals formed the government the public got so sick of their arrogance that it reduced them to some 40 seats in Parliament in the 1984 election. Let me serve notice here and now that if the Prime Minister and the cabinet ignore public feelings about crime, that will be the good old days for the Liberal Party.
If the Liberals hope to avoid such a debacle, there are so many things they are doing that they had better not. They had better not raise taxes for one thing. They had better not keep spending more money than they take in for another. They had better apply the Auditor General's critique to their entire crime policy. Is crime being deterred? How do we measure it? If it is not, how do we change the law so that it is?
To help the Liberals in this unfamiliar exercise of considering whether what they are doing is actually working, I would like to start by applying the Auditor General's criteria to the Young Offenders Act and to these amendments to it.
The Young Offenders Act is supposed to give a second chance to those who deserve it. Is that what it is doing? Or is it just giving a licence to those under 18 to commit crimes? How can we tell? It seems quite simple to me.
If the Young Offenders Act is working, those youths who are given light sentences, who have their records sealed when they reach the age of majority, who receive no punishment at all for their misdeeds, should subsequently turn out to be better citizens than those who are selected for more severe punishment. Young people who get into trouble with the law should be less inclined to continue their criminal careers into adulthood than before there was the Young Offenders Act.
In short, if the Young Offenders Act is working, we would either have no more youth crime than we had in the past or perhaps a little bit more but a much lower rate of juvenile delinquents going on to become adult criminals. If not, if youth crime is skyrocketing and young offenders who receive a light slap on the wrist for serious acts like robbery, assault, even rape and murder go on to commit serious crimes as adults, then the Young Offenders Act is failing.
To me, the scariest possibility would be that the young thugs are manifesting an increasingly obvious awareness that they are beyond the reach of the law because of the Young Offenders Act, that they are responding rationally to the incentives government has built into its policies. That would be easy to measure too. Just look to see when the Young Offenders Act came into force and then after a few years delay when teenagers came to understand these provisions youth crime skyrocketed.
I wonder whether the government bothers to keep statistics on these questions and if it does, whether it will release them. I wonder whether we had less youth crime before the Young Offenders Act or more. I wonder what proportion of those who receive lenient sentences or have their records sealed when they turn 18 go on to commit more serious crimes as opposed to those who used to receive a stiff punishment for an evil act.
I am submitting these as Order Paper questions because as Canadians we have a right to know what is going on. That includes knowing whether the Minister of Justice knows or cares whether the Young Offenders Act is working. If it turns out that when measured adequately against clear criteria the Young Offenders Act is the failure it seems to be, then I wonder something else. I wonder what the government's priorities are.
Does the Minister of Justice think that his primary and overwhelming responsibility is protecting the lives, liberties and property of Canadian citizens and does he measure each of his initiatives against that criterion? Or is he busy trying to turn us all into socially aware, personally tolerant, cappuccino drinking, fluently trilingual citizens of the global village of the 21st century? Is he too caught up in his social engineering to protect society as it now exists?
Some will doubtless believe I am being unfair to the minister. Some will doubtless maintain that the justice minister knows exactly what the Young Offenders Act and these amendments to it are supposed to achieve. And he knows exactly how to measure success.
The Young Offenders Act, some will tell me, is part of a grand social engineering project of this and previous Liberal governments. It is the abolition of personal responsibility. These people will further tell me that the Minister of Justice knows exactly what the amendments are intended to achieve. They are intended to deceive the bumpkins out in the hinterland into thinking that crime is being punished and innocence rewarded so that the project of relieving us all of responsibility can proceed unmolested.
These people will tell me that the justice minister has very clear ideas how to measure his success on this project. They will say that if the justice minister can get the polls to say Canadians think he is cracking down on youth crime, he will not actually have to hold murderous young thugs accountable for their acts of evil. I do not think so.
I prefer to be charitable and assume that the justice minister and the Liberals are so convinced of their divine right to rule over Canadians and reshape them for their own good that they do not bother asking themselves whether what they are doing is working.
That is why I have risen in the Chamber today, to tell the justice minister as clearly and forcefully as I can that when his party was elected on the promise of a better yesterday, voters had in mind a time when jobs were more secure, the national debt was far lower and the streets were a lot safer. That is what they want to come back, not to the crazy experiments and wild excesses of the Trudeau years.
I hope the Minister of Justice, the Prime Minister and the entire government understand that Canadians really do believe and cherish individual responsibility. They overwhelmingly favour the right to own property. They overwhelmingly favour politicians who listen to their constituents. They overwhelmingly favour the right of law-abiding citizens to live in freedom and in security. And they overwhelmingly favour tougher action against crime and criminals of whatever age.
I call on the Minister of Justice, the Prime Minister and the government to take back this legislation and to repudiate the entire approach behind it. I call on them to recognize that the most primary duty of a government is to protect the lives, liberty and property of its citizens from force and fraud.
I call on them to develop and make public a set of standards for measuring the success or failure of the Young Offenders Act against this goal. And I call on them to amend it so that it works or abolish it if it cannot be made to work.
Enough of softness on crime. Enough coddling. Enough punishing the innocent and pardoning the guilty. Either they do it now or the Reform government does it after 1997 while they collect their undeserved pensions and write their wistful memoirs.
That would be simple justice. Simple justice is what the Canadian public wants and simple justice is what the Reform Party is going to give them.