Mr. Speaker, I extend congratulations to my colleague from Calgary Northeast for an eloquent speech. It was full of a lot of good suggestions that I sincerely hope the government will be able to adopt in an effort to try to bring some sense to the increasingly absurd situation which is taking place within our prisons and reformatories.
Bill C-53, an act to amend the prisons and reformatories act, was a great opportunity for the government to put forth some constructive solutions to situations with which those who work within the system and those who are observers from without are increasingly dissatisfied. I particularly feel sorry for those working within the system, the men and women who work in corrections. They are finding it increasingly difficult to work within the system and to find meaning in what they do. The outcome of what they are faced with has been less than satisfactory, not from the good efforts they have made but from the fact that the system within which they operate is making it very difficult for them to put forth good solutions.
The suggestion within this bill, as my colleague from Calgary Northeast mentioned, is really to increase the number of temporary absence programs. The reason the government is proposing this is not for the safety of Canadians, it is not to improve the way in which crime and punishment operate within Canada, but it is purely to try to save money.
In the process of trying to save money, which we all approve of, there is going to be a huge cost. The cost is in releasing individuals who have committed crimes, sometimes very serious crimes, and compromising the innocent men, women and children who live in our great nation. That is the cost people are going to have to pay in the efforts the government is pursuing in this bill in trying to increase the number of temporary absence programs which exist within our country.
Of all the problems that are affecting our prisons and reformatories, the government is messing around with a very minor issue. This country's prisons and reformatories need a radical overhaul. My colleague from Calgary Northeast, my colleague from Surrey-White Rock-South Langley and my colleague from Fraser Valley West have all put forward some very eloquent solutions in which we can revamp our justice system to try to ensure that Canadians are safer and try to ensure that crime and punishment and sensible cost effective rehabilitation will be integral parts of the system.
Instead of pursuing these courses, instead of trying to make these solutions better, the government has chosen once again to nibble around the edges into an area that is relatively meaningless in the grand scheme of reforming our prison system. This not only happens within this bill but in fact happens to the majority of bills in this House. In fact it happens to the majority of work that is done in this House and in the committees of the House of Commons. Why is this so? Because we do not have a democracy here. We have a fiefdom.
Every member in this House, if they are honest and look into their hearts, will recognize very clearly that a small cadre of elected and unelected, invisible, unaccountable individuals are making the major decisions within this country. Because of the whip structure that we labour under in this country, the good men and women who work in this House as members of Parliament across party lines are forced to engage in behaviour and are forced to do the bidding of these unelected and unaccountable individuals.
This is not a democracy. This is a fiefdom. It does a huge disservice not only to the people in this House, but most important it does a huge disservice to the Canadian public, the people we are supposed to serve.
This bill provides the Canadian people with just one more example of why our system simply does not work. What goes on in this House 80 per cent of the time is a sham. It is a complete and utter sham.
It is offensive to me that we are dealing with nibbling around this issue. Unlike what the government believes, the situation is that our streets are becoming less safe all the time. It is true that the stated statistics demonstrate that there has been a decrease in crime in adults. It is true that the stated statistics show that there has been an increase in violent crime, in particular with youth. There has been an increase in crime in general with youth.
However, our stated facts and statistics on crime and punishment do not reflect the fact that the actual rates of crime in this country are much greater than the stated levels are. When we look behind these statistics the reason is the Canadian public is becoming increasingly dissatisfied, more fearful and has less and less faith in the justice system as it exists.
If we speak to RCMP officers and the good men and women who put their lives on the line to keep our streets safe we will find they are becoming increasingly dissatisfied. The system ties their hands behind their backs and prevents them from doing their jobs. They are overworked, understaffed and labour under a series of rules and restrictions that prevents them from doing their jobs.
If you are playing hardball with criminals you have to play hardball back. One need not look any further than the Asian gang crime situation in my province of British Columbia and see the terrible difficulties that our police forces are having in trying to bring these individuals to justice. They feel aggrieved that there has been no leadership at the federal or provincial level on this issue. This is why we in the Reform Party have become increasingly dissatisfied by the inaction, whitewashing and smoke and mirrors that have come forward from the justice minister.
Rather than taking the initiative and using his power to work with members across party lines to develop good, concrete, effective solutions to the problems, he has chosen once again to play games. He is not playing games only in this House for political reasons, he is playing games with the health and welfare and the lives and the safety of men, women and children in this country. That is nothing to be proud of.
Crime is increasing in this country and we have asked the minister to do something about it. Apart from the good solutions that have already been put forward by my colleagues let me offer a few more. First, as has been said before, we have to change the mindset of the way we think about justice. Back in the early 1980s the Liberal solicitor general of the day said from now on the primary goal of the justice system is not going to be the protection of innocent civilians; the primary goal is going to be the rehabilitation of criminals.
While we think that rehabilitation is essential to developing a stronger, safer community in the future, there can be no doubt the primary role of our justice system has to be the protection of innocent civilians. Period. End of story. That is what we aim to do.
It is wise to divide up those who are violent criminals and non-violent criminals. Those who are violent criminals have to pay the price. They have demonstrated that they have shown a wilful neglect to innocent people in the worst possible way. If they are sentenced to a term in prison they must pay that price. People who are contemplating committing offences must know they are going to pay a hefty sentence if they commit them.
Second is to ensure that individuals before they are released are not going to pose a threat to innocent people. When I worked in prisons one of the most appalling things imaginable that I saw were individuals with rap sheets as long as your arm who committed many violent offences and who were going to be released even though everybody who worked with these individuals knew they would commit violent offences when they were out, physical, sexual or otherwise. It was known.
The system prevents us from protecting innocent civilians and that is a terrible situation and everybody pays. It is a crime to society.
The Canadian public should say loudly and clearly that it is not going to put up with it anymore. Canadians demand to be protected and this House must stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Canada to ensure that people will not commit violent crimes again. To the best of our ability we must safeguard the Canadian public from this. If we have to, we should deem those people violent offenders and keep them in for such a time that they will not pose a threat anymore.
Non-violent offenders should be able to work as part of restitution not only to the victims but also to society at large and for their own incarceration.
There are two things which are not spoken of often but which my colleague from Calgary Northeast mentioned very well. The first is skills training. Many of these individuals do not have appropriate skills so when they are released out of the system they have nothing to fall back on other than a life of crime, which is what they do. As part of the system we must ensure skills training is an integral part of the rehabilitation of criminals.
The second is the extraordinarily high incidence of drug and alcohol abuse by incarcerated individuals. Obligatory counselling and treatment for drug and alcohol abuse must be a mandatory and essential part of rehabilitation. Drug and alcohol abuse, as we know in this House, is a very fundamental part of violence and criminal behaviour.
My third point concerns dealings with psychiatric patients. One of the worst things we have done in recent years is to deinstitutionalize psychiatric patients. In my view, many psychiatric patients should not have been deinstitutionalized, although some certainly should have been and the integration of individuals from that
population in society is something that they and those of us who do not have psychiatric problems have benefited from.
However, there is a large population composed of individuals who cannot take care of themselves on the street. They stop medicating themselves and they go into a worsening spiral of their psychoses. They run afoul of the law and wind up in an institution, in a criminal institution, in a correctional facility. These people should not be there. They should be receiving the appropriate psychiatric treatments. They should be medicated properly. That would save the system money. It would save a lot of hidden costs for our society and, most important, these poor individuals who suffer from psychiatric diseases would be treated appropriately in an environment of safety with the assurance and care they need.
I strongly advise the Minister of Justice to urge his counterparts in the provinces to stop the deinstitutionalizing process and look at effective means of determining which patients should or should not be deinstitutionalized.
My next point is also related to rehabilitation. There is an interesting program that has taken place around San Francisco, California which touches on what I said before. They have brought individuals who are near the end of their sentences into the real, non-custodial world to work in the real world with real people. They are introduced to working in the real world with non-incarcerated individuals.
In the process, these individuals learned a great deal about how to function appropriately with others. They learned conflict resolution strategies. They learned appropriate social mores, how to control violent behaviour and how to work effectively in a work situation. They were required to act responsibly in the working world.
Many of these individuals had never had that opportunity before and had led lives of crime. When they became a part of this type of rehabilitation system-I encourage the Minister of Justice to look at this-the outcome was to save millions of taxpayer dollars and to help integrate them back into society as useful, productive, employable members of society. I would encourage the Minister of Justice once again to look at this other solution.
Another thing I would like to address is the issue of prevention. In my experience in dealing with youth in juvenile detention centres, many of the children do not have the pillars of a normal psyche. It is true that many of them have endured atrocious and appalling conditions of violence and sexual abuse. Throughout that period the pillars of a normal psyche were not allowed to develop. As a result many of them have run afoul of the law and go on to develop into dysfunctional adults later on.
There is a way out but it does not involve trying to change the mindset of these individuals when they are 15. We cannot do it at that time and we certainly cannot do it with a three month, six month or one year incarceration with optional counselling in a juvenile detention centre. Nothing changes. These people are let out and they go right back to the criminal behaviour they had before. Many of these kids go back into the same family situations and endure the same appalling family situation. This does not work.
There are solutions. First, we need to identify children at risk very early on and we need to identify families at risk. It is not too early to identify these families right at the prenatal stage. Families at risk do not just materialize. It is something that one can observe clinically. When these families are identified it is worthwhile to have quick response teams go in and deal with these families.
Furthermore, the school system can be a useful tool. They did this down in the United States, I believe at Columbia University. What they did at inner city schools, which had terrible rates of violence, drug abuse, teen pregnancies and dropouts, is they took these kids early on to teach them at four and five years old not only their A, B, C's, but also appropriate conflict resolution, drugs, alcohol, self-respect and respect for others.
When doing this intervention beginning at the age of four, they had an enormous impact on the future psychological development of these kids. Furthermore, they also brought the parents into the system, many of whom were single parents, and taught the parents the same issues.
The outcome of this was a radical decrease in dropout rates, violence and teen pregnancies in these children. The savings to the system were absolutely enormous. The parents who were also involved were able to develop appropriate parenting skills that they never had before. It was a win-win situation for all concerned. It will not cost us more money. In fact, it will save us money.
I presented this to the Minister of Justice last May or June. I asked him to take a leadership role to bring together his counterparts in the provinces, the ministers of health, human resources and development and the solicitors general, to develop some kind of formalized plan that can be employed in the educational system very early on beginning with kindergarten in order to teach the kids and to also bring the parents who are at risk into the system.
The benefits to our society will be massive. I am confident we will see a decrease in the youth crime rate and a decrease in adults.
This is not pie in the sky. It is cost effective economically and it has been proven in the United States to work.
Dr. Fraser Mustard, part of our centres of excellence in Toronto, has done some work touching on these issues. I would again encourage our Minister of Justice to take a look at this, not study it for 10 years but to start acting and using some of these ideas if for no other reason but to use it as a pilot project.
I know members of this party would be very happy to provide the considerable amount of expertise that exists within our party to the minister for effective, cost effective and socially effective solutions that are going to make our streets and society safer and stronger.
In closing, we do not support Bill C-53. It does not address the central issue we have in this country which is the issue of an increasing crime rate and decreasing safety and putting greater emphasis on the protection of innocent civilians rather than on the rehabilitation of the criminal.
I would ask once again for all of us to work together on this issue for all Canadians.