Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join in this debate. Let me start by saying that in the last election there were two particular issues relating to justice and justice estimates on which I campaigned. One was gun registration.
During the election campaign I ended every debate with these concluding remarks: “If you in this audience do not want gun registration, do not vote for me. Rather, if you are against it, you want to vote for the New Democratic Party, you want to vote for the Conservative Party or you want to vote for the Reform Party”. In every debate that was one of my concluding remarks and the results were 28 points ahead of the Reform Party, 28 points ahead of the Conservative and the New Democrats were much further back.
My constituents fundamentally feel that it is not too much to register guns in many ways like is done in Europe. We do not want to have the gun culture in this country that exists south of the border where all too often we see the tragedy of innocent victims being gunned down ruthlessly and needlessly. More and more we are seeing young children killing other young children and their teachers.
I make absolutely no apologies for it. I stand with the chiefs of police and with victims groups. I think our party, the governing party, recognizes the need to be dealt with. We definitely do not want to adopt the culture south of our border.
Let me get on to another very important part of the justice agenda that we will be implementing. Let me ask members of all parties, all members of parliament, to play a role in this challenge.
We have put together a $32 million community safety crime prevention program which will afford opportunity to each riding across the country to join in the crusade, to join in the project to prevent crime. We will do that by working with people at the community level: police forces, service clubs, school boards, recreational and planning departments of municipalities and various neighbourhood groups. Our challenge is how we as a country can improve our record of crime prevention and have safer streets and homes.
Prior to being elected to parliament I was executive director of an organization called Youth in Conflict with the Law from 1976 to 1993. For some who might recall, Youth in Conflict with the Law was to be under the youth in conflict with the law act. It was changed to the Young Offenders Act in 1984.
I had occasion to observe the workings of the criminal justice system firsthand at the criminal courts. I also had the opportunity to work with other organizations involved in community justice and community corrections. I can say that much pioneering work was done in my community.
David Worth, head of the Mennonite Central Committee, worked with communities right across the country trying to look at alternative ways of dealing with crime and conflict resolution.
I worked with John Bilton of the John Howard Society. His organization was also very much involved in preventive work. It had anti-shoplifting campaigns which involved young people. Young people would be diverted from the court system and would go through alternative measures. Not only did this lessen the strain on the courts. It also provided a much more meaningful resolutions to the problem.
Dean Peachey pioneered community mediation in our community where disputants were brought together to see if with a trained facilitator they could reach a successful resolution. While originally there was a great deal of resistance to that program eventually it was embraced by the courts and the municipalities and now a system of conflict resolution exists in schools.
Ken Motts pioneered the first halfway house for provincially sentenced inmates in Ontario called Kitchener House. Unfortunately that program was closed a couple of years ago by Mike Harris and his agenda.
Another important program pioneered in my community through community justice initiatives and the Mennonite Central Committee was the victim-offender reconciliation program. Let me tell some of my colleagues how that program works. It is fundamental to the whole issue of preventing crime and creating safer and more secure communities. It also deals with the rights of victims.
A typical victim-offender reconciliation case would involve a young person who broke into a business establishment or a private dwelling. We all know people who have been victimized through break and entry. We all know the sense of violation the victim of that offence feels. Somebody has come into their home, which is their castle, invaded their private space, caused damage and committed theft. Many people who are victims of crime feel a personal sense of violation.
I recall one of the cases that I worked on under the victim-offender reconciliation model. It involved a 17 year old who was under the supervision of our organization, Youth in Conflict with the Law. During the course of the pretrial hearing before that person was sentenced for the offence we met with the individual whose store he had broken into.
There was a humorous side to the break and enter because the two young people broke into a restaurant and somehow managed to lock themselves inside. It took them a great deal of effort to break out. Mind you, they rifled the cash register and took $20. Ultimately they were caught because when the police came to investigate they followed their footprints which led to the house where they lived.
The first impact of bringing the two people together, the victim and the offender, was that the restaurant owner felt a sense of relief. He was looking upon a young person of 17 years of age who was not a scholar, who was not particularly accomplished in any area. Some could say that he had some tough knocks in life. There was a sense of relief that the person he was dealing with was not a Clifford Olson, a Paul Bernardo or whatever one's worst nightmare might be.
After we went through that exercise, the resolution we arrived at was that this young person would pay back something like $300 to fix the cash register and to make restitution for the damage caused as well as the money taken. In this case and in most cases of victim-offender reconciliation the money was paid back and the young person learned from the experience. The court made sure it was part of the sentence that the money was paid back. As well, the court made sure that the young person did community service.
At the end of the day, under our Criminal Code, break and enter is liable for life imprisonment. That really does not happen, but that is what the law allows. Any time of incarceration in this case would have been a waste of taxpayers' money. This young person would have been sent into an environment where he would have been exposed to more negative influences and probably would have come out a much more accomplished criminal.
One of the people who played a very key role in our justice efforts was Henry Bloos who was a teacher at Kitchener Collegiate. Henry Bloos used to teach law. He started a law day at KCI that eventually involved the whole regional municipality of Waterloo. Within a few years of its establishment it became the single biggest extra curricular day for students in the Waterloo region.
Once a year, starting in 1978, in order to educate the community and get people involved in community justice and crime prevention, we established what was fondly known as justice dinners. Our 20th justice dinner took place this past April and we were fortunate to have the Minister of Justice attend.
It is no longer the people I referred to previously who are putting on this justice dinner. The justice dinner is now being put on by the community safety crime prevention council of Waterloo region. That council is a project of my community, funded by regional council to the tune of $75,000 a year in cash as well as the provision of office space and other resources.
I am very happy to say that we have two members of this parliament on this side of the House, the member for Kitchener Centre and the member for Waterloo—Wellington, who were members of the regional council that gave funding to this project.
This project initially was headed by the chief of police for Waterloo region. The council includes people from justice agencies. It includes people from probation and parole. It includes people from community social services, people from the school boards, people from the planning departments and the commissioner of social services. It has fairly heavy representation from the provincial police. It includes the now mayor of the city of Waterloo, Joan McKinnon, the commissioner and director of family and children services, as well as the executive director of the Children's Aid Society. The list goes on. There are 33 members.
These people have taken up the challenge of co-ordinating in our community the services of the various governments, be they the school board, social services, children's aid, the police, the planning departments or the voluntary sector.
They produced numerous planning documents and strategies to deal with prevention in our community.
The first report came out in November 1996. The second report came out in 1997. The third report came out in 1998. They came up with a proposal to have a unified community response to deal with the issue of crime.
The province of Quebec deals with crime much more effectively than we do in the rest of the country. Crime is very expensive. The federal and provincial governments spend $9.6 billion a year on crime. If we include the victims and other costs associated with crime we are talking about $46 billion.
What we are talking about in the first year of this crime prevention effort is $32 million. It is a little more than $1 per capita. The money that we spend, the $9.6 billion, is more than $300 per capita. Clearly what we are trying to do is to start diverting some of the money at prevention so we do not have the victims, we do not have the shattered lives. Then we will have contributing members of society, as well as safe homes and safe streets.
When we deal with the the Young Offenders Act and with the people who exploit it, be it for economic or political considerations, let me say that we imprison 15 times as many young offenders as they do in Australia or in New Zealand. We imprison 10 times as many young offenders as they do in the western European countries. But to our shame, we incarcerate two and a half times as many young offenders as they do in the United States of America. That is a shame. That is not the perception that the Canadian public has.
The perception that the Canadian public has, if they watch the proceedings of this House or if they watch the media which likes to exploit crime, is that we have a system which is in disarray and we have a society that is not as safe as it really is. The perception has been driving the agenda and it is time for us to get together and make sure that the reality drives the agenda and that we work on realistic solutions to make Canada one of the safest countries in the world.