Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleagues all started by saying that it was a pleasure for them to speak on this bill today. Personally, I regret having to address this issue.
The House should never have had a debate on Bill C-3, and the justice minister is well aware of that. Over and over again, we have seen that it is not the Young Offenders Act but rather its implementation that leaves to be desired. Those who implement it appropriately succeed where others fail. Nevertheless, the Liberal government is being stubborn and is about to reform the spirit of this legislation.
Personally, before the bill was ever introduced, I would have liked the House to address some very basic issues. How is it that a 12, 13, 14 or 18 year old can become an offender? We never asked ourselves that question. We do not need to be a psychologist or a psychiatrist to answer that question.
These young people have gone through something that makes them feel unloved. They end up in a gang and seek some kind of recognition.
Even in grade school, some fourth or fifth graders show signs of being—and I hate the word—bad seeds and on their way to becoming offenders. And nothing is done about it. If we had the decency to take care of those young people, they would never end up in court.
Cuts in transfers to the provinces for education penalize teachers. They do not have the time to take care of their students and some of them see themselves as mere numbers in the system.
The Young Offenders Act was passed in 1982 and came into effect in 1984. It did not come up overnight. It is the result of several decades of thinking. In fact, one has to go back to 1857 to find the first measures giving special status to minor offenders. In 1908, we established the first youth justice system. The Juvenile Delinquents Act was designed to put young people back on the right track by minimizing their responsibility.
In Quebec, we have successful legislation and it is in our province that the delinquency rate is the lowest. When a young person is punished and sent to prison, the older inmates will show him ways to commit crimes with minimum consequences.
In the early 1970s, Quebec adopted two social measures that proved very useful with respect to the Young Offenders Act: legal aid and social services reform. In 1974, the first set of measures aimed at solving problems outside the judicial system was implemented. Now, the federal government wants to give the act more teeth.
I heard our friends in the Reform Party say that the names of young offenders should be published in newspaper or mentioned on the radio. Going to that kind of extreme is unworthy of responsible citizens. As I said earlier, responsibility starts in elementary school.
It is reported that 1.5 million children do not eat their fill. This year, in Quebec, there was a campaign to buy pencils for pupils in elementary schools. Some parents cannot afford to buy pencils. This is serious. Some children have nothing to eat for lunch. They see their schoolmates go to the cafeteria and take money out of their pocket to buy fruit and chocolate while they have nothing to eat. I do not know how that would make us feel. I do not know if we would not feel rebellious.
The government is saying, “Let us have stricter laws. Let us send them to jail and it will solve the problem. They will have time to think in jail”. We should ask ourselves what kind of thinking one can do in jail, other than becoming tougher and trying to find ways of getting out of there.
Of course, there is help available in our prisons. There are highly qualified people who try to help, but when someone is seething with revolt, it takes more than six months or a year to get over it. It takes years and, during those years, someone has to be close by, I would say every day. When a tree is sick, what do we do? We put a protective coating on it. When a young tree is not growing straight, what do we do? We do not stick it in the garage. We leave it outside and stake it.
We should do the same thing with young people, that is give them support instead of locking them up.