Mr. Speaker, today the member for Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough is asking the government to increase the federal share of financial support for the provision of the Young Offenders Act with the eventual goal of dividing the cost on a 50:50 basis between the Government of Canada and the provincial and territorial governments.
One would think this is not a big thing to ask for. If the federal government wants to keep an eye on what is happening it terms of crime prevention, health care or education across the country, it should expect to pay its fair share. That is really what is being asked here.
This also means that many problems are created by government policies and regulations—provincial or federal. On the subject of crime prevention, many of the decisions taken are taken in such a way that it appears crime prevention was not the first thought.
The more invested in crime prevention, the lower the crime rate. Our young people who live in poverty cannot afford a post-secondary education and parents cannot send their children to daycare. These are things that lower the country's crime rate. We need governments that give priority to prevention.
We can talk about prevention as well in the context of halfway houses for battered women. Too many regions do not have such facilities for these women. They do not have the opportunity to stay in a safe location so they may make good decisions for themselves and their children. It is important to have such facilities, and that is what the majority of Canadians think.
We have to remember that. Often when youths commit crimes we want to throw them in jail and throw away the keys. That is not the solution. We have to look at the cause, why young offenders are in that situation. We need resources available to prevent children from being in that situation. Once they are we definitely need resources to help them out of those bad situations and put them in very good environments.
Unfortunately, with child poverty increasing on a daily basis, one goes with the other. If I look at just my area, in one week there were three bank robberies in small communities of 200 in one and 2,000 in the other. We have to look at that situation very seriously. The increase in poverty is certainly a big factor in crime. A woman in the Saint John area was badly beaten during a robbery.
If we look behind why all these things are happening we can track it to the individual not having resources available. I see it with teachers all the time who tell me that they do not have the resources to help the kids identified in our schools as needing help.
I was speaking with a friend who is a French teacher in Newfoundland. They have been told that in order to get a psychologist in their school they would have to let a regular teacher go. There are all kinds of situations in that school where children and their families need counselling. We have to look at the causes. When parents do not have a job or are the working poor it certainly does not help. We did not see any new funding going toward that.
There is really nothing in the budget to help in this regard. If the federal government wants to have input with the provinces, it has to pay its half. This applies to health care too. The government found itself in a very difficult situation at one point. It used to pay 50% of health care costs but this percentage has now dropped to 11%. The figure might rise to 12.5%.
It is very difficult for the federal government to say to a province “I want you to provide these services in this way”, when it contributes only 5% or 6% of the funding.
I have a 13-year old son and a little girl who is three years old, but I have no idea what the future holds for Mathieu and Mélissa. I hope they will stay on the straight and narrow. That is all we can do, to hope, because our children have to make their own decisions.
It is certainly good for them that their mother has a job, and it was great that I could work or be on employment insurance when I was off work, because there was food on their plates and a roof over their heads. I was perfectly capable of supporting them as a seasonal worker because, in those days, we could still get benefits between jobs. Without this income, I cannot imagine how those years would have unfolded. There was also education, including the post-secondary education I had access to.
We must ensure that our young people today have access to education and that they do not end up $40,000 in debt after completing a four-year university degree.
That is often the case, and we are not helping our young people with decisions that makes life harder and harder for them, when they have no job prospects at graduation.
The New Democrats believe that the government needs to invest in families by providing access to child care, support for parents and labour policies that encourage employers to respect family obligations.
I must say that I was lucky. All the years I worked, I was with the public service, so I had benefits. If my son was sick, I was entitled to five days a year at least to look after him. I also had a drug plan, which also covered replacements for eyeglasses. That helps a lot.
The federal government must make a real commitment to provide funding to the provinces for more community policing and to increase support services for both the rehabilitation of youth and support for victims of youth crime.
The NDP fully supports the motion before the House and encourages the government to adopt it and take immediate action to address the chronic underfunding of our justice system.
I think this is important. We ought to support this motion because the future of our young people is at stake. They are the ones who will be running this country in the future. We must look after them today to ensure that they will be there in the future.