Mr. Speaker, I would also like to add my personal feelings as I open my remarks on Bill C-260. It is certainly the feeling of our caucus that we have great admiration and personal respect for the member for Surrey North for the work that he has done to champion this cause. There are not many issues that our caucuses will find any community of interest on, more than likely, but this is certainly one where I have the greatest admiration not only for the issue but for the way the issue has been put forward and handled over many months.
It is not easy to champion any cause, much less a cause of such great personal interest. It must have been that much more difficult for the member to deal with the issue. Our caucus feels strongly that he has handled it very well.
Bill C-260, as we have heard from previous speakers, will be covered under the new Bill C-68 so many of the merits of Bill C-260 will be incorporated into the new act. It is for that reason that our caucus will not be voting for Bill C-260. It has nothing to do with the content or the merits or the arguments that we are hearing today, and certainly nothing to do with the issue. It is simply the fact that we believe it is redundant at this point and is not necessary. Still, it gives us a valuable opportunity to speak to the issue and to raise the many merits Bill C-260 certainly brings forward for us.
My understanding is that under the current Young Offenders Act there is a maximum penalty of six months in jail and/or a $2,000 fine for parents or guardians who fail to meet the requirements of the custody and supervision orders. Certainly it is not as though this issue has been left unaccounted for at all.
People have obviously contemplated the problems that come with releasing somebody into the custody of another person and holding that person accountable for doing what they promised to do or undertook to do, which is to keep the person in some form of custody until such time as a trial can relieve the issue.
Coming from Winnipeg and with the street gang problem it has, this issue comes up all the time. It is a very frequent occurrence. It certainly needed to be addressed so we are very pleased that Bill C-68 will put stiffer measures in place to try to give some satisfaction in that regard.
Our caucus has tried to wrestle with the issue and in doing so has tried to be tough on crime but also tough on the causes of crime. That is the best way I can put it briefly.
Looking at the issue in Winnipeg Centre, the riding I come from, the whole idea of releasing children to the custody of their parents and having parents act in a responsible manner is actually compounded by the aboriginal population there and the parenting skills of the middle aged group of aboriginal people who live in the inner city of Winnipeg due to the fact that they were lifted out of their homes as children and put into residential schools.
This is something we have finally come to grips with. We learn our parenting skills from our parents. When we remove a whole generation of people from their family homes where they would pick up those skills, they do not have the opportunity to learn how to be parents. I am not saying this in a critical way or a generalizing way, but that has come to be recognized as one of the issues we are facing with a generation of youth in various kinds of trouble with street gangs or whatever.
The parenting that normally goes on in any family home has not been going on properly because of the unnatural intervention in in the lives of that middle aged population when they were ripped from their family homes, dumped in a residential school and just did not have the opportunity to learn many of those skills.
Scratching deeper under the surface of the whole issue of youth crime and street crime, we have to look at how these youth gangs and street gangs are actually structured. A lot of the kids who are involved, the 10, 11 and 12 year old kids, did not actually seek out to be members of these gangs.
As more and more of them are finding refuge in safe houses and being interviewed by people, it turns out that they are getting muscled into taking part in these gangs. Quite often it is an 18 or 19 year old who comes to a 10 or 11 year old and says “If you do not do this B and E for us we will beat up your sister or bring harm to the rest of your family”. The kids literally have no choice. That is often how they get sucked into it.
I am not saying that should change the way we view crimes.
We have to take a dispassionate view of the impact on victims of crimes. We also have to take into consideration the fact that a lot of these youth involved in this stuff did not do it by choice, that they were often pulled or drawn into it from unnatural circumstances.
I have an issue in my own personal family that happened to us and made me wrestle with the issue to try to get a grip on how we feel about youth crime and the treatment of youth. In my own family we were broken into by two youths who were 15 and 16 years old. I actually caught them in the act of breaking into our house, which is a very nerve wracking thing. When I drove home one night there they were in the process of breaking into our home.
I managed to hold one of them down while my wife phoned the police, but my four year old boy was obviously curious about why I was fighting in the snowbank with these kids. He came outside. The other youth grabbed my four year old son by the hair and pulled him down the street and said “I'll trade with you. You let my friend go and you can have your kid back”. It was sort of a kidnapping incident in the middle of a dark, cold winter night in Winnipeg. It was very terrifying for my whole family.
Naturally I dropped the one kid and went after the one that had my son and gave him a bit of a licking. The end of the story is that I wound in court for six months fighting charges that I had assaulted this kid who had broken into my house. It is fundamentally wrong. It made me a very angry guy for a long time. As I said, it made me wrestle with the issue of whether we get into a hang them high kind of punishment for 15 and 16 year old kids who break into our houses and threaten our families or we work harder to try to understand the root causes and try to deal with it in that way.
This was eight or nine years ago. I have had the fullness of time to try to wrestle with the issue. I believe that some of the measures undertaken in Bill C-68 address the right direction in which we should be going. I compliment the member for Surrey North that some of the issues dealt with in Bill C-68 had their origins in the issue the member brought to the House as the issue he wanted to promote. There should be some satisfaction there, I would hope, for the member.
The whole issue of inner city youth gangs and street gangs—and I do not want to harp on it—is an overwhelming problem in the inner city of Winnipeg. There are 1,500 kids actively involved in street gang activity. They actually have break and enter rings where they divide up neighbourhoods. One person will be in charge of a little crew of break and enter artists. They will have maybe a six block area that is their turf until they wear it out. Then they sell the rights to the area to another sub-gang leader.
It is actually structured to the point where it is beyond kids just doing random acts of violence. It is almost getting to be an organized crime ring of young people.
The reason I call them street gangs and not youth gangs is that they are not driven by young people. There is always an older ring of people managing the young people who are undertaking the actual crimes. It is incorrect and it is actually maligning young people to call them youth gangs.
Obviously as parents we know that most kids are not engaged in any illegal activity. It is only a very few when we look at the larger picture.
Families that can least afford decent affordable housing, education, sports and recreation for their youths, are the ones most likely to be affected by the tragedies of crime, violence, street activity and all the predictable consequences of those things. Not to draw too tenuous a connection, we can bring the issue down to one of socioeconomics. It is a natural fact that the have nots are more likely to have some kind of violent crime as a part of their daily life and more likely to experience some sort of violence or crime because the incidents are that much higher. Desperate people take desperate measures.
Last week I spoke about the issue of arson in my area of Winnipeg where the housing stock is so beat up, atrocious, and dominated by slum landlords that arson is getting to be almost epidemic. These properties are not worth rehabilitating or renovating in any way. We have had 85 arsons in a three month period in a 12 square block area. Sometimes two or three places a night are going up in smoke. It is like the big American inner cities during the race riots of the 1960s. These people are torching the whole community. It is burn baby, burn again. That is an indicator of the type of social unrest we are prompting through many of our social and economic policies.