Mr. Speaker, I know the member who asks the question has had a long interest in this issue. Many of my colleagues are dividing children who commit crimes into two sections. There are those who are violent criminals and have been proven to repeat violent offences against innocent civilians. Those people have demonstrated their wilful neglect of innocent Canadians. We want harsher penalties for them because we feel the primary role of the justice system is the protection of society, not rehabilitation. We put protection first and rehabilitation second.
That is not to say we are not interested in rehabilitation. In fact we are. The member for Surrey North introduced a private member's bill which the Minister of Justice integrated into her young offenders bill.
That bill provided for younger children between the ages of 10 and 11 to be tried under the Young Offenders Act. The reason was not to have punitive measures enacted against individuals. The reason was to ensure that children at 10 and 11 years of age would have the benefits of our judicial system in terms of what the hon. member mentioned.
How do we treat these problems? The sooner we can treat the problems, the better chance we will have of the child not becoming a lifetime criminal and prevent a lot of problems in the future.