Mr. Speaker, maybe the member was not here from 1993 to 1997, but in the previous government I spent a lot of years as one of the major critics of the Young Offenders Act and other parts of the justice system, which I will continue today because I have the opportunity.
I want to make a couple of things quite clear. First, my party and I believe that the number one success to youth crime is prevention. That is why we had kids at risk programs going on in the school which I operated for about 30 years until legislation came from the Liberal government which prevented us from doing so because we were not entitled to do some of the things we were allowed to do previously. We had to recognize certain things under the charter, which destroyed the ability of the police to work with a free hand, not in a violent way, but in a way that solved problems. Most of those young people are now parents and some are even grandparents who are grateful that we did these things.
I would like the member to come to some of the class reunions. I go to them every year. It is nice to be able to reminisce and to hear the thanks and praise from the students of the past for the work that we did on their behalf.
I know that prevention works. I know that is where a lot of the money should be spent; upfront, working on prevention.
I heard the previous member ramble on about publishing names. I will tell him about a couple of incidents.
When I was a principal of a school and received a student from another area, perhaps it was from another province or another city, we had all of the information about the individual. We could determine what we needed to do on the student's behalf in terms of education, social life or whatever. These young people would transfer into the school. After the Liberal government's legislation in the 1980s under the charter of rights, as a principal I did not have the right to receive information about any previous criminal record or anything else about a young person who showed up on our doorstep. We had to admit him. Perhaps he was 15, 12 or 18. It did not matter. I had no right to that information.
A lot of these people who were coming in from other areas had been kicked out of every school they had been to. A great deal of it was for criminal activity, and a lot of it was for violent criminal activity. Therefore, we were not in a position to provide any assistance which might have helped this individual with their problem. Instead we had to accept the student with no questions asked because we could not publish anything about these young people. As a result, I cannot even begin to tell members how long the list was of victims who came out of my own school and my own community because we did not know about that individual until after they continued down the same path for which they had been removed from a previous school before they had transferred to our school.
I will have to give the Conservative government one bit of credit. It will be very small. It did allow under the Young Offenders Act for certain information to be given to school authorities and other officials who might have a bearing on the lives of these individuals.
The Liberals would have never done that. It is better not to publish or let people know that these young people may be violent individuals. In the Liberals' view it is better not to let school authorities know.
Please tell me how that prevents crime. If there is a family with young children, would they not like to know if a young offender living next door had been in trouble in other places for having molested young children? As a parent, would that not be a good thing to know? Should school authorities not know about these particular individuals?
The Liberals' prevention method is to pour out money and then hope that the provinces will come up with something which will solve their problem, which they created in the 1980s when they brought in their loosey-goosey Young Offenders Act and the charter of rights at the same time, protecting everyone except the victims. Since that time the number of victims has escalated to such a degree that the 10 year report on the Young Offenders Act is a disgrace.
It is not all the fault of the act. It is the fault of the government which suddenly decided that we cannot publish names of individuals who could be a problem.
The government is at fault for making legislation that says people can no longer discipline in any fashion that might seem abusive, such as with a paddle or a strap. In my opinion, there was always a place for that in the schools. It was not used in a violent way and was seldom ever used, but there was a time when it was necessary and most of the time it was effective.
Government members would not understand those kinds of preventive measures. They talked the good talk on prevention, but I have not heard one good suggestion out of their mouths about how we should spend the money.
Prior to the Liberals coming in, people like the ones in my community and others had good programs in place. We were able to put them in place because there was not a Liberal government to stop us from doing so through silly legislation.
I cannot believe there could be a government in existence that would say that the public really does not know what is good for them; that it must pass legislation because the poor souls in Canada do not even know how to raise children in their own homes. Why, they might spank them, for goodness sakes. It cannot allow that, so it wants to remove section 43 from the Criminal Code which says that parents cannot spank their children any more, even if they think that is what they would like to do.
Nobody dislikes abuse more than this guy. I have seen it in my from peers in my own school. When I really saw it was after the Young Offenders Act and the charter of freedoms and rights came in. Everything went sky high.
The Reform Party does not want to put 10 and 11 year olds in jail. We do not want to lash them or cane them. Nobody has ever said that. What we are saying is that we want them in the system so we can work with them and get them to a point where they will cease and desist from any activities of a criminal nature.
In Calgary a young person stole 150 cars before he was aged 12. In every instance there was nothing anybody could do except return him to his house and that was the end of it. He would then go out and do it again. When did this young fellow stop stealing cars? He stopped on his 12th birthday. He was smart enough to know that he could not continue that activity because from that point on he could be arrested and put in the criminal justice system. The government knows about that. That is not an isolated case. It also happened in Vancouver. I am not sure how many cars the young fellow in Vancouver stole, but it was the same story.
When I introduced a private member's bill dealing with young offenders and even adults who steal cars, there was a member of the Liberal government who dared to say something to the effect that the member for Wild Rose was out of his mind because he wanted to punish children who were simply taking a car for a joyride. He said there was nothing wrong with joyriding; that was a normal thing for young children to do. Stealing cars is not a normal thing to do.
It is fine for a person to learn how to be a mechanic, a good entrepreneur or fix cars. However, I would like the NDP member to know that learning how to hotwire a car in order to steal it is not really the best way to get an apprenticeship in the mechanics of a car. There are surely better ways. Maybe we should give these young people the opportunity for rehabilitation through some good solid programs.
Once again, the Liberals talk prevention and talk rehabilitation, but I have not heard one good suggestion about what that program might look like. Nobody can disagree with that. Everybody agrees with prevention and rehabilitation but they do not know how to do it.