Debates of April 15th, 1999

Youth Criminal Justice Act

[Myron Thompson, Reform, Wild Rose, AB]

Yes. As my hon. colleague from the NDP says, we have not heard about the amount of dollars that the Liberals are prepared to spend to help prevent crime and to rehabilitate these young people. I have not heard anything on that. Lord knows the government taxes us enough. There should be an ample supply of it laying around somewhere. The government has not done anything about that.

I do not know what is wrong with the Liberal government. It really likes making lists. We have a hate law in Canada. Let me paint a little scenario. A guy hates his mother-in-law so he murders her. Well that will not be considered under hate crimes because mother-in-laws are not on the list.

Another example is a kid in school who is built a little differently. Maybe he is fat and considered to be ugly or homely. We just do not like him so we want to get him. Wait a minute, fat ugly kids are not on the list so it does not fit under hate crimes.

Then lo and behold the Liberals come up with another phenomenal list, a list that says it is going to get tough on some of these individuals. What does the list consist of? Let us take a look.

The Liberals are going to get really tough on those who commit serious crimes by putting them into adult court after one conviction for murder, manslaughter, attempted murder and aggravated assault. That means that if a young offender kidnaps, sexually assaults with a weapon, commits an armed robbery or a host of other violent crimes, nothing too serious is going to happen. The young offender will remain under the old Young Offenders Act because those crimes are not on the list.

I really do not understand what is wrong with the government. It seems to like the idea of coming up with lists every time we turn around. If the crime is not on the list then it is not a hate crime. If the crime is not on the list then it is not a violent crime and would not result in adult court or adult punishment. That is the key word. I really do not understand why anybody in the House of Commons or why any adult would not believe that the consequences of wrongdoing should not involve a degree of punishment.

We do not want to talk about incarceration in the House. It is a dirty word. Community sentencing is a nice word. The government recently came out with Bill C-41. This bill is supposed to come under the Conditional Release Act where people who commit non-violent crimes will be able to serve their time helping in their community as punishment for their crime. I agree with that. I do not believe for a moment that non-violent offenders need to be behind bars. They need to be out in public paying for their crime in the community. They need to make restitution for the loss they have caused their victims. There are a lot of things they have to do which are all part of the punishment picture.

What is happening under the government's legislation is that violent offenders, including those who commit manslaughter or second degree murder, are being released back into the community under community supervision. There is something wrong with that picture.

All of a sudden we have cases under the section dealing with sentencing. There are a number of things that we must consider before passing a sentence. I agree. One of the very last ones regarding the sentencing of an individual is—and this includes the person who is charged with murder, manslaughter or whatever—that we must consider whether the individual is aboriginal or not. If someone takes a person's life, what difference does it make in regard to his or her race or background? I have never seen a piece of legislation that is any more discriminatory than the legislation that keeps coming from the Liberals. I was shocked when I looked at the Criminal Code. Time after time I found they had made a list and anybody else did not apply to that list. That is discrimination in the worst kind, in the most subtle way.

We believe in equality, but this legislation is the most divisive kind of legislation I have ever seen when we start identifying that we have to take into consideration what nationality an individual is before passing sentence.

One judge told me not too long ago that we must treat different people differently. A judge told me in a conversation that we cannot treat unlike people in the same way. “Never mind the victim, never mind the crime. Let us talk about the offender”, this judge says. “If he is not the same as others might be in terms of race or nationality then he must be treated differently”. That is Liberal law, the most divisive and most discriminatory law that exists. Why do we allow that?

I looked at the Liberal wisdom. This cannot be any more than just Liberal wisdom which is no wisdom at all. We are talking about the youth criminal justice act. Guess what the number of the bill is? C-68. My, my, what a coincidence.

The last Bill C-68 which is now law is not going very well. I understand it is almost up to a billion dollars in cost and it is going nowhere because nobody knows what they are doing, but after taking directions from the Liberal government that does not surprise me in the slightest. However, to dare number this bill as C-68 is quite the strategy. We will name it Bill C-68.

I want the Canadian public to be careful when talking about Bill C-68 from now on because we will be talking about the youth criminal justice system and not the gun control bill. What a piece of strategy. What a work of wisdom. Let us keep the public confused and then they will not question us.

What goes in the front door at a committee is usually what comes out the back door. As hard as we try to amend or change it, that is usually what comes out because orders will come from the front row to not amend or change the bill and to vote yes on it. The old puppets and the old sheep will jump up and lo and behold it will become law. There is no doubt about it.

[Bernard Bigras, Bloc, Rosemont, QC]

Madam Speaker, I am still very surprised to hear such a hard-line speech about young people in this place, and I am particularly surprised by our colleague's definition of prevention.

He seems to view prevention as an activity that only comes into play after the offence.

I find this rather surprising, because he talks to us about lists, as though young people should be stigmatized. This is unacceptable.

We have always seen prevention as coming before the offence. For there to be prevention, there has to be education, guidance and resources in our schools, often at the time when young people are having difficulty.

I would like to ask my Reform Party colleague what he means by the term prevention, which he has used repeatedly in his speech.

[Myron Thompson, Reform, Wild Rose, AB]

Madam Speaker, I guess I will have to repeat my speech. I thought I had clarified that quite nicely.

I talked about kids at risk programs that we had in the school. We caught many young people, even as low as grade 1. We were able to work with them and prevent them from committing future crime. I talked about that a great deal. Maybe the member's earplug was not in. I do not know.

I could go on and talk about it some more but that is what I was talking about, kids at risk programs. All those kinds of things can be put into place. I thought I had covered that but maybe I did not.

[Nelson Riis, NDP, Kamloops, BC]

Madam Speaker, I listened with interest to my friend. I always enjoy his presentations. I find I agree with much of what he says, but not all of what he says. I will not focus on what I do not agree with.

The member talked about prevention and the program he had in his school that was so successful. Could the hon. member give some thought to the causes of crime? I know he is an educator and has a lot of experience in the field. In his experience, why is it that certain young people go afoul of the law? Is there any commonality in their backgrounds? Is there any commonality in their experiences that he has been able to identify so that we can begin to focus on not only the crime itself but the fundamental causes of crime?

[Myron Thompson, Reform, Wild Rose, AB]

Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for the question. I know there will not be enough time to answer it. It is a difficult question to answer, but not in all cases.

I can only give examples. I remember little Eddie whose grade 1 teacher brought him to me. He had been kicking her in the shins and had pulled a knife on her. That was an indication there could be a problem. We identified that there was a serious problem with little Eddie. I tried to bring in the family, the mother and the father. I said we had to begin the process of helping this young fellow out.

Unfortunately there was no father and the mother worked all the time, and worked hard. He had no supervision. That was a shame. No supervision is not good for young people, especially at six years of age. We had lots of problems in that area where supervision seemed to be unavailable and therefore kids would lean into trouble.

Another problem that came up quite often was caused by low self-esteem, kids put down by peers and in some cases put down by teachers and parents. They had low self-esteem and needed recognition to become somebody. Especially if they had any brute strength, to be a bully was the way to be, to do something that would attract some attention. I have seen these very same kids break into tears when we began working with them because that is not what they wanted. It is a cry for help.

The list can go on. Sometimes some kids are just rotten to the core and I do not know why. There is no excuse for it. I have had parents ask “What am I going to do? He will not listen to us. We tell him he can't go out. He breaks the window and goes out and he doesn't come home until the next morning. If we try to punish him, he goes to the police and cries child abuse”.

It goes on and on. It is really a tough one to answer. I had better not take much more time or Madam Speaker will cut me right off.

[Allan Kerpan, Reform, Blackstrap, SK]

Madam Speaker, I would like to ask my colleague from Wild Rose if he would agree with a few brief comments.

The member for Mississauga West mentioned in his speech that young people are often full of testosterone. I can tell the House that the member for Mississauga West is definitely not full of testosterone, but most likely the stuff that I wipe off my boots when I come from the corral.

I still have the notion that I may support this bill and I want to ask the member about that. But it is speeches like those of the member for Mississauga West that make me think and wonder what I am doing. Again, the bill is very little in the right direction, but perhaps that is all we can expect from the Liberal government.

Would the hon. member agree with me that it is members like the member for Mississauga West who give this institution a bad name? Certainly in my opinion he is nothing but a blowhard windbag who in my opinion is a waste of skin.

[An hon. member]

Could he be a little more explicit about that? What does he really mean?

[Myron Thompson, Reform, Wild Rose, AB]

Madam Speaker, I am not sure what the member really means, but I think I agree with him.

The sad part about it is that there are some genuine people over there who are serious about doing something about the Young Offenders Act. There is also a bunch of them over there who do as they are told. They have studied legislation to no degree because they know they will have to vote the way they are told.

If we had free votes in this House, if we could have open debate, if we could have legislation come to the justice committee and know that the justice committee is going to effect the change, but we know that most of the legislation that comes in the front door of the justice committee goes out the back door in the same form that it came in. Those are the orders and that is why there has to be a Liberal majority on a committee.

The process and the way we handle business is wrong. It is a shame. I would not like to sit in the House of Commons in a place where I would not be allowed to study legislation and be able to vote according to what I or the people that I represent feel. Unfortunately, the member for Mississauga West has to do all he can to make sure that he gets heard and known, gets on TV and gets well advertised, because he will always be on the backbench. He will never have the opportunity to be on the front bench so he can tell the rest of them what to do.

[Darrel Stinson, Reform, Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Madam Speaker, I listened to the hon. member's speech and I agree with just about everything the member had to say. It shocked me when I sat here and listened to the members before him speak.

If some young person breaks into a car and hot wires it, they are becoming entrepreneurs. This is coming from members in the House. The hon. member from Nipissing stated that because young people steal cars they are just being children.

That is what is wrong here. I have gone around schools and talked to children who are afraid of children. I have talked to their parents who have said “The government has handcuffed us. We cannot do anything. The government has taken the right of parenting away from us. It has become the almighty parent and it penalizes us if we try to do anything to help our own children to stop this type of stuff”.

I would like the hon. member to comment.

[Myron Thompson, Reform, Wild Rose, AB]

Madam Speaker, the hon. member is absolutely correct. Parents, the police and myself used to work very effectively with young people in our community. We never had to go to court, never had to make an arrest. We involved the parents, we involved the police and we involved the school authorities. We were very successful.

But this government brought down certain pieces of legislation and the next thing, I had to open my desk drawer, pull out a little piece of paper and before I could even begin thinking about discipline or helping the young person I had to say “You have the right to remain silent. You have the right for me not to call your parents in”, all of the gobbledegook that has come out of this Liberal government.

[Jim Pankiw, Reform, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order to seek the unanimous consent of the House to extend the question and answer period for the honourable and well respected member for Wild Rose for 10 minutes.

[The Acting Speaker (Ms. Thibeault)]

Is there consent to extend the time?

[Some hon. members]

Yes.

[Some hon. members]

No.

[John O'Reilly, Liberal, Victoria—Haliburton, ON]

Madam Speaker, I feel like I have reached into the bag and drawn the black marble. After the member for Mississauga West has spoken and gets the member for Wild Rose all riled up, I happen to be the next person to speak.

Because I have already spoken on the bill, I am speaking on the amendment brought forward by the Bloc which basically takes the bill away from what it was intended to do. The bill was intended to deal with the youth justice system in a fashion that is reasonable. For some people it would be going too far and for others, not far enough.

In my experience as a parole officer in Ontario for a short time in my former life, I dealt with the Young Offenders Act when it came in in 1984. I knew when it came in that it needed to be refined, retuned and readjusted because it did not address some of the glaring problems.

Bill C-68 has addressed some of the problems that were in evident need to be addressed. It was done after much consultation and time spent with the various people in the criminal justice system, in the parole system and the people who work with youth. A lot of thought has gone into it.

I do not know that it addresses the systemic problem that exists in our society that we as the highest court in the land have to deal with, and that is lack of education, lack of training for parenthood, disadvantaged people, people from broken homes. If I were to sit down and write a report before I saw a case file and I put broken home, substance abuse, dropped out of grade 8, lack of motivation, lack of confidence, abused as a child, I would catch probably 80% to 90% of the people I dealt with in that system.

We look at the answers and the simplistic approach of the Reform Party. The member for Calgary Northeast was going to study caning as a way to address the problems of the youth justice system. Certainly, I found that not a way I could agree with. If our answer to a person who has been beaten all their life is to give them another beating, somehow that has absolutely nothing to do with what is being proposed in Bill C-68. It has nothing to do with the systemic problems of our society and that is how to deal with people at a young age.

My wife is a special education teacher in an elementary school, a resource person as they call it. She deals with people who are in trouble at a very early age. As with the problems I talked about, there is the lack of parenting, the lack of people having some kind of a system of rules, a system of looking at whether courses should be mandatory for certain people, whether it is more involvement with the Children's Aid Society or whether it is more involvement with the youth justice system very early in our schools. That is what we have to look at.

What do I do in a parole hearing when a young woman has dropped a baby off a balcony because the baby was crying too much? We look into the problems that exist with that person being tried in an adult court, as she was, and not having any of the advantages of people who grew up in a home where maybe two people were working.

Here we have a person who is suffering from serious substance abuse and serious societal problems who ends up in jail and has to be kept in the hospital section for fear of being attacked by the other inmates who feel that this crime is very serious. Their way of approaching and dealing with that crime is to inflict more pain on the person who committed the crime, somehow falsely thinking that would be a cure or that suddenly the problem would dissolve.

That is what we are trying to do here with Bill C-68. Basically the amendment would gut the bill and make it worth nothing. I think the bill requires us as a government to promote it, to take advantage of all the study that has been done and to analyse it.

Members of parliament should look at it, analyse it and decide where they want to make changes. They should follow them through. They should not make changes because they belong to the Reform Party or because they are against everything that the Liberal Party does.

I run into people in society who hate Liberals, who hate Catholics and who hate Christians. I am all of those so I have a problem sometimes right at the start in dealing with that. People are like that in society. They grow up in certain areas and are expected to do certain things. We have to break out of that mould in order to advance and to advance our youth.

Some of the problems were dealt with by the hon. member for Mississauga West, although he does it in a way that inflames members of the Reform Party. He even attended their UA convention. This was after they actually voted non-confidence in the Reform Party and said they could not govern. They wanted to bring in the people left in the Conservative Party, the rest of the Conservative Party, and were to do great things.

Jurassic Joe Clark must be having a field day. Have not all the right wing fanatics gone out of the Conservative Party? Have they not all gone to the Reform Party? Now they have voted non-confidence in themselves and they are coming back. It is sad to see a party, which actually had a chance to be a sound official opposition, all of a sudden vote non-confidence in itself and go around like a band of sheep wondering which way to go. I have a problem with that, and I appreciate now that the hon. member for Mississauga West has come in here to straighten me out.

[Steve Mahoney, Liberal, Mississauga West, ON]

Not at all. To support you.

[John O'Reilly, Liberal, Victoria—Haliburton, ON]

I supported him, of course, but to follow the hon. member for Mississauga West after he has inflamed the hon. member for Wild Rose—

[Steve Mahoney, Liberal, Mississauga West, ON]

He just threatened to punch me out.

[John O'Reilly, Liberal, Victoria—Haliburton, ON]

Well, no doubt, and that is how they would cure you.

[Keith Martin, Reform, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I fail to see the relevance of the hon. member's speech given the fact that we are discussing youth crime.

[The Acting Speaker (Ms. Thibeault)]

I am sure that the hon. member is about to make a link between all that.

[John O'Reilly, Liberal, Victoria—Haliburton, ON]

Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for coming in on the conversation and reminding me that I was speaking to the amendment to Bill C-68, in fact the amendment in all its glory. I know the hon. member wants to be leader of the Reform Party. He has indicated that. I appreciate that he would get up and get involved in doctoring the speech that is going on.

Anyway, he has some obviously good points that are almost liberal in a sense and that would create some type of a problem for his party. He would be an excellent candidate and I appreciate him intervening.

Let us go back to the main talking points on Bill C-68. I am speaking to the amendment because I already spoke to the bill and I know the hon. member listened intently. I want to correct something that I said when I was heckled by one of my own members when I spoke to Bill C-68. I said that I had spent three years in grade eight and that they were the happiest years of my life. That is not true. My wife asked me to have that corrected. It was actually the member who had heckled me. I indicated those were the happiest years of his life but it came out differently in Hansard .

Going back to lowering the age to 14 and 15 years olds, that part of the youth justice system was not addressed in the original Young Offenders Act. Young offenders come from three sectors. There are the very young first offenders who commit a crime and are caught. Sometimes it is the very first crime they have committed and they are caught. It may be a misdemeanour of some type. They go into the justice system and for the first time in their lives they are taught some values.

When they realize those values and are pressured by different peers and not the peers or the gang they hang out with, many of them are success stories. They actually spend time with people who counsel them. They spend time with very intelligent lawyers. We even have some in the back row who wail away here. They spend some time with people who teach them values.

The part of the Reform Party's platform that always bothers me is that it wants to pretend that this does not happen, that people are not helped by the Young Offenders Act and are not put on the right track.

I can give many instances of people who we deal with once and they never come back into the justice system. They rearrange their lives. They take the talent they have and use it to be productive members of society. The lowering of the age to 14 or 15 years gives me the feeling that the bill is on the right track.

When 14 to 17 year olds commit a very serious crime I do not see anything wrong with publishing their names. Right now they could go back into school without people knowing that they have committed a serious crime. That part of the system has to change so that educators know who they are dealing with when there are violent offenders in their school system. If youths are sentenced for murder, attempted murder, manslaughter, aggravated sexual assault or they repeat serious violent offences, their names are then subject to publication.

We sometimes think publishing their names in the paper is what this deals with. It is more than that. It is the publication of their names so that the people who are dealing with them on a day to day basis know their backgrounds and are able to come to grips with them. They could be sitting in front of them in a classroom. I am not taking about an elementary school system. I am talking about training courses or rehabilitation courses, whether it is Alcoholics Anonymous or courses dealing with people who have come in contact with cocaine, marijuana, heroine or any of those evil drugs that are out there and so easily available. A person dealing with those people should know that a violent reaction could happen at any time. The publication of names when a judge considers them to be dangerous is a very important part of the act.

It is very easy to tell if someone is dangerous. All we have to do is look at their file or rap sheet to see the number of convictions, arrests and times they have appeared before the criminal courts. Bill C-68 is a very positive step toward have a more refined justice system for youth but it will not stop someone from committing a serious crime. That will not happen.

We have already heard the Reform Party saying that the Liberals have this idea that the bill will be the be-all and the end-all. Well, it will not. Once again I go back. We have to look at not the simplistic approach but the systemic problems in society. Until the government and all other parties deal with them our chances of having a perfect society, which will never exist of course, are diminished. This helps the people in the youth justice system to better apply the power of the courts to help youth, to rehabilitate them.

We are trying to make the public institutions a safer place to work. In order to do that we require crime prevention. The only way to have crime prevention is to educate people eliminate poverty, lack of training, lack of education and sometimes the lack of discipline. However, quite often, if we look at the people we are dealing with, giving them another beating is not the answer.

We have to find ways to deal with them that challenge them to do something different with their lives and that challenge them to have more confidence in themselves. A lack of confidence is the largest problem in youth suicide. No matter where it is one is too many. Lack of confidence and a lack of resources or ability to cope comes from the lack of the basic essentials that one needs in life.

People with money, people who are rich, still have suicides in their families. It is not because they have given them too much. It is because they have not given them the confidence. They do not have the ability to cope with the pressures that are existing today in society.

Bill C-68 is a good start in addressing our criminal justice system for youth. When we seriously look at the bill in committee and when we offer any kind of amendment to it, we should take into account the research that was done on the bill and the consultation that was done on it with the various people that came forward and will still come forward to give submissions on a bill which I think is worth the consideration of the House to pass as quickly as possible.

I hope I have added something to the debate that will promote Bill C-68 and a new youth justice system.

[Howard Hilstrom, Reform, Selkirk—Interlake, MB]

Mr. Speaker, extensive comment was made about the United Alternative. I would like to say I was happy and proud to be at the United Alternative conference.

There were 1,500 delegates from all over Canada. These delegates were not associated with a given political party. They came there as Canadians realizing that an alternative had to be created to get rid of the federal government.

[John O'Reilly, Liberal, Victoria—Haliburton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Selkirk—Interlake for his intervention on Bill C-68. I noted he made some very deep thoughts and contributed to the promotion of Bill C-68. I thank him for that. I know he is a strong supporter of the youth justice system.

[The Acting Speaker (Mr. McClelland)]

It being 5.30 p.m. the House will now proceed to the consideration of Private Members' Business as listed on today's order paper.