Mr. Speaker, you will be pleased to know that I too do not have a prepared speech to read and put the House to sleep with.
Allow me to begin with an important quote, which could guide our discussions today. It is from the report submitted by the Jasmin task force, established by the Government of Quebec to look into the application of the Young Offenders Act.
This excerpt is important in the context of the current debate.
The Jasmin report sates:
It is often easier to change a law than to change practices of intervention. It may be tempting to think that tougher legislation is the answer to the problems of delinquency.
Simplistic responses blind us to the full extent of complex problems and create the false impression that we are doing what is necessary to resolve them.
One such simplistic response is substituting get-tough measures for educational approaches. This, however, overlooks the fact that adolescents are still in the process of learning, and it means they are being saddled with full responsibility for delinquency, as if the society and environment they live in had nothing to do with it.
In today's debate, this should be a beacon guiding the minister as regards the bill before us. But that is not what the Liberal Party is doing. The minister should have travelled across the country to explain that, as far as young offenders are concerned, the best policy is the one advocated by Quebec, but she did not do that.
Instead, the minister decided to reform herself. She decided to adopt the philosophy of western cowboys. Members will recall that the cowboy approach to young offenders was simple: shoot first and ask questions later.
Listening to my colleagues from the Reform Party and the Progressive Conservative Party, I could not help but wonder if the hanging would be reintroduced. Why not have public hangings while we are at it? The Reformers and the Conservatives are going a little too far.
I condemn the Liberal government for moving toward such radical solutions. It is not by changing the law to make it tougher and by imposing exemplary sentences that we will solve the problem with regard to young offenders.
I think Quebec's approach was better. Unfortunately, as usual, the minister and her cabinet colleagues simply ignored that approach. She will engage in a big centralizing exercise. We will have to wait and see how it will fit in with the various provincial justice systems. We already know there will be a problem in Quebec.
The minister claims, among a lot of other things, that the existing legislation is not clear. However, statistics do not lie. The crime rate in Quebec is the lowest in Canada. Why has the minister not taken Quebec as model instead of embracing the philosophy of the Reform Party and western Canada and bringing forward such a harsh piece of legislation to deal with young offenders? She even found a way to criticize everything that is related to Quebec's justice system and police forces.
The Government of Quebec does not agree with the minister's bill. The Barreau du Québec does not agree. Most criminologists have expressed great concern about the minister's approach. Youth centres, which deal with young offenders and see to it that they are rehabilitated instead of punished and put into a system they will never get out of, have expressed their opposition to the minister's proposal. And so has Quebec's president of the bar.
I did not take many examples from the law, but one that caught my eye is the one about publishing the names of the young offenders. We consider this totally counterproductive. Juvenile delinquency breeds new recruits for gangs like the Hell's Angels and the Jokers. When a juvenile delinquent is planning a career with the Hell's Angels, and his name appears in the papers, he need only report to the Hell's Angels and say “See what a naughty brat I am. I am ready to take over in a motorcycle gang”.
It seems to me that publishing the name of these young people is counterproductive. This is one of the measures I found in the bill. There are a lot more.
What we have before us today is again two systems and two values. The Quebec system believes in rehabilitation. Under the Quebec system, all the energies of the justice system and the police forces must go toward rehabilitating young offenders who have not reached the age of majority. The solution is not to send them to a harsh prison setting where there is absolutely no chance of rehabilitation.
Quebec considers it important to give young people who have committed an offence, whatever the offence, the opportunity to rehabilitate themselves. Unfortunately, I think that the minister opposes this. As usual, she holds the philosophy of centralization under which all of Canada's justice systems, Quebec's or that of other provinces, must align with the federal system. That is totally deplorable.
There are not just the visions of Quebec and Canada that differ. There are also two visions in the area I hold dear, Indian affairs. In most provinces, except in Quebec maybe, the rate of incarceration of young natives is very high.
Some people understood how to deal with the issue in Quebec. A travelling judge used to go to northern Quebec and attend what they call sentencing circles. When a young native had a crime problem, people gathered in a room and asked the community “What can we do, by using a healing circle, to reintegrate this teenager?” Some extraordinary things are being done in Quebec but unfortunately not elsewhere.
This judge was Jean-Charles Coutu. He travelled to the far north on a regular basis to solve problems. Contrary to many judges and indeed to the minister's philosophy, this judge sat down and, after having heard the evidence and before sentencing, he would listen to what the community had to suggest in order to rehabilitate the young offender.
On numerous occasions, the judge agreed with the healing circle and said “I will sentenced this young person according to what you told me and we will see how successful rehabilitation will be”.
The rate of success was very high. Besides avoiding overpopulating jails, they succeeded in rehabilitating those young people.
This is why it is regrettable that the minister is leading us down a different path and taking a hardline approach. Unfortunately, the Bloc Quebecois will have to vote against this bill, for the main reasons I have just given.