Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise and speak to the bill, as I have in the past. I appreciate that we are in the first group of amendments. I will keep my comments general with respect to the youth criminal justice act.
I want to state at the outset that prior to being elected as a member of parliament I did practise law. I did a fair amount of work in the youth criminal courts. It was a real eye-opener. I want to put this premise at the very beginning: every single youth who ends up in our youth courts will end up back in the community, whether they have committed a lesser offence or are incarcerated. At some point in the continuum they will all end up back in the community. We have to keep that in mind so that we can help them help themselves and be integrated back into the community.
My greatest concern with the new youth criminal justice act is that we have taken the old Young Offenders Act and repackaged it. We have put some new wrapping paper and ribbons on it and given it a new name but by and large we have not made the substantive changes that are necessary.
I will give a few examples. I want to emphasize that in my experience I have seen a lot of troubled children with horrific backgrounds who end up in our court system. Trying to stop them from becoming career criminals and going through a revolving door is another problem in itself. The focus has to be on ensuring they do not end up back in our courts. How do we help them? How do they become productive members of society?
I call it a tough love approach. I think we need to deal with these people. When these young offenders are institutionalized, the people at those facilities need to have the tools and resources they need to do the job, as so often they do not, such as the right counselling and drug programs. The goal at the end of the day is to make sure these young offenders are taught discipline and respect for society. I think that can be done.
I heard the Minister of Justice say today during question period that we want to send 10 year old children to jail. In very serious offences that will be necessary. That is what we are pushing for.
There are cases where 10 and 11 year old children absolutely need to be institutionalized to get the help they need. I mean that sincerely. If we do not send them away when they are committing really serious offences at a very young age, it is a problem. In most cases they come from terrible backgrounds. The best thing we can do for those young children when we institutionalize them is to make sure that they get the programs and the counselling they need. I would say based on my experience that at least half of them have fetal alcohol syndrome. There are all kinds of problems.
I heard the Minister of Justice say in question period today that we have no compassion, no feelings, and that we want to send 10 year old children away. I believe in my heart that it is the right thing to do if we are going to get them the help they need. That is just one example.
Adult sentences under this new youth criminal justice act are for only very specific offences: first degree murder, second degree murder, attempted murder, manslaughter and aggravated sexual assault. That is why I say we have only repackaged the old Young Offenders Act.
There are many other offences, such as assault causing bodily harm, that are extremely violent offences. There are property offences such as breaking and entering and home invasion. These are very serious offences. We also need to look at these offences. I call it a tough love approach. We need to deal with these young offenders and make sure that this is not a place they want to come back to, that they learn respect and discipline. We will only be helping them.
There are other areas I would like to see addressed that are not. One is with respect to the whole area of legal aid. I watched young offenders who were given lawyers under the legal aid program. One of my concerns is that we are sending the wrong message. Many of these people are striving for attention. They get their own lawyer and think that is cool. They walk into the courts and it is “I have my lawyer with me.” We do not do them a service. There are other ways in which that could be much better addressed. I do not see this legislation as addressing any of that.
I want to emphasize that at the end of the day our goal is to help these people, because every single one of them, at least at this point in their lives, will be back in society. We want to make sure that they are not just being institutionalized. If they need psychiatric help, counselling, anger management or schooling, we want to make sure that all of it is happening while they are in these institutions, that they are not just going through a revolving door. I want to emphasize that I do not believe in my heart that the bill is doing any of the things I am talking about. It is important that we focus on providing what I call tough love.
Youths used to come up to me and say they did not mind going to jail for two weeks. Some of them actually kind of liked it. What they used to absolutely hate was curfews. Under section 7 of the old Young Offenders Act there was a provision whereby a curfew could be enforced by parents. In other words, if a young offender breached that curfew the parents, as legal guardians, had an obligation to report that breach. Obviously they could not control that child, but they had to report the breach to the authorities. That person would then be picked up at a later date and brought back before the courts.
If, along with other conditions, we made curfews mandatory for many offences, that would go a long way toward helping these children, as I call them, with their problems. We need to take a tough approach. It does not have to be a mean approach, but it has to be a tough approach up front so that young offenders get discipline and guidance and learn to respect society.
Home invasion and break and enters are not even mentioned in the act with respect to adult offences. Other than sexual assault, those are some of the most intrusive invasions into one's personal privacy. These are very traumatizing for victims and affect their lives for years. These young offenders, these children, who are committing these terrible offences need to be dealt with swiftly, not by taking a year to go through the process, and without the adjournments. They need to be dealt with very swiftly. They have to realize that society will not tolerate these actions. They have to learn that there are consequences. We will be helping those children to become much more productive members of society and to have a much better life in the future. That is a good approach.
I know that members from the Bloc oppose this vehemently and seem to want to take a lesser approach. I do not share that view. I am not talking about a mean approach. I am talking about an approach whereby offenders learn respect for and discipline in society. The institution becomes a place they do not want to go back to. While offenders are institutionalized, those institutions must have the resources to help offenders to help themselves. Those who do not want to be helped will have to learn that there are serious consequences and that those actions will not be tolerated in society.
To summarize it in a sentence, I see this youth criminal justice act as just a repackaging of the old Young Offenders Act. It has a new outside, but by and large it is almost the same as what we have.
The substantive changes that are required are not there. There is not the commitment on funding that is required to make sure that the resources are available for these institutions in order to actually help these people help themselves. For those reasons, I will not be supporting this new act. I look forward to this debate. Hopefully there can be some amendments that will help to move us in this direction.