Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to stand and contribute to the debate this afternoon on Bill C-3.
I thought it was interesting that when the minister responded to a question today she said that the Young Offenders Act had been under debate for the past two years. I thought she must have been sleeping in the 35th Parliament. The debate on the Young Offenders Act was one of the first things we dealt with when we entered the House in January 1994. There had been a nationwide request for submissions on the Young Offenders Act in the late fall of 1993 and the justice committee tried to move that agenda forward in the 35th Parliament. I believe we were successful only in forcing the federal government to bring a very weak piece of legislation at the time into the House which dealt with nothing that was identified by Canadians as a problem with the Young Offenders Act.
It would appear that Bill C-3 is another lackluster attempt by the federal government to deal with the concern of Canadians with the Young Offenders Act and its inability to deal with the changes in our society and where young people find themselves.
It is not just adult Canadians who have identified the problems with the Young Offenders Act. It is the young people who have indicated to my colleagues and to myself that they do not feel at all protected by the Young Offenders Act. There is no significant penalty being paid by young people who choose to live a life that is less than desirable.
I sympathize with the Bloc in that Quebec does have a much better system for early intervention than we will find anywhere else in the country. Early intervention is certainly not something that replaces the Young Offenders Act. It is something that should work with the Young Offenders Act. It is something that should continue to be used and supported in the province of Quebec and hopefully in other provinces.
In my province of British Columbia we have a program in a number of communities that deals with first time offenders or young people who show that they are getting into the wrong choices. Two of the communities in my riding have that program. The process is to bring them into the program for counselling, to work with the parents and their schools and to try to give these young people, who have made a bad choice or perhaps got mixed up with the wrong group of friends, an opportunity to change the direction in which they are going without having a criminal record.
That is not what a young offender act is all about. A young offender act, although it can deal with some of these alternative measures for first time offenders and for young people who are not criminal in nature or who are not going to be repeat offenders, should have other ways to deal with that. A young offender act deals with young people who have chosen to go in a direction that is not acceptable to society. They need to know very strongly and very clearly that their actions are not acceptable and there is a penalty to pay to behave that way.
That has not happened in the past. With the present Young Offenders Act under which we now operate there is not a clear definition of what a young person can get away with. I think young people are asking for that clear definition.
Once again the government has brought in a piece of legislation that does not give those kinds of clear definitions. I have noticed that again there is a reluctance to understand there are 11 year olds in society who are part of the group of young people that have chosen to violate the law and do things that are abhorrent to society. Unfortunately those 11 year olds are not dealt with.
If the government thinks that they are dealt with under the social services and child protection acts of the provinces, surely the statistics out there would indicate that is not the case. The provincial governments do not have the resources or the ability to make sure those young people get appropriate treatment.
It has also been brought to my attention over the course of this debate that the federal government has once again reneged on its commitment to fund the services for young offenders to 50%. If the federal government is to bring in legislation that puts the onus on the provinces to deliver a service with the understanding that there would be financial contributions of up to 50% of cost, why does it never meet that commitment? Whether it is in health or the young offenders act, why is the federal government not meeting a commitment it is making to the provinces to fulfil an obligation that is there?
If these young people are brought into the system and are treated, perhaps we will not have an increase of 360-odd per cent of violent offences by young people. If a young person breaks the law repeatedly, does not pay any significant price for doing so and then goes back into the school environment holding himself up as a tough dude who will continue that kind of behaviour, why would we expect anything different?
We on this side of the House and others in society are asking for the government to acknowledge that there are young people out there who need substantial support because they do not mean to be doing whatever it is they are doing and are being led astray. There are also some young people out there who are not nice and whose intentions are not to be good citizens of society. Those young people also have to be brought into a system where they know what will happen to them, what the lines are and what the punishment will be. It has to be substantial enough that they change the direction in which they are going.
It is quite obvious to many of us when we see what happens in society. If young people are not given opportunities to readdress where they are going with educational opportunities, counselling or whatever they might need when they are young offenders, chances are they will be in the system when they are adults. We have seen it. Anyone who has had any exposure to the prison system has seen that many individuals in that system started at a young age and were young offenders.
A lot of it is because they never had to pay when they were young people. The concern we have in the House is that we are not distinguishing between young people who make a bad choice and violent offenders. In this piece of legislation there is reference to alternative sentencing, which means something other than incarceration, being applicable to violent offenders.
We saw in the sentencing legislation brought down under the criminal code a couple of years ago that violent offenders are now being given alternative sentences, which means something other than incarceration, and put back or left out in society because there was not a clear definition in the legislation which said a violent offender should be treated differently than an ordinary non-violent offender. The legislation for young offenders allows that same abuse of the system.
We have had numerous cases brought before the House of how it is not working in the adult system. Why would we repeat the same mistake in the Young Offenders Act when we have identified that mistake in adult legislation in the criminal code?
Although there may be the odd provision in the legislation that is supportable, for the most part it should not supportable by individuals in the House. It is another weak attempt by the Liberal government to brush the issue aside and say that it has dealt with it. We will be revisiting the same issue, mark my words, in another couple of years because the government has not addressed it any more now than it did in 1995-96 when it brought in its previous legislation on the Young Offenders Act.
It would be nice if the government would be a little more willing to listen to the witnesses who appeared before the committee giving constructive suggestions and if it would listen to opposition members and actually do something meaningful to readdress the Young Offenders Act.