Mr. Speaker, I am going to try to address the hon. members of this House without a prepared speech, speaking from my heart rather than from my head, in a final attempt to convince the government that it is on the wrong track with this bill.
I am also going to try to convince the House that we in Quebec did not just decide overnight to set off on a crusade against the federal government on this young offenders bill.
I am sure that those who have studied the young offender issue, and I know certain members on the other side have looked at it very seriously, know deep down that they are off on the wrong track by wishing to pass this bill at any price, come what may, despite all that has been said in Quebec, and even in the other Canadian provinces, about its complexity, about the fact that the bill is going to be impossible to apply and above all will not give the anticipated results.
Well before passage of the Young Offenders Act in 1984, Quebec already had its approach to young offenders. It had the Loi sur le bien-être social, which addressed young offenders and took a very particular approach to them, before the federal government enacted its young offender legislation in 1984. The Quebec statute applied to young people aged 14, 15, 16 and 17, particularly the 16 and 17 year olds who had committed serious crimes. The Quebec system took charge of these young people and processed them through a system parallel to the one for adult offenders.
At that time, we already had an infrastructure for handling young people in trouble with the law. In 1984, with the great wisdom of the House, prompted particularly by the paternalism of the federal MPs—