It is the quality people. I could call for quorum but I will not.
I want to get my point across, even to the minister. The minister is trying to do a pretty decent job. If the aboriginal program is failing for any reason and if there are more aboriginal youth having problems for any reason, the minister should try to fix that, but the government should not try to make an excuse for it, because those youths have committed crimes and we would give them less of a consequence than anyone else. That is no consequence at all. In fact it is making matters worse.
If I may, I would like to go back for just a minute to what I really believe about the House of Commons. I thought when I came here from British Columbia that I could actually sit down and negotiate with a majority government, with anyone on the other side, and try to make common sense of things, but it is such a partisan place that I do not believe it is possible.
In regard to some of the issues brought up here, particularly the national sex offender registry, the issue I mentioned, I want to say that it is something that all the provinces need. They need it so badly that Ontario had to undertake it on its own. I have heard the solicitor general say in the House that there is not much compliance in this thing, so why would we build a national sex offender registry? In fact, the first provincial registry set up in the country is Ontario's and it has 90% compliance. Of the 10% who are incompliant, that is, offenders not reporting, many have left the province. They have left the province because there is such a restriction as far as compliance and reporting is concerned. There are laws in place. How this hurts Ontario is that other provinces do not have registries, so sex offenders who want to reoffend and do not want to report just go to another province.
What we need is a national guideline, a national sex offender registry that has mandated reporting and mandated penalties if offenders do not report. It is not a difficult thing to do. In fact Ontario indicated that it would give the software to anyone who wants it, including the federal government.
Putting the legislation in place would take nothing. I have done it myself. It is sitting here as a private member's bill, but it will not see the light of day because there is no will on the other side. What we are stuck with here is a government that does not want to implement a national sex offender registry, maybe because it was not the government's idea. That may be it. Everybody else seems to want it, including its own members. All it would take is to have a bill like that, make it law and take the software from Ontario. We would then have a much better system of promptly finding young people when they are missing, but I guess that will not happen. I guess that when the government stands up and says “yes, we're all for it and we'll do it by January 30”, it does not mean a damn thing, quite frankly.
To get back to the youth justice act, Bill C-7, I guess that all the speaking we do in the House does not really mean a lot either, because the government will do what it wants. It will neglect our concerns. It will not even use its own committee to put this in place because it lost it on the committee, thanks to the opposition. It will go to the Senate and the Senate will bring it over to the House, where it will pass, much to the objections of the Alliance, the Bloc and the other opposition.
All of us in our country have a lesson to learn. Majority governments do not work if we have a specific interest that is not the government's, because it will just tell us to take a hike, stick it in our ear, and it will damn well do what it wants to do.