Mr. Speaker, I listened intently to my hon. colleague's remarks. I also listened to the member for Laval who spoke earlier.
In my previous job as a vice-president of my union, one of the things I had the privilege of doing was going to visit the different work sites of our members. Some of those work sites are provincial prisons. One of the prisons I went to was the youth centre in Willingdon, in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia.
Some of the things I saw still haunt me to this day. I saw young people who were incarcerated there for crimes they had committed at a very young age, as young as 14 years old. I wondered why the kids were there. How did they get to this point? What was missing in their lives and how could we have avoided having them in that place?
My children were about the same age, and I thought, “There but for the grace of God go my kids”. They may have one little fight in a schoolyard and they could been in there.
Regarding his comments about the restorative justice system, could we envision, in the House, what it would look like for these kids to have some support and a system that respected who they were and—