Mr. Speaker, what we have seen is the spike and we have seen it most noticeably in the last three or four years in our crime statistics. We have seen it particularly coming out of crimes committed by youth gangs.
If we go back and study the sociological data, a good number of individuals committing those crimes were in their early to late adolescence or early teens at the time when these financial cuts came about and when the impact of the cuts to those programs, whether it was the treatment programs, affordable housing or basic social assistance, were felt. We saw a 22% cut in social assistance in the province of Ontario in one budget.
Those cuts had a substantial impact on the ability of mostly single parents to provide even the basic necessities. We are seeing this analysis coming at this point, and I think it will be a few more years before we can say whether it is a valid analysis, but at the very least it should say to us that we need to be very careful about how we deal with youth crime. How do we treat it, handle it or reduce it?
A simplistic analysis that we see in the bill, and particularly in the second part of the bill, says that all we need to do is introduce some new sentencing principles, take them from the adult sentencing principles that we have now and say that we need to denunciate these crimes, deter these crimes and use those sentencing principles to do it.
There is overwhelming sociological evidence that deterrence works very little, as does denunciation even in adult crimes. There is even better evidence that it does not work at all in youth crimes.
It is good that we are continuing to have this debate because it allows us to hear more stories and information from other members of the House that this bill is not the way to go or tinker with the youth criminal justice system because it is not effective and, in fact, we may have unintended consequences.
We know that if we put people who are psychologically vulnerable into certain settings they come out more hardened, experienced and better criminals in the sense that they learn while they are in those custodial facilities from other more hardened criminals how to commit crime better. They oftentimes come out more bitter and more vicious. We know those things from all sorts of studies.
This simplistic analysis of simply saying that we need to denunciate, we need to deter and put those principles into our youth criminal justice system flies in the face of overwhelming factual evidence to the contrary.
We hear from the Conservative government that it is spending money on treatment programs. As I said earlier, the analysis we had from across the country was not $10 million or $20 million a year in additional funding. We have some makeup to do for all those programs that got cut, both federally and provincially, all those funds that stopped flowing to help build a better society, whether it is for recreational or treatment programs. We cut those funds and they have not been put back.
I think one of the speakers earlier this evening talked about $22 million going back in. The analysis we made, in assistance with the network of communities across the country that did the analysis, is that at a minimum we needed $100 million a year. If we could find all that money in the budget to give tax breaks to large corporations in the billions of dollars, could we not have found more money for these programs? Even though the government may be spending $22 million, it actually is not since it has not got around to spending it all. However, it could have spent another $80 million if it had not given those billions of dollars in tax breaks to large corporations that did not need them.