Mr. Speaker, I did not have the opportunity to sit on the committee that produced this report. However, I have the privilege of coming from a family that has traditionally been open to cultural communities. I can remember that, from early in my childhood, my father would bring home people from various backgrounds to allow us to learn from their music, culture, theatre and writing. We always were very open to having people from wherever visit, and being enriched by them; it was an opportunity to get to know them better and to share their culture.
When we talk about crime in cultural communities and the desire of these communities to see their children, teenagers, young men and women, get out of crime, we talk about communities which have been consistently striving to fit in with society, in Quebec and Canada, and to really work together with police and other institutions.
On the subject of crime, there are things we do not talk about. What I would have liked the government to do is give the reasons for crime, instead of going on and on about cultural communities getting together in committees to discuss the terrorist potential of some of their own. I would rather discuss what causes crime to exist in cultural communities, because it is caused by extreme poverty. There is no social housing and no employment.
Today, in Quebec and Canada, those least likely to find employment are people from the cultural communities, particularly visible minority cultural communities.
The vast majority of women in these communities cannot find jobs because they are unable to cope with today's very demanding labour market, and also because employers are not doing what they are supposed to do; they do not have non-discriminatory hiring policies in place.
If these problems are not addressed and members of Parliament and legislators do not deal with poverty issues, as is their duty, crime will never be stopped. Try as they may, without help in doing what they have to do, cultural communities will never succeed in stopping crime.
Not one child born to a mother from Haiti or from countries in Africa or Latin America sat in Santa's lap and said that he wanted to become a gang member when he grew up. Not one.
The reason why some of these children are on the street today and chose to join a street gang is because they wanted to feel valued. Obviously this is not the right way to achieve that. It is not what we wish for our children. That is often what happens when a society abandons its children and does not ensure that they have everything they need to grow and blossom in a fair and equitable environment. Instead of demanding more measures to fight crime or more prisons, we should be demanding measures to help people find a way out. We need more social housing, more jobs and more people who really have the good of their community at heart.
There are glaring examples. In Winnipeg, children and families living in poverty formed a cooperative so they could buy a house. Poor people cannot afford to buy houses. They do not have RRSPs and they cannot benefit from the home buyers' plan. Home ownership is just not accessible to them.
These people used to live in a place where graffiti, crime and vandalism were a daily occurrence. When these people were finally able to buy a house, when these children could finally be proud to have parents who owned their own house, there was a drop in crime.
There was a noticeable decrease in crime, even an end to crime altogether. Graffiti is no longer seen on the houses. The houses are no longer covered in graffiti because the people and children living there are proud. This is what we must keep in mind. Cultural communities can try to do everything in their power to stamp out crime, but if they are not given the tools they need, they will never succeed.
And by tools, I do not mean additional prison sentences or the imprisonment of 12-year-old children. I do not mean jailing people who commit misdeeds because they want to impress their young peers. That is not what I am talking about. Instead, I am talking about measures to help cultural communities keep their outreach workers in the street, such as the Maison d'Haïti mentioned earlier by my colleague. Communities need to have outreach workers who work on a daily basis with young people in the streets, to try to convince them to become involved in something other than crime. These youth need role models. And it is not until people get out of poverty that they can become role models. Once these mothers and fathers have decent jobs, they can get out of poverty, their children will be able to go to school and on to post-secondary, and these children will stop being marginalized because they do not have what everyone else has. This is how we should talk about reducing crime.
Unless we reduce poverty in Canada, we will never be able to reduce crime. For years now, we have been saying that we want to reduce poverty, but we still have one million children living in poverty. Given 1.5 or 1.6 children per family, that means that at least 700,000 people are living in abject poverty. That creates fertile ground for criminal activity and for children who have nothing and want what other people have. That is to be expected.
We live in a consumer society where everything we see on television, on the Internet and all around us tells us that we have to have the nicest clothes, the best cars and the best weapons. In the United States, despite last week's tragedy, the National Rifle Association and the Gun Owners of America are suggesting that all students should be armed to go to school. Just imagine. And they would have us think that such policies do not promote criminal activity. They are trivializing the use of guns, trivializing the fact that a gun does not have to be registered, trivializing the fact that women want the gun registry so that police officers can continue to track down people who might be inclined to misuse them.
There are many things we can do to fight crime other than build prisons and hire people to figure out whether a private prison would be better than a public one. That was done in the United States, where the incarceration rate is seven times that of Canada.
I am privileged to have many ethnic communities in my riding. Everywhere I go, those communities have community centres to help their young people. The centres encourage the youth to help older people and participate in choirs and basketball, baseball and soccer clubs. Even though they do not have the financial means to do it, they dig deep and do as much as they can to help their youth.
As my colleague said earlier, to fight crime, we have to give ethnic communities the necessary tools. By tools, I also mean money, because it is always about money.
I would like to add that youth from ethnic communities are not the only ones falling prey to increasing criminal activity. Because of the media, young Quebeckers, both anglophone and francophone, also seek the notoriety achieved through criminal activity.
One way to combat youth crime might be to prohibit the media from talking about it, because whenever they run stories about young people from cultural communities, it is because they have done something wrong. The media never report on young people from cultural communities who have done something noteworthy for their community, but do talk about them when they do something wrong, as all young people are likely to do.
A person does not have to come from a cultural community to want to assert his or her identity at 14, 15 or 16. Unfortunately, however, young people sometimes choose the wrong crowd. But if there is no one in the community to help them when this happens, I am afraid our young people will do things they will regret later. We must do everything we can as members of Parliament and legislators to give cultural communities all the tools they need and try to create more culturally diverse police forces. Only by initiating a dialogue involving institutions, communities and children can we stop the rise in violence and crime.
As I said earlier, young people do not aspire to be criminals when they get older, just as they do not necessarily aspire to be members of Parliament. They think about being happy and enjoying their childhood. But a child who, at 12, 13 or 14, already has a weapon is no longer a child, at least mentally, if not physically or emotionally. And that is even more serious, because children whose childhood is taken away from them lose their ability to wonder and to laugh for no reason. Is there anything more beautiful than an innocent child's laughter? Is there anything more beautiful to hear as a mother and grandmother? Sometimes, I stop and listen to my grandchildren laugh. Children's laughter gives us the warmest feeling we as parents and grandparents can have, because it means that our children perhaps do not have to prove to others that they are men or women. When they laugh, it is because our children perhaps do not have to prove to themselves that they can escape the abject misery they live in.
Have you ever been to Ville Saint-Michel or to Montréal-Nord, Mr. Speaker? Have you ever been to Verdun in areas where some apartment buildings are real slums, with mould on walls, with broken windows and without heat because landlords do not maintain them? Do you know what it means for a child to grow up in such a slum? No. We have the good fortune and the privilege of coming from rather well-to-do families, or if it was not the case, at least we did not live in that kind of abject poverty. We did not live in ghettos.
Now a lot of cultural communities are ghettoized. And they are ghettoized even more when we hear statements like the one made earlier by my colleague from the Conservative Party who said that these people who live here but who are from a different culture are just thinking about committing suicide, as was the case in England, that these children want to commit suicide by killing other people.
I do not think so. We must have more respect for cultural communities. We must meet them and get to know them better to make sure that when we say things about them, we say the right things.
Again, I hope the government will understand how important it is not to use crime to put in place measures that are totally inappropriate to deal with the problem that we are facing.
I hope the hon. members will be wise enough, as the hon. member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine is asking, to recognize the contribution of the cultural communities and to recognize their efforts in dealing with the difficulties experienced by their children and adolescents. We must also recognize that without these cultural communities, our social fabric would not be as vibrant.
I am married to someone from Africa, from the Congo more specifically, and today it is a great pleasure and privilege for my grandchildren to talk about their ancestors and where they are from.
As long as we welcome people from other countries, our lives will be enriched. We experience the best of those who come here: their food, music, dance and literature. The freedom of spirit they have taught us, the ability to break out of our shells and exceed our limitations, has put us on the world stage. We have succeeded in doing this, in Quebec in particular, where we have a number of world renowned artists, because of the contribution from all the cultural communities that live here now and that we have come to know. Thanks to these cultural communities, we have a sense of our own worth, we recognize our own values, and we have established very enriching dialogues with the communities.
I hope the government will very seriously consider adopting measures for decreasing poverty, increasing the stock of social housing, cutting unemployment and reducing incarceration. I hope there will be more measures for finally giving people in the cultural communities the right, the legitimacy, and the freedom to live here and prosper. That is the right of every individual under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which was celebrated this week and of which all Canadians are so proud. It is not through repressive measures that we will succeed in tackling crime, but with our hearts, our hands and our open minds. We have to listen to the communities and do what we can so they can better help their children and loved ones to find success.