Mr. Speaker, my colleague made his point very clearly and I am pleased that he took the time to do so because it is also very important to make a distinction between different types of crime.
My colleague told us that when he was younger, his family was poor and lived in a ghetto. I believe him. In those times, I do not know if poor families had television, and if during the shows there were so many advertisements to show them what all the other children had.
This does not mean that in wealthy communities there is less crime. It only means that there is perhaps a little more idleness, disinterest and perhaps a little less involvement. I think that as adults, we have a responsibility to look out for all children, regardless of whether they are from rich, poor or multicultural communities. We have the responsibility to ensure that there is prevention. This is very true.
My grandparents used to always say, “The devil finds work for idle hands”. We were taught how to knit so that our hands were always busy. We were taught how to crochet and all sorts of other things that I loathed. I am left-handed and I really disliked all of that. The results were always terrible but we were taught to always keep busy.
I think that today we have a society where everything goes very fast, where everything is very fast. My colleague spoke earlier about television violence. There is violence on television and also in video games where you can die 20 times and then come back to life in the next second. That makes our young people think that they are immortal. When I was 14, 15 or 16 years old, I believed that I was immortal and invincible. Today, at the age of 57, I know for certain that I will die one day and that I am not invincible. It took me many years to figure that out. Until we are confronted by the realities of life that make us aware of such things, we continue to believe that we are invincible and immortal.
Video games can make us believe it for many years. Young people who are 30 or 35 play them every day and may still believe that they are immortal. Furthermore, when there are television programs such as Weeds, which sings the praises of marijuana and endorses its use, our youth will want to continue down that road.
We must realize that the most important news media for youth today are not newspapers but the Internet and television. We must take action to ensure that if we wish to have television without censorship, it must be television that is appropriate for our youth. We must be sure that our young people are learning things of importance when they watch television and not just values associated with crime.