Mr. Speaker, this is an important debate on an important aspect of criminal justice. I want to open with a little anecdotal story from my and my community's past, greater Moncton.
I was elected to council for the city of Moncton in 1992. We had an older councillor, who was over 80 years of age, named Al Galbraith. He is now deceased. He was a veteran of World War II. He was a very fair-minded individual, but a law and order councillor. We all know those types who speak from the benefit of age and experience.
We were having some problems with loitering and lack of curfew being followed in some of the poorly lit parks in the city of Moncton at the time. I was newly elected and like all newly elected people I was going to save the world very quickly and easily. He was the old sage councillor and when we went on a radio show together, he talked about the problem of youth congregating in a darkly lit park. I thought perhaps we should toughen the curfew laws and look to the law side of it, the black letter. The older councillor suggested that if children were congregating in a place without lights, perhaps we should put lights in the park or provide opportunities for youth to congregate elsewhere. It struck me at the time that there were more ways to effect better laws and to have good laws followed than just enact new laws and that we had to look always at the resources in the community and what we would do to raise a community.
I do not want this to be seen as an endorsement of Senator Clinton, but it is a village that we are raising and the attempts to raising the village come not always from the law and from this place.
Nevertheless, we are talking about Bill C-25. Just like that park in the north end of Moncton, it would have been really easy perhaps for the government to turn on the light over its desk and read all of the Nunn report. It appears that it only got to one of the six recommendations.
The part of the bill that deals with the revolving door of custody is a good start. It will have to be fixed at committee. However, the Conservative government once again is in the dark with respect to criminal justice issues by not following the whole of the Nunn report. It has not even adverted to the review of the Youth Criminal Justice Act, which will be upon us very shortly. It also has not embraced other aspects that come from without the Nunn report.
My colleague, the member for Beauséjour was very clear in his remarks, as our justice critic, that the part of the bill that dealt with custody of repeat offenders or those charged with serious offences under the Youth Criminal Justice Act was a good start and that it could be fixed. I do not want to spend any more time talking about it because there is so much to the Canadian public what the government is not doing to keep our community safe. It did not follow the other aspects of the Nunn commission report, which was the very germane, sensible and logical response to a horrific incident involving Ms. McEvoy. Being in neighbouring New Brunswick, it rocked the province of Nova Scotia for the period in question.
In short, with Bill C-25, the government could have at least copied the recommendations in the Nunn report. If the government needed a set of crayons, we could have got them for it. However, it only copied one of them and, at that, not so well.
Then there was the slip-in of the issues of deterrence and denunciation.
What the government does not realize is that from time immemorial there has been legislation that bifurcates the responsibilities and the penalties to be meted out to adults on one side and youth on the other. If we are only to return to an era where everybody, in some sort of Dickensian novel way, gets treated the same way, everybody gets thrown in the debtors' prison and the poorhouse respective of age and circumstance, then that is what Canadians should know. Maybe they should know that the government wants to return to that sort of era.
We have had youth crime legislation, whether it was the Juvenile Delinquents Act, the Young Offenders Act and now the Youth Criminal Justice Act, for some time, and we do not act in a vacuum.
It is quite interesting to note that upon the enactment of the YCJA in 2003, it was the subject of a reference from the province of Quebec in respect to constitutionality and also its legitimacy on the world stage.These are important matters dealing with children and the way children are raised in our communities.
The bill does not talk about punishment. It talks about justice to the community. What are we to do with our youth? None of the principles of deterrence or denunciation were in the YCJA. The most offending aspects of the YCJA in international law deal with those provisions in sections 61 to 72, regarding the imposition of adult sentences, or the mode of trial in adult court, for young offenders.
Sometimes we live in a bubble that media outlets and certain Conservative demagogues propagate, such as having no laws covering this, or we are a lawless society, or our youth are running rampant across the country committing crimes. That is not the case.
The YCJA has provisions that have been challenged for their constitutionality and their international human rights legitimacy with respect to trying youths as adults. It is important perhaps to remember and to remind Canadians that we have legislation on the books to deal with the problems that face our communities. In certain circumstances children and youths have been tried as adults. What is wrong with the principles of deterrence and denunciation is that they import a concept from the Criminal Code of Canada into the YCJA.
Justice Nunn talked about a lot of things. The McEvoy incident was horrific. It rocked the community. There have been instances like the McEvoy incident across the country. As parliamentarians we should be dealing with things like this.
Let me be clear. We on this side of the House would have welcomed both here in the House and in committee a more comprehensive Bill C-25. Alas, amendments to Bill C-25, incorporating more of the Nunn recommendations, might well be out of order. They might be further than the concept that this very narrow bill suggests.
The government chose to import one concept of the over six recommendations. It inserted from its political quiver an agenda of punishment, of incorporating concepts that did not belong in the act. The government chose to try to get a reference to the Supreme Court of Canada to get the whole YCJA thrown out. Maybe that is the whole ploy here. Incorporating the principles of sentencing of deterrence and denunciation will put the YCJA in jeopardy.
It is important to remember this. We often talk about what we add to legislation, but often there are teeth to pieces of legislation. The Criminal Code and the YCJA are no exception.
Reading the very monosyllabic but frequent Conservative press releases on criminal justice, one might be surprised to read that there are principles of sentencing in the YCJA. On a good and fair reading, these principles might make Canadians feel that judges are given the task of interpreting these principles and ensuring that our communities remain safe.
Section 38(3) states:
In determining a youth sentence, the youth justice court shall take into account
(a) the degree of participation by the young person...
(b) the harm done to victims and whether it was intentional...
(c) any reparation made by the young person...
(d) the time spent in detention...
These alone speak to the community interest.
How many times at justice committee and in the House have we heard, for example, the member for Wild Rose say that victims are never part of any determination by judges or lawyers in any of the discussions on criminal justice across the country?
I stand here today as a representative of a community where an 83-year-old veteran councillor had the sense to say that we did not have to deal with all the law. Sometimes we just had to turn the light on in the park and read the laws that exist. I wish the government had done that.