Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to address the House on Bill C-25, which attempts to modify the Youth Criminal Justice Act and take into account the number of provisions that deal with the importance of youth in pretrial custody and also how we can sentence young offenders and penalize them more for the crimes they have committed.
I come from a riding in the Northwest Territories in which the crime rate is very high. Social conditions have been bad in the past and continue to provide us with no end of problems in our communities. It is something each community tries to grapple with and understand.
Many of the problems arise from the transient nature of our non-aboriginal society, the cultural impact of changing societies on our aboriginal people, the harsh conditions under which we live and the failure of the education system to give adequate education to many people, not necessarily the fault of the system, but of the whole society. Many things go on in our society that lead young people in the wrong direction.
As a former mayor in a small community that was 50% aboriginal, I understand many of the issues young people are facing in growing up and making choices. It is not easy. Sometimes it comes from the lack of parental guidance available to them. Sometimes it comes from problems that are physiological in nature. Sometimes it comes from a community that does not have an answer for a young person, does not have a direction to give a young person. We all grapple with these issues and we wonder how we can best serve our young people.
Whenever we look at the legislation like this, our primary purpose is to improve the lot of young people as they move toward adulthood, accept their own decisions and comprehend and understand the nature of their acts.
Basically this is common law experience in Canada for 150 years. We accept that young people do not necessarily have all the tools required for the complex decisions they have to make in their everyday life. Sometimes they make mistakes. Sometimes they are led to mistakes. Sometimes they are ill-prepared by their parents to deal with the kinds of choices they have to make. We are all troubled about how we can deal with these things and how we can put them in context.
We think that perhaps stricter sentences will give us an answer, that somehow this will drive the boat to encourage young people to move in the right direction in their future life, that it gives them a very strong message of denunciation that their acts are inappropriate and they should be struck heavily for doing them and carrying that with them for a while, while in incarceration or other forms.
I have trouble with that. I find it does not really work all that well in our society. I find the solutions for young people are more tied to the things we do that are not tied to incarceration,or the criminal justice system. We have seen the kinds of results that can bring.
I was very encouraged. I held a public meeting in a small community by the name of Déline. I mentioned it in the House earlier today with a question to another speaker.
This aboriginal community has had a great success rate in keeping their children in line to avoid many of those pitfalls that are in our society, unlike many other communities. It has a record of five years with no young offender charges in the community. In talking to RCMP officers who supervise and work with the community, they are very pleased with what is happening. They are very pleased the community has taken hold of these young people in many ways.
I like to talk about positive things many times when I talk about young people. We need to have a positive message for young people. That to me is part of the intrinsic nature of young people. They are optimistic and looking forward. Let us give them that chance. This is what the people in Déline have done. They have a very vigorous program of interaction with their young people in their schools. The whole community of 800 people is linked back to the young people. They put the time and effort in with their young people and they get results from it.
They also have opportunities for young people to get the experience of elders. They consider this very important and I think it is very important as well. In our modern society so often we leave our young people with their peers. We are not providing them with the ongoing direction and counselling that they would get in previous generations or in a previous era when they had the opportunity to work with their parents in the fields or in the everyday tasks of a rural and simpler lifestyle.
Now children are alienated from their parents and their workplaces. They are put into a modern society that does not deliver this. In Déline they encourage those directions. They encourage the young people to participate with the people who can give them direction, who have the direction inherent in their nature. It is a very valid point.
As well, I had an opportunity to talk to a sociologist and psychologist about the nature of youth centres. He said to me that in a way, youth centres were validating what modern society was validating, that they got their direction from their peers. They go to a youth centre and interact with young people. They do not have that communication with the whole of society that gives them a better message, that more complete message about what they do with their lives or with the choices they have to make in life.
We have to be very careful with legislation that drives young people into correctional facilities, into environments where they will run into more of the peer situation. They will run into the criminal peer situation, which will increase their likelihood of repeating criminal acts in the future. Therefore, I do not find this is a very useful thing or objective in law. It may work for one or two, but what we have to look in legislation is the best possible solution for the most young people. I find it to be very limiting to think that young people are going to improve by being sent away to correctional facilities, incarcerated in a fashion that denounces their actions, that is a strict deterrence to them for that act.
I had the occasion the other day, in reviewing a parole application, to look at the record of a person in his forties who was incarcerated. I look back at this record and it is almost like a picture perfect image of what I am talking about today. A young person perhaps made a few bad errors in his early life, not serious errors, not things that any of us would be completely immune from or would make a big difference to society, but after a while they accumulated and he was incarcerated.