Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House today to speak to Bill C-25. I know that other members of the NDP have spoken today and there will be others speaking as well. We have a number of concerns about this bill.
I have been sitting here listening to the debate and thinking about this issue. One of the problems with Bill C-25, An Act to amend the Youth Criminal Justice Act, is that it is another example of the Conservative government bringing in legislation with really very little reflection and thought about its impact.
This is part of an overall drive to create this core issue that Conservatives believe they have around crime and justice, to create a “them” and an “us”, and to play on people's fear about crime, which obviously is very strong in most communities. When we actually go through the bill and see what it seeks to accomplish, there is no evidence that what it proposes is actually going to build safer communities.
Having said that, I note that there is one aspect of the bill that the NDP does support. It has to do with pretrial discretion of the judge. We agree because it is now practice in the judiciary that judges often do take into account whether there has been a previous serious offence and whether the young person poses a risk and therefore should not be released. In the law, technically speaking, there is a presumption that the youth in pretrial would be released. We do agree that there should be discretion within the system to allow judges to make a determination for those young individuals who do pose a serious threat to society. Judges should have the tools and the availability to make sure that such individuals are not released.
However, beyond that, this bill is very problematic. It concerns us a lot. Certainly we believe that if it goes to committee we should take a serious look at it. In fact, we probably should be cutting out large sections of the bill. The two particularly problematic areas have to do with the introduction of adult sentencing principles that have to do with denunciation and the question of deterrence.
We need to recognize that throughout our history there has always been a difference in the way the judicial system treats adults and juveniles, young people. It is based on the understanding that sometimes young people, for whatever reason, out of impulse, ignorance or anger, commit crimes that they do not necessarily think about. These crimes are not necessarily premeditated and there is this idea that sentencing based on denunciation or deterrence is not necessarily going to work. So in 1999 and 2000, when the Youth Criminal Justice Act first came in, the act was based on the idea that a different model needed to be created. That was a good thing. We generally supported that.
The bill today is taking us yet another step closer, because of the Conservatives' agenda, to where those lines become indistinguishable and where how we treat young people in the justice system would become more blurred in terms of how we treat adult situations. I think that is a very serious problem.
We should not proceed with this bill in a mad dash just because it happens to be another bill that the Conservatives have brought forward and just because it happens to meet their political agenda. I actually find it very offensive that so much of the legislation we have debated around the crime issue has been based on this political agenda rather than on evidence based information about what works in a criminal justice system.
I have been listening to our colleagues from the Bloc, who have been telling us something about the way it works in Quebec. In my own community in east Vancouver, we have issues around crime and safety, like other inner city urban communities, and we often use Quebec as an example of a different approach based on rehabilitation, on taking the young offenders with the goal of returning them to society. In fact, that should be so for all people where possible, but particularly for young people. I think we have a lot to learn from Quebec about the system it has used, yet this bill would actually undermine that and take us in a completely different direction.
I was reading an article the other day and was horrified to learn that the Conservative member for Kitchener—Conestoga sent out a householder claiming that the rate of violent youth crime had increased 22%. In actual fact, according to Statistics Canada, violent youth crime had fallen by 2%. This is not a huge decrease but at least it is a decrease.
However, that information is being put out there. My concern is that it is like the oldest game in the book. We know that people are worried about crime, even though crime overall has gone down. We know that people want to see effective strategies. It is so easy to keep throwing more laws at the problem and to say that we need tougher enforcement, that we are going to have tougher regimes and that is going to solve the problem.
Let us look at justice department studies, however, and at what happens in the United States. In fact, after debate on this bill is concluded we will be moving on to another bill, the minimum mandatory sentencing for drug crimes, a very severe bill in terms of its approach. It seems to me that we are not looking at the evidence that is so starkly there, the overwhelming evidence that we have in our own country in terms of what does and does not work and what we actually see in other jurisdictions.
We do not often refer to countries beyond the United States. Different models are used in Europe and have much more focus on rehabilitation and a sense of restorative justice. In east Vancouver, we had a number of incidents in the Commercial Drive area. People were very worried about youth at risk who were on the streets. Various incidents had taken place. People had been assaulted. I think it was easy to have that initial response of saying that we should just have a get tough approach and get those kids off the street, that those kids should be in jail.
However, we held a community forum. We invited local residents and some of the community organizations. We invited young people and the businesses. We had a very thoughtful discussion about what we needed to do in our own community and what was our response. Certainly relying on the Criminal Code and on police resources was a part of that discussion and that response, but beyond that, there was a lot of reflection about how we needed to develop programs at the very local level, right at the grassroots level, to deal with problems at the street level.
For example, we started a whole series of meetings about restorative justice. I have a very high aboriginal community population in my riding. This is something that has been really well thought out in that there are some programs, not enough but some, whereby people are taking a very different kind of approach rather than having this knee-jerk reaction to crime. That is what I feel we need to do. Unfortunately, that is what this bill does not do.
That is why in the NDP, although we agree with some parts of the bill and are willing to see it go to committee, we have very serious concerns about this idea that we will move juveniles closer and closer to the criminal system and that somehow we are going to fool people that it is going to fix the problem, that this is going to work. I feel that is a big mistake.
We all have a responsibility to speak truthfully about these issues, even when politically it may appear on the surface to respond in the way that people want us to. There are those lines that we tend to come out with, such as the lines about more enforcement, more officers and getting tough on crime.
If we emphasize more crime prevention and building healthy communities, whether it is through training, better health care, housing, and certainly more opportunities for young people, then I think we would be minimizing at the beginning the number of young people who end up in situation where they become at risk and where they may become young offenders. It seems crazy to me that we load everything up at the other end, the end that is the most expensive and the end that has the least amount of impact.
I have concerns about this bill. Obviously we will see what happens in committee. The NDP will support some of its elements and we will address our concerns.