Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to put a few thoughts on the record this morning concerning Bill C-25.
Right off the bat let me say that I agree with my colleague from the across the way who spoke earlier, the member for Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe. When I came to this place almost four years ago, I came here with a sense of mission, as I did when I went to Queen's Park in 1990. Based on the community work I did, I wanted to change a number of things and I wanted that to happen immediately. Alas, I discovered it was not going to be that easy. In fact, it takes much effort, with support from government, to make the kind of change that is necessary if we are going to experience and enjoy the result of change, particularly if it is a positive change.
One of the things that always disappoints me more than anything when I see a bill like this come forward is the missed opportunity it represents. We have a bill here focused on dealing with a very difficult challenge that we all face with our young people as we try to keep them on the straight and narrow.
There is no one, and I include myself, who does not want to reduce the number of people who get into difficulty with the law in our communities. There is no one here, I do not think, who would not get up and speak very passionately about the need to keep our communities safe.
However, there are different ways of approaching this. It takes more than one bill with a couple of small items in it to actually effect the kind of larger, longer term difference we want to see in our communities. We would like to reduce the recidivism rate going forward and we would like to see young people participate in more constructive and positive ways when they find themselves in trouble with the law.
Those of us who have family know this in a very personal way. We see our young men and women who go out into the world, having received the support, love and care of family, sometimes not being able to cope with what comes at them and then acting in a rather irresponsible or thoughtless way and finding themselves in trouble with the law.
If we go down this road the government wants to take us down, and which so many in our country today seem to think is the answer to this question of young people and the law, particularly young people involved in violent crime in our communities, we in fact will end up losing more young people than we actually save, than we actually get back on the straight and narrow. More than anything, that is what concerns me about this bill.
I remember going to Mississauga about a year or so ago and talking with a gathering of people from the community around the question of poverty. A number of parents at that meeting, particularly female immigrant parents, said to me that they were as concerned as anybody, including me as an MP and including the government, about how their young people were behaving in the community sometimes and how they were getting themselves into trouble. They very clearly said to me that the way to deal with them was not to just bring in harsher punishment or to throw them in jail, where they enter into a whole new culture of negative behaviour that then affects them when they ultimately get out.
They told me and all the others gathered that night that we need a more comprehensive approach to this, which includes a government that is committed to making sure that our young people can get the schooling, training and education they need to participate in the life and economy of their communities in a positive and constructive way. That will give them a sense of self-satisfaction, allow them to grow as human beings and contribute in the way that most of us do as we successfully live out our lives.
As for those parents, those mothers in particular, it could be seen in their faces that they were very disappointed and frustrated with this lack of understanding and the lack of commitment by government to actually step up and come forward to provide them with those resources, opportunities and support as they tried to keep their young people in school and keep them on the straight and narrow.
These parents are the people who keep our economy going. In many cases, these are the single mothers who work all night cleaning buildings, making beds and serving food, only to come home to a house that has been left for large chunks of the day unsupervised, with young people coming home from school or not going to school at all. They were crying out for a more structured framework to be provided to them so that their young people could participate in behaviour that was more constructive and productive.
They saw that in juxtaposition to the fact that in their community, as in so many communities across this country, in the evenings and weekends at night, for example, schools are closed because there are no resources to provide supervision, to turn on the lights and to do the janitorial work necessary, or even to provide the insurance that is so often required when public facilities are made available to a community.
I would be very pleased to have an opportunity in this place to talk more fully about these questions of youth, the criminal justice system, crime and the activity of some young people in our communities, so that we might together look at the Quebec model, which has been presented this morning on a couple of occasions. Quebec found a different way to deal with this challenge that we all face and are very concerned about. Quebec has gathered the community around this question of keeping our young people on the straight and narrow. It has begun to introduce concepts which flow out of the thinking that is often referred to as restorative justice.
I remember attending a gathering of foster parents led by the Children's Aid Society in my community at which a priest from Los Angeles talked about his work with gangs in the inner city of that community. In 2007, when I heard him speak and had the chance to talk to him, I learned that Los Angeles officials had gone beyond the more punitive approach to dealing with and trying to fix a very difficult challenge in terms of our young people getting into trouble with the law.
Officials there are now themselves searching out more creative restorative justice types of approaches to dealing with this problem. They know that in bringing this kind of response to this challenge communally and together, we stand a better chance, first of all, of helping some of these young people, of keeping them out of the criminal justice system, of actually changing their ways and reducing recidivism so they do not continue to repeat this behaviour. More than that, officials find that these young people become very constructive and productive members of the neighbourhoods in which they were previously seen as a difficulty.
We in this caucus are going to be supporting the bill to move it forward, not because we agree with a lot of what is in it but because we would like to have more opportunity to actually dialogue, discuss and try to find some common ground with the different approaches and parties that exist here in the House of Commons, and so that we might find some way to bring some real, constructive, positive change to this very difficult task that we face as a community today.