Mr. Speaker, that is what is so ironic. Both my colleagues are right.
Clearly, someone who is under 18 will not be sent to prison with adults, at least not until he is 18. That is the subtlety and the irony of this bill. Will an 18-year-old be smarter once he has spent three or four years in a reception centre and then finished serving his sentence in an adult prison? I do not think so. The government would have us believe things that are completely unrealistic and unacceptable.
We believe that young people should be treated like young people, in other words, like people who are not too bright and who have committed crimes. Society knows that they need much longer time-outs, but before we send them to an adult prison, we need to do everything we can to get them back on the straight and narrow.
But that is not what the government is going to do if this bill is passed as is. If it is passed, young offenders will be handed a heavy four-year sentence. A 17-year-old offender will spend a year in a reception centre and serve the rest of his time in an adult prison. What the members opposite are forgetting is that there is no parole for young offenders, and this bill does not provide for any. What is even more ironic is that young people could get heavier sentences than adults for the same sort of crime. That is unacceptable.
The more I look at the bill, the more I realize that it must be studied, chopped up, amended and transformed in committee to meet the needs of our young people, not tailored to get political support as the other side is trying to do.
It is very strange that when the Conservatives are low in the polls, they come back with the old tough on crime mantra and introduce more crime bills. They are planning to introduce another bill on suspended sentences. That is not the way to deal with crime in Canada. In Quebec, we believe that youth justice should focus on rehabilitation.