Mr. Speaker, I am having trouble even hearing myself with the rhetoric from the other side. The Reform Party never seems to want to stay and listen.
My point is that a lot of good children are growing up healthy and responsible. I wanted to start with that premise.
The second premise is that during the very short period of the difficult teen years many young children go through a temporary period where they get into trouble in the sense that they may come into conflict with our laws.
The vast majority of them get into trouble because they commit property offences. I will not say that property offences are insignificant because they are not. I am sure all members of the House feel they have worked hard for their properties, homes and family security. Canadians value and want a safe community to live in. They do not want to be fearful.
Property offences are far different in nature and need a different response than offences that a slim minority of children engage in involving violence. Most violent offences of a criminal nature—and I want to stress this and maybe have Canadians understand it—are not committed by children, by young offenders, but actually by adults. That is important to understand.
I also stress that when we hear about rates of offences they are actually charge rates. They are not conviction rates. They are backed up by Juristat, a tracking mechanism in society doing victimization studies after the fact and tracking the charge rate. They correlate quite well. There is accuracy in these figures which show that crime is going down across the board in Canada.
That does not mean that a society ignores what crime there is. It just means that we must be doing something right. Something must be happening inside the system, inside society. The values of the majority of the Canadian public who seek a safe Canadian society are being responded to in a way that does work.
A safe society, how do we accomplish that? If I create a new act or I change this or change that or put some more words into a statute and put it through a parliament, is that going to make my society better? Some people think so. But in reality what has to happen is that whatever legislation and whatever we call it which is accepted by the majority of the people living under those rules, people have to accept the rules of society.
In other words our legislation has to be based on the values that society holds dear. That means responsibility. That means some compassion. That means accountability. And it means giving an individual in this country a chance to rehabilitate. That is the major difference between the Canadian society, our system of justice, and some systems of justice in different countries around the world where the rights and the protections are not there.
Does that mean we ignore victims? Absolutely not. In fact in the last couple of parliaments a lot of legislation and the actions of organizations across the country have very much taken to heart the need for all members to have a say for those people who are aggrieved by people who are not in control of their actions for period of time.
I think back to situations where we did change those rules. In fact in the last parliament we strengthened and changed some of the rules with respect to young offenders. We strengthened the rules with respect to DNA situations. We strengthened the rules with respect to gun control.
Who in our society in Canada is not thinking today that down in the States they have a bigger problem than we do. They have not had the will of their population to change the social more that thinks of a gun as a tool to which anyone of any age should have access.
We have a different set of values. If we want the values at the end of the system to be ingrained in a productive manner especially for the young children in our society who come into contravention of the law, then we have to put some values into the system which will surround the individual and try to change the behaviour while they are captured for a limited amount of time inside our justice system. It starts right at the beginning of the charge and ends for an adult at the parole system and for a juvenile at the end of the system in which we deal with that child.
There are differences in the individuals before our justice system just as there are differences in the individual needs of people inside a family, inside a community, inside a school, inside an organization. People are not clones of one another. They come with their positives and their deficits.
A lot of the children who go through our young offenders system have some social deficits. They have social deficits that may stem, not always but may stem from poverty conditions or that may stem from illiteracy. Maybe they have a dysfunctional family. In fact many do.
We all wish that there would be healthy, nurturing families surrounding every child in Canadian society, that there would not be child poverty. For some children with attention deficit disorders or learning disabilities, we might wish that we could put a white picket fence around them, give them a mother and father who are employed and functional and supportive. Where we cannot though we have to have systems.
Some of those have to come in the form of the social welfare system that is administered by the provinces. There are situations where we have good integration. I applaud the province of Quebec because it has a better system than many of the provinces for dealing with its young offenders. The solution is not to criminalize so as to access the social welfare system.
There are provinces where there are gaps. We know from evidence. We have to be careful to stay with evidence, things we can prove as opposed to thinking about or perhaps have a perception which is usually a misperception. We have to divorce the perceptions from the realities.
A lot of very good work done has been done on what are the causes and what can be the benefits of a well integrated, well defined program for young offenders to have a better outcome.
I do not think there is a party in the House that would not want a better outcome and that includes the Reform Party. Sometimes the rhetoric and partisanship that surround this issue rob Canadian taxpayers of the viewpoint that is best for Canada, the viewpoint that kids come first.
We cannot penalize kids more than when we have a choice between money spent on penalties and money spent on rehabilitation. We could probably tell 3 year olds or 10 year olds that they will be in trouble when they hit the young offender system. We could ask any teacher in any riding and they would be able to point out who is having problems.
We need systems outside the justice system supporting children. That is where there needs to be some financing. If we spend money preventing children from turning into young offenders we will have accomplished something of which we can be proud.
People often talk about costs and wastes in government. In my mind a waste is to build a building that incarcerates people and warehouses them without giving them good programming so that there is some benefit for those individuals and hence for society. If young or old people are put in a building and their behaviour is not changed during the time they are there, we have wasted that dollar. Eighty per cent of adult offenders will be on the street again. What do they learn while they are incarcerated? They learn about brutalization and anger.
I have been in our penitentiaries. I am five foot one. If I stretch out my hands I can touch both walls of a cell where often two prisoners are housed. It is not a cell built for two but a cell that is accommodating usually two adult males. There are sleeping accommodations and a toilet facility in the cell. People ask “Why do I care if they are crowded or it is uncomfortable for them? There many other better human beings to spend money on”.
That tells me in the double bunking system of our justice system that there is not enough money to provide programs. There is not enough money for programs for these people.
It is much easier for an opposition member to talk about a nine hole golf course, the extreme exception. What is more the rule is the double bunking situation where there is insufficient programming, a situation which breeds unrest, violence and many things people do not want to think about.
As a mother of two teenage boys and another younger child coming up through the system I could not think of a worse place to send a child, especially if they are in trouble. It would be horrific. It is not in line with the values of people.
We can go through the process of looking at some of the recommendations the justice committee has worked on. All members of all parties on the justice committee and members of the communities have worked hard. We just returned from a week in my riding where I talked with the partners in my community involved in these issues. They regularly talk with me and voice their ideas. Their ideas work. The community is where the best ideas will come from.
I cannot sit in parliament and dictate to people what will solve the issues in their communities. We have to facilitate a mechanism that may involve for young offenders and adult offenders some alternate measures. Then the community will have to find a much cheaper way. Alternate measures are much cheaper than incarceration, especially for juveniles. Up to $100,000 a year can be spent on a custody situation for a juvenile.
For example, in my riding in London, Ontario we have something called the youth justice system. It is a diversion for young offenders out of the court system, not on serious crimes, but again I stress most young offenders are not involved in serious violent crimes. It takes those young offenders and the community chooses people, adults and youth, to sit in a discussion group and the young offender has accountability for the offence. There is counselling. They are trying to figure out what created the problem. They are not pointing a finger saying “you are the problem”, but they are figuring out what created the problem and how will it be fixed.
That youth then often is involved in a restitution situation to whomever he has harmed. There is often a community working restitution order. It is whatever is wanted as a creative solution at a very low cost and which is very fast. Most sentencing youth justice circles take less than three hours. Often the parents, or whoever is living with the child and is responsible for the child is in attendance. In fact if they are not, it tends not to work.
There is no long time schedule. We who deal with teenagers know that tomorrow is forever. A court system is slow. In my opinion I would rather see the majority going to alternate measures outside the very formalized courtroom setting and into something which I think will bring real value and real solutions at far less cost.
We should be looking at the community to help us design these measures. As members of parliament we should be there as facilitators. It is so much cheaper, so much better and so much safer for society to prevent the offence than it ever is to come after the fact and punish for the offence. In that way we can build the values.
Some of those systems are there now. It could be the sports and recreation system or the tutoring system. It could be as basic as nutrition programs. There is a need for breakfast programs in some of our communities, let us face it.
What I am saying is that Canadian youth are far from perfect. Our justice system is far from perfect. There is a need and I believe a desire in this country to get beyond the rhetoric of crime and the fear of crime, and into the real working situations day in and day out. This will model a justice system that actually does benefit our society, as opposed to always focusing on unfortunately what the media can sell a paper with, which is the latest crime. There is nothing I would wish more than to never have those horrific crimes occur, but when they do there will be a stricter discipline system. However those crimes are the minority.
Our legislation has to cover everything from the extremes through to the broad middle section. It is important that we also remember all of those youth and those adults in this country who never come into contact with our criminal justice system.
The final thing I will say is that it is so very important for Canadians to understand that there is judicial independence from the politics of a nation in our justice system in Canada. I applaud that concept. I believe in that concept. Judicial independence is as fundamental to our system of working in a Canadian democracy that values rights and freedoms as is privacy of information in our taxation system.
These are fundamental building blocks and I believe they should not be called into question. I call upon members from all parties in this House because all of our communities will benefit when we work together with different levels of government toward these solutions.
