Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to Bill C-68 today.
It frightens me when I see what is happening these days. I think all my colleagues in the House have been shocked over what happened in Taber, Alberta, and in Colorado. We ask ourselves what has gone wrong. This did not happen when I was growing up as a child or when I was in high school.
Some time down the road whatever party is in government will have to address the charter of rights and freedoms because responsibilities were left out when it was drafted. Today everybody has their rights and their freedoms but for some reason we do not feel we have responsibilities, and we do.
To be fair to our young people, they have to know that they are accountable for what they do and that they have responsibilities. Someone said to me that no one would have the courage to even mention that. I have the courage to mention it. I pray that some day we will have a government that will address it.
I worked as an assistant to a pastor in a church back in Saint John, New Brunswick. Every night I would go home with a headache and so would he. One day I said to him “Reverend Dan, do you go home with a headache every evening?” He said “Yes, I do”. I said “Do you know what is wrong with us”, and he said “No”.
I told him I would take him out in the alleyway the next day at noon hour and he would see a man who was giving drugs to high school children. I said: “There must be about 35 of them. This has to stop”. He said “Elsie”, and I said “I have been watching”. It was marijuana.
I hear on the Hill about the possibility of decriminalizing smaller amounts of marijuana. I did a lot of research on it out of California and New York City. We do not want to decriminalize marijuana. We want to get children away from it as much as we can, because the minute they start to smoke up it goes into the cells of their brains.
I said to the pastor “Please, Dan, let me bring them in. I will buy the hot dogs. I will buy the pop. The church will not have to pay for it. Let's get them out of that alleyway”.
The first day I went out they all ran but five of them who were pretty cocky little men. They stood there and I said “I will not call the police, but tomorrow before he gives you those drugs, come on in and and eat with me and just talk”.
They did come in. Before we were through we had about 30 young people who came in every day. Later they thanked me for taking them out of the alleyway. They said “He gave it to us. We did not know it would hurt us”.
We asked those young people how they got along with their moms and dads. They did not get along with mom and dad because they were fighting with them to make okay what they were doing. They had guilty consciences.
A few years ago on Christmas eve my doorbell rang at home. A young man was standing there who said “Hi, Mrs. Wayne. How are you?” I said “I am fine. Who are you?” He said “Don't you remember me?” He looked familiar. He said “My name is Terry. Thanks, Mrs. Wayne, for taking me out of the alleyway”. I said “What are you doing today, Terry?” He said “I am a draftsman in Toronto, but if I had not gone out of the alleyway I probably would have been on cocaine or heroin”.
Each and every one of us have a lot to do. Everyone has their rights. Today's family has a difficult time. For some reason when we are here we forget about the traditional family and how mom, dad, nanny and grampy want some help with their children. They want us to adopt laws that are better for the children and will show them the right way.
Over 1.3 million children are living in poverty. I never thought I would ever live to see the day that I would have to stand in the House of Commons and talk about 1.3 million children living in poverty. We have to look at what has happened to society.
I have a little granddaughter and a little grandson. I often call my son and daughter-in-law when I am home and ask what they are watching on TV. My husband and I are in the TV repair business and of course they have TVs in their bedrooms, each one of them. They make sure grampy gets them there. I worry that they see violence and sex on TV which they should not be seeing at their age.
We talk about freedom. Everybody has freedom, but what about those children? Why do we not allow them to be children for a while like we were while growing up?
My party and I are worried about Bill C-68. My colleague from Charlottetown mentioned about when the government took out the port police. I was mayor at the time. I fought it hard because I told them that the minute the port police were gone they would see cocaine and heroin like never before. Members should it in my community. I cannot believe what has happened, I truly cannot.
My party is calling for lowering the minimum age at which young offenders may enter into the youth justice system. If they break the law they should have to take responsibility for it and we should know who they are. They should not be allowed to live next door without their neighbours knowing they are there. Definitely we should go public.
We need some form of rehabilitation. The new youth justice strategy will be administered by child welfare agencies and/or mental health providers. I also worked for many years with the mental health group in Saint John. They are not the ones to help these children. We need to take these children right from the time they are in our arms and build a better foundation for their future.
I do not want the people in mental health to deal with these children. I do not want them to go down that road. I want us to correct the situation right now. Over $6 billion were slashed from transfer payments for health care and social service programs. All of that is gone. My party believes that our focus should be on rehabilitation programs for young offenders which put the emphasis on basic education, social skills, personal responsibility and community. We must develop the programs.
The funding cuts have also affected the programs in place for early prevention of youth crime, but I say and will always say that if we help make the family unit stronger and protect it up here there will not be the youth crime we see today. Youth crime needs to be a major focus for our communities. Something needs to be done about the young people who have no regard for the laws of this great country. We need to help them that see there is another way to achieve goals.
I was at our airport in Ottawa at 6.40 Tuesday morning going home. I saw the police pulling up. I wondered what had happened. There was a mother at the airport. She was as high as a kite and she had her child with her. Members should have seen that little child's face. He was saying “Please, mother, please”. They took her out and put her in the police car, and the child was crying. That child does not have any hope for the future. There is no hope for the future because the mother has gone in the wrong direction.
All of us in the House know that our children are our future. We need to make sure they are secure and successful and become proud, productive members of society. It is our duty, each and everyone of us here, to help them stay on the right road. When they do not, we must take responsibility for not having helped, for not having adopted the right policies for them, and have a plan for dealing with them that is fair and makes them responsible for their actions.
Bill C-68 does not do that. I am sorry to say that and I ask my colleagues to take a second look at it.