Madam Speaker, today we are debating the youth criminal justice act. This is not the first time that I have had the opportunity to debate changes to the Young Offenders Act.
Earlier in the day I listened to hon. members discuss this. I heard members opposite suggest that it has taken an awful long time to get these amendments to the House. I am sure the record will show very clearly that there have been three separate bills to amend the Young Offenders Act over the years.
The act was first adopted in 1984. There have been three separate phases of amendment to that statute over the years. I would count this substantial rewrite by the Minister of Justice as the fourth.
Let us not forget that prior to the Young Offenders Act in 1984 there was a predecessor statute which dealt with young offenders. It had a slightly different name. It was called the Juvenile Delinquents Act. That statute provided a procedure for dealing with young offenders who committed crimes and breached the criminal code, some would say just as effectively, less or more effectively than the way we handle them now.
However, it is clear that our society, in modern times, has always had a statute to provide separate intervention and distinct measures to deal with young offenders. Whether we call them juveniles, children, boys and girls, non-adults, young adults, teenagers or adolescents, we have always in modern times had a statute to deal with them. There was nothing radically different about the Young Offenders Act of 1984.
I arrived in the House in 1988. Over the years after 1984 there continued to be a need to amend the statute, at least this is what Canadians told us. I was not in government then, but the government of the day accepted that changes were necessary. There were amendments dealing with some of the sentencing provisions for the more serious crimes, some of the procedures for the publication of names and that type of thing. All of these were attempting to improve the working of the statute.
It was clear in the early days that, while the government had passed the statute, the burden of administering it fell to the provinces. Going back 15 years one may question whether sufficient consultation took place prior to the passage of the Young Offenders Act in 1984 with reference to the role of the provincial administration.
It is the provinces that have to carry the financial burden of dealing separately with young offenders. It is only in a small number of cases that young offenders make their way into the ordinary criminal courts, which are provincially run. It is rarer still that they would find their way into a federal penitentiary, where anyone sentenced to two years or more would be confined. Most youth who get into trouble with the law are dealt with by provincial authorities.
I heard members opposite go through all of the old paradigms and clichés. They have referred to the absence of accountability. They have stated how bad and ineffective the Young Offenders Act is and that it lacks accountability.
Each one of us has an ugly case we can cite. We have all bumped into a policeman somewhere across the country who has said “My hands are tied. We could not do anything. He was a young offender”.
Well, to be sure that policemen had responded to the complaint, had made an arrest, had laid a charge, had appeared as a witness, if he or she was a witness, and saw the conviction, I do not call that having one's hands tied. I do not call that doing nothing. I do not call that zero response. That is precisely how we respond to anyone who is charged with a criminal offence.
I have often heard members in the opposition suggest that the Young Offenders Act is the cause of the crime. They have said that it is the Young Offenders Act which is at fault. Rarely do they point the finger at all of the other causes of crime.
Everyone in the House knows that the criminal code is not the cause of crime. It is not the criminal code that is the cause of a bank robbery. It is not the Young Offenders Act that is the cause of a crime. The Food and Drug Act is not the cause of drug smuggling.
The Young Offenders Act is not the cause of the crime that is committed. There are other causes out there. From time to time, I think some of us simply want to shoot the messenger, not understanding what the messenger is and not understanding the process.
The theme in the criminal code, the theme in youth justice is intervention, societal sanction for anti-social criminal acts committed by an adult or youth. The Young Offenders Act, the Juvenile Delinquents Act and this new youth criminal justice act provide appropriate levels and intensity of intervention when crimes are committed.
We all recognize that crime rates are now dropping. This may make the invective a little less sharp, but this is recognized as a good thing. Who gets the credit? It is certainly not the government members and it is certainly not the opposition members. Crime rates drop because the causes of crime drop. They are demographic, economic and administrative. We can always give some credit to our police forces that good job.
I want to address the level of intervention and also the intensity of that intervention in the youth criminal justice act. It is a combination of society's response under the criminal code and under the youth criminal justice act.
The youth criminal justice act, as does the current act which we hope will be replaced, provides different classes and different intensities of intervention based on the seriousness of the crime and the age of the offender. Most people would accept that a minor criminal offence committed by a 13 year old could be dealt with differently than the same relatively minor criminal offence committed by a 16 year old.
Under the new act, as generally the old act attempted to do, the higher the age of the convicted young person and the more serious crime that he or she is convicted of the more intense the intervention will be. There are all levels of intervention. Hopefully, the first thing is getting caught and having to deal with a parent or two. However, if by some misfortune a parent was not there for some of our youth, they would still have to deal with the police, the court and a judge.
The act provides flexibility. I think it is worth noting for our provinces that for the more serious crimes, the level of intervention is dictated by the attorney general of a province. The scheme of intervention is arranged by the attorney general not by the Government of Canada. That allows provincial flexibility in addressing this type of youth crime.
Two or three provinces do have successful regimes of Young Offenders Act intervention now. Quebec has been mentioned here as one province that does. The act is not intended to interfere with that.
The objective in these amendments is to provide an act for Canadian youth that provides a firm intervention, including hard time if it is appropriate. This will be in the hands of a judge so that the youth will not, hopefully, continue in a life of crime and can become a contributing member of our Canadian society.
