moved:
That, in the opinion of this House, the government should: (a) develop, along with their provincial counterparts, a comprehensive National Head Start Program for children in their first 8 years of life; (b) ensure that this integrated program involves both hospitals and schools, and is modelled on the experiences of the Moncton Head Start Program, Hawaii Head Start Program, and PERRY Pre-School Program; and (c) ensure that the program is implemented by the year 2000.
Madam Speaker, some years ago I was working in a jail as a physician. A couple of young women, 13 and 14 year old prostitutes and IV drug abusers were sitting across from me. They were incarcerated for the nth time in this institution. After examining them I said that I did not think they would live to see their 18th birthdays. They smiled and said quite softly that they probably did not see any need to live to 18 years of age anyway.
They were individuals who had endured many years of suffering. Their parents were prostitutes. They had lived on the streets since they were 10. They started hooking at the age of 12 and started mainlining drugs at the age of 13.
I was wrong. It was not that they did not live to see their 18th birthdays; they did not live to see their 15th birthdays. One young woman was found murdered at the end of a lonely road. I saw the other one while doing rounds on the pediatric ward. She had suffered a massive stroke after a cocaine overdose.
We see the children who are affected by the problems in our society. We look at those who are in custody in detention centres. While their history does not exonerate them for their actions, perhaps looking at their history will provide us with a clue as to how they got there.
The vast majority of those children in detention centres have suffered years and years of abuse in environments we would not wish on anybody. Years of neglect, sexual abuse, violence, malnourishment, complete lack of parental involvement in their upbringing. These are the histories of so many of those children. Our response historically has been the expensive management of these children while they are in jail.
Through Motion No. 261 I am trying to change our focus, to look not at the management of crime but to use some of our existing resources in the prevention of crime and to look at the root causes of crime. Parental neglect, child abuse, physical abuse, the witnessing of abuse, malnourishment, even the absence of proper parental involvement with the children, all of these things play a role in the development and damage of an individual's psyche.
Recent medical evidence has demonstrated quite conclusively, from things such as the positron emission tomographer, that the development of a normal psyche starts while the fetus is growing in the womb of the mother. At that time events can take place that can radically change the ability of that individual to function properly in society, such as the exposure to alcohol.
After the child is born the exposure to abuse, neglect and malnourishment all have a profound effect on the ability of the child to develop the underpinnings of a normal psyche which enables them to become a productive, integrated member of society who can have normal interpersonal relationships. Destroy the development of that individual at that critical time in the first eight years of life and we have a child that at best often develops personality disorders, conduct disorders or at worst, becomes incarcerated in jail.
We have to move our thinking and engage in a paradigm shift. If there is one thing I hope the government and its members, as members on our side and in fact in all political parties will do is to recognize the fact that prevention is more important than management. It is a lot cheaper and more effective for us to deal with these problems from time zero than to try to manage the situation when the child is incarcerated in an institution.
We have to change our thinking. If the government were to adopt this motion it would be the single greatest paradigm shift in social policy thinking in this country in the last 20 years. It would radically save a lot of money and dramatically change the lives, welfare and well-being of so many children, particularly some of the most underprivileged children in our society.
The motion is based on a few programs. I would like to give credit today to the member for Moncton who has been a leader in our country and in fact the world on developing the Moncton head start program. She has done an outstanding job.
I would also like to pay credit to my colleague from Saanich—Gulf Islands. He has done an outstanding job in our hometown of Victoria in trying as a lawyer and now as a parliamentarian to develop ways in which we can not only address individuals who are incarcerated now but also to engage in prevention.
The motion is based on three programs, one of which is the Moncton head start program which the member for Moncton was a leader in starting. This program recognizes that there needs to be parental involvement in the development of children. It started in 1974. It brings together high risk families in an environment where the parents are involved with the children in learning things that sometimes we take for granted, nutrition, proper parenting skills, the importance of play, the importance of having quality time with those children.
It is interesting to note that many of those parents did not themselves have good parenting skills because their parents did not have good parenting skills. The cycle continues and in order to break that cycle, sometimes active intervention is required in a co-operative and constructive manner.
The Moncton head start program demonstrated that very conclusively. It worked. It decreased crime rates. It decreased the incidents of those children running afoul of the law. They stayed in school longer. It also demonstrated a $6 saving for every dollar that was put into the program.
The Hawaii head start program has been in existence for quite some time. It has seen the importance of using volunteers, usually women who were very good parents and were trained to develop a bonding relationship with families at risk. They dealt with child abuse, violence in the home, drug problems, substance abuse problems. These were dealt with in a co-operative arrangement. The outcome was a 99% drop in child abuse.
The last program has actually been in existence the longest. It is the Perry pre-school program in Ypsilante, Michigan in existence since 1962. We have had over three decades of rigorous scientific analysis of this program to see what works and what does not work.
What this program demonstrated as many of the other ones did is that active early involvement to provide children with the basic necessities of life enabled the children to stay in school longer. There was a 50% drop in the crime rate and a 40% drop in teen pregnancies. There was less demand on social programs and the welfare rolls and the children got through school and had higher incomes at the end of the day.
This is a win-win situation. It also demonstrated a massive saving to the taxpayer.
Motion No. 261 asks the government to work with its provincial counterparts to implement the best from all these programs. There are good things and bad things. One can easily take a motion like this one and build it into some kind of Cadillac model where money will just be poured down some sinkhole and little will get to the people who really need it and little effect will happen.
If this motion is to become a reality, it requires a leader. It is true that most of the sentiments expressed within this motion are in the realm of the provinces. I will be the first to admit that. But for heaven's sake, someone has to take a leadership role and no one is. A hodge-podge of programs exists within our country, a little bit here and a little bit there. Some of them are good and some of them are not. There is overlap. The left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.
The federal government can take a leadership role by bringing the first ministers together, locking them in a room like was done for the Dayton peace accord and telling them they will not get out until they sort out the problem. They will put on the table what they have and they will develop a comprehensive strategy that involves medical personnel, the schools and others.
In that way there is no overlap. There is a streamlining of the program and we can ensure that the basic needs of the children are met not in a Cadillac program but in a program that is cost effective.
The program has to be analysed very carefully to ensure that our outcomes warrant the investment and that money is not spent unwisely. There is a lot of room here for financial abuse and inefficiency. But there is also an enormous opportunity for us to take the bull by the horns, put our existing resources where they can make the best effect and deal with prevention to ensure that these children do not slip through the cracks.
In the throne speech the government mentioned a few interesting things that demonstrate in principle a support for the type of motion I am talking about and also the fact that it has put a series of important funding programs in existence.
The health transition fund is being organized by the government to help the provinces make innovative and co-operative arrangements with the federal government to deal with areas of primary care. I would argue that this is an issue of primary care that goes across health care, justice and social services.
Rather than having this conglomeration of programs where all this overlap exists, swallowed up in part by bureaucracy, let us make sure the dollars get to the kids and where they are needed most.
There is also the national children's agenda that exists. All these can be used against the backdrop of what this motion is asking for, and indeed the government has already implemented among aboriginal communities head start programs which I hope will be effective and which are long overdue. Not only the aboriginal community on reserves should have access to this but also aboriginal people outside reserves and non-aboriginal people.
One of the issues that can come into this program that I think would be a fallacy is to associate impoverishment with money for the people involved. What these programs have found is it is not money that makes the child, but a loving, caring, secure environment with caring, loving parents provides children with the best hope they can have in life.
Responsible, caring parents are the most important gift that a child can ever have. I and others can probably pay testimony to the parents who have given them so much and for which they can never repay them.
I hope the government takes the initiative, looks at this motion and implements it. I also put down in the motion that it be implemented before the year 2000, the reason being fear of the House proroguing sometime before that and this motion merely getting tossed under a carpet.
The national crime prevention council that the justice committee sensibly asked to be organized has come forth and been an advocate for many of the sentiments expressed within the national head start program. It has done tremendous work, and yet its good work lies on a table in its building, not for lack of desire or talent or hard work on its part, but because of inertia that pervades this place all the time. It is something that all of us as members labour under and try to find ways to overcome.
I argue that this is a motion that transcends party lines. It is a motion which I think members from across party lines will be in acceptance of, at least in principle. I hope members from across party lines will adopt it and provide the government with constructive suggestions to implement it, not for us but for all the children out there who come home to environments that are rife with abuse, neglect, malnourishment and hopelessness.
These children deserve hope if only for the humanitarian reason, but also for the cold, hard, pragmatic reason that what we do not deal with today we pay for tomorrow.
There is the increasing epidemic of crime. Just in my riding of Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, the death of Reena Virk was a profound tragedy. A young 14-year old girl was beaten up by a group of teenagers. This is not an isolated incident. Tragically, it occurs in other parts of the country, perhaps not to the same extent but it occurs.
We are not winning with our current proposal of detection, deterrence and incarceration. That needs to happen for certain people and we need to do that too. But we need to also focus our minds, focus our efforts into trying to prevent these tragedies from occurring, and it has to start from time zero.
It is estimated that half the people in jail suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome or fetal alcohol effects. FAS is the leading cause of neurological damage in this country. People with FAS have an average IQ of 68. They have irreversible neurological damage that prevents them from engaging in appropriate interpersonal relationships with other individuals.
An unfortunate number of those individuals go on to commit crimes. This does not excuse them from their crimes but it provides a clue that this is a preventable problem. It is a tragedy when any of these children come to see you.
I will speak personally of my work in emergency departments. A child comes to you to be taken away from an abusive situation. You have a scared, emaciated child sitting in a corner. You take that child an do the appropriate exam before the child goes to a foster home. I have been fortunate enough to see a child like that again four months later. Now the child is a bubbly, chubby, smiling, gregarious, playful little one. I have to do an examination, as so many other physicians do, before that child goes back into the same abusive environment as before. That is wrong.
I have gone to judges, lawyers and social workers and what have they said? It is the system. I cannot reconcile, nor I am sure can others in this House, putting that child back in the same abusive environment as before. One year old children have no business going back in that type environment where we know they have no chance. We can only imagine the horrors those children endure for the rest of their young lives. Who knows where they will end up? They will end up in a place none of us would want to be.
I am not saying we can take children away forever but for heaven's sake let us be the advocate of the child first and foremost and the parents second. Let us ensure those children are put in environments with loving, caring secure parental involvement. That is the best asset any child can ever have.
This is the first hour of debate on this motion. There are two hours left. In advance I thank my colleagues for spending the time to do the investigation. I hope we can work together to make this motion a reality for the children of our country.
