Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise and speak today, because I have a personal interest in this bill. You have been in this House for a long time, longer than I have, and you will remember the pitched battle we fought against the Young Offenders Act. Once again, the government is treating us like children by introducing a bill that will require judges to enforce this legislation.
I would like to talk a little about young people. I have two children, and one of them went through a more difficult adolescence than the other, because I was raising them alone. My son had many more problems during adolescence than my daughter. We have to remember that during adolescence, young people change dramatically. A young person is no longer a child, but is not yet an adult, even though he or she is becoming an adult. Often, because of the extreme hormonal changes adolescents are going through, they want to be loved by everyone, they seek attention and they want to have a lot of friends. As a result, they may fall in with the wrong crowd and find themselves in situations they would not have chosen.
That does not make them dangerous offenders. We should not be deprived, therefore, of our parental role. Even if we are deprived of our role as responsible parents, and even if it is a single-parent family, that does not prevent us from being very close to our children.
In Quebec in particular, we have a lot of resources for our young people. That is what I wanted to tell the House about. In my view, we should make use of all these resources before deeming a young person incorrigible. I have rarely seen young people who are really incorrigible.
I have often been asked to go to schools and meet with young people. In Quebec we have centres for young people 13 to 17 years of age. They go to these centres in groups and are supervised there by adults who show them the right path. These adults arrange presentations and tell the young people about the various services available to them. They also arrange group activities, discussions and exchanges. This is very important for young people. They make friends here. There are a lot of youth centres in Quebec. We do what we can to help these youth centres survive.
My children went to youth centres as adolescents and it was very good for them. It is best, though, to start very early. We must not necessarily think that it starts in adolescence.
Poverty exists, and we need to deal with it. It is often the reason why young people do not eat breakfast, why there is no food in the home, why they are poorly housed and do not have clothing. They are laughed at in school because they are not stylishly dressed like the other students. These are all reasons why young people may get involved in criminal behaviour.
In Quebec we have the breakfast club for children in primary school. All the children in the class are given breakfast without exception so as not to discriminate. This enables children who did not get breakfast at home to have one like everybody else but not be identified as unusual. It is very important to include them rather than exclude them. It is when children are excluded that problems start.
Sending young people who are 14 to 17 years of age to prison means sending them to a school for crime. Studies have shown it. These young people try to make friends in prison, but they do not have the maturity and knowledge to handle an environment with which they are not familiar. So they are dropped right into a criminal milieu. It is totally unacceptable. These young people are deprived of their lives. They are deprived of a chance to become functioning adults some day. Rather than trying to rehabilitate them, we are putting them in prison where they have to get by on their own. They get no help or support.
As well, young people are often the ones who are abused in prison. Because they are young and have little knowledge, they are treated horrifically. When they get out of prison, then we can say they are real criminals, because that is what they have become. No one has looked after them and no one has tried to rehabilitate them instead of sending them to prison.
There are a lot of services in Quebec and that may be why we are so different from the rest of Canada. One of the things I want to talk about is the services in my riding. There is a centre called La Parenthèse. It is a youth centre. Young people go there voluntarily. When a problem arises at home, if a young person is using drugs or alcohol and wants to stop, a discussion is held between the parents and the young person, who can leave and live elsewhere, at this place, which is called La Parenthèse.
There are specialists at the centre who work with the young person to get him or her back on the right path and rehabilitate him or her. These young people also have chores to do in the house. They each have their own responsibilities. So they are required to take responsibility and an effort is made to help them break their abusive patterns. This is on a voluntary basis. It is excellent and it has a high success rate. Young people can rehabilitate themselves.
In my riding there is a huge secondary school. In the police services, we have trained police specialists to work with adolescents, with the problems of adolescents. They are not treated like criminals from day one for a first offence or a stupid mistake. We try to guide the young person. The parents are informed. The police sit down with the family and try to find solutions to rehabilitate the young person. This is extremely important.
There is also the entire question of where our parental authority comes into it. As I said earlier, this is extremely important. Personally, no one can take away my right to act as a parent with my child. No two children are identical. There are some children who are more difficult than others. There are children who are not necessarily living in poverty but who will have other kinds of problems.
I had problems with my own son, who is now 20 years old and on the right track. When he was a teenager, however, everything fell apart. Why? I could not say. He lost his father at a very young age and it was only in adolescence that it all came out. He began to stray off track, but we managed to get him back on the right path. I worked very hard with him. Our parental rights must be maintained. We must use the tools available to us in Quebec society to help us rehabilitate them. It can be done. Help can be found at CLSCs and other organizations.
There is an arts centre in my riding that brings young people in off the streets and helps them get by through art. The name of the organization is ICI par les Arts. This may seem quite simple to us, but I can assure this House that these young people do some extraordinary things. They create things with all sorts of materials. They produce art, which directs them away from their negative thoughts and misconduct.
In Quebec, there are also street outreach workers. They are not there for nothing. There are young homeless people and we must be able to help them. These street outreach workers work directly with young people to guide them, talk to them and help them find a place to sleep, if they are found on the street at night. It gets very cold in the winter and we do not want to leave our young people on the street. All these services exist. There are other services, but I cannot name them all.
I am being signalled that my time is running out. It is extremely important to think about rehabilitation and not criminalization. I care deeply about this. All Bloc Québécois members, including myself, oppose this bill, because it will simply increase crime rates among young people, not reduce them.
