Wednesday Feb. 14, 2001

Mr. Bill Blaikie (Winnipeg—Transcona, NDP): Mr. Speaker, this is my first opportunity to participate in this debate in my new capacity as justice critic for the New Democratic Party. I listened intently to those who preceded me and I signal my intention to listen intently in committee and to try to learn as much as I can.

Even though I might not always agree, I would like to learn as much as I can from my colleagues on the committee who are more experienced than I. To that end I listened to the minister, to the member for Provencher, to the former minister of justice in my own province, and to my colleague from Quebec.

This is the third time the bill has been introduced in the House. It was at one point known as Bill C-68, then as Bill C-3, and now as Bill C-7. Noting that the bill has been before the House before, I would like to pay tribute to my predecessor as NDP justice critic, the former member for Sydney—Victoria, Mr. Peter Mancini. Unfortunately he was not re-elected and therefore could not continue as our justice critic. He had the opportunity to put forward our party's position and he put it forward well the last time he spoke to the bill in the second reading context on October 21, 1999.

It is unfortunate that the bill has not gone ahead. As with various other projects of the Liberal government, a combination of government delay, lack of will and an opposition resistance that has its own merits, has meant that the government has not been able to act. We collectively have been unable to act to possibly improve the Young Offenders Act which we all know to be deficient.

We now have some 15 years of experience with the Young Offenders Act and it has not lived up to expectations. I am one of the few people in the House who was here when it was debated and brought in as a replacement for the former juvenile delinquents act. There was great expectation at that time that the Young Offenders Act would be a great improvement on the older legislation which I think went back to the turn of the century, if I remember correctly.

The fact that the Young Offenders Act has not worked out the way many people thought it would and the fact that we now have before us a new bill should perhaps give us pause and make us all a bit humble when we realize that the act did not work. Youth crime, even though it may have gone down in some respects in the past few years, is certainly up overall when we consider what the statistics would have looked like when the Young Offenders Act was brought in or prior to that.

If acts of parliament alone were enough the problem would have been solved by now, but we still have problems. The minister, by her own description, has tried to strike a balance between those who want her to be tougher and those who want her to seek more and better alternatives to incarceration, particularly with respect to young non-violent offenders in the first and hopefully last stages of their encounter with the criminal justice system.
In the coming days and weeks as we debate it further in the House and as we get into committee, I think the debate will be on whether it is true that the minister has struck an appropriate balance or whether she is, as the criticism has been levelled at her, trying to be all things to all people without really coming up with an effective piece of legislation. I will certainly be trying to make my own judgment in that respect in the context of our overall opposition to the bill, to which I will speak shortly.

The minister has said she has tried to make the bill more flexible, particularly in respect to the amendments that have been introduced since the last time it was before the House. I understand there has been some attempt to try and satisfy some of the concerns raised by the Bloc Quebecois as to the ability of the youth criminal justice system in Quebec to continue to do what it is doing now, which by all accounts is a comparatively successful attempt to deal with youth crime.
Some people have said, and I have no reason to doubt them, that Quebec is one of the few provinces that has been able to do with the Young Offenders Act what was intended when it was first brought in. Whether this is true or not, it is certainly the case if we look at rates of youth crime and the approach the province of Quebec is taking.

To give credit where credit is due, it is fair to say that Quebec is doing something right. It may not be reproducible in an uncritical way in every province because Quebec, after all, is a distinct society. It may be that things which are possible in Quebec are not as possible in other provinces, but certainly it would seem to me that we have much to learn from the approach taken in Quebec.

If the bill is not flexible enough at this point, if it can be demonstrated that it is so inflexible as to render impossible the ability of Quebec to keep doing the things it is doing right, then surely that is a criticism the minister should take seriously.

One of the inadequacies identified in the current Young Offenders Act has been what my predecessor referred to when he was speaking in the House as an absence of discretion. I will quote from Mr. Mancini who said on October 21, 1999:

We know, and again I can give some evidence of my own, that in many cases what happened with the old Young Offenders Act is that there was an absence of discretion, that police officers, school teachers and people who routinely came in contact with young people ended up referring matters to the courts, even if they were the most simple matters where some cautioning or some exercise of discretion may well have dealt with the matters.

I have seen in the courts young people coming in charged with damage to property because they got into an argument with a schoolmate over a school locker or where young people end up in court on trespassing charges because they walked across a neighbour's lawn. There is no need to clog the courts up with these kinds of offences when we have serious matters that have to go before the courts.

I think that is a particularly insightful criticism of the Young Offenders Act. I think it points to the heart of the matter when it comes to finding the right spirit in dealing with young people.

I am reminded, as I often am with justice matters, of a person in my family, my grandfather, Alex Taylor, who was the chief of police in Transcona for many years, and before that a constable. Subsequent to being the chief of police, he became a justice of the peace. Although he has been gone for 40 years, I still run into people on the doorstep who say “your grandfather gave me a boot in the rear end once when I needed it”, or “your grandfather took me home once when he could have taken me to jail” or “your grandfather put me in jail for the night when I needed a lesson”. This was long before there was a charter.

All these things demonstrate to me a certain amount of discretion, mercy and exercise of judgment when it comes to young people that sometimes can only be exercised by people who know the community, or who know the family or who know that young person.

In that context, I make the argument for more and better community policing. Our young people should be policed by people who know them and who know their communities. They should not be policed in the impersonal way that they are now so often policed in our larger cities where police do not work in the communities they live in or where they are transferred all over the place and nobody knows anybody anymore.

It seems to me that this absence of discretion is a key element of what is wrong with the Young Offenders Act. However, there was another absence, and this is one that I like to also dwell on. There was an absence not just of discretion, but of resources to deal with the process that was set up by the Young Offenders Act. We see that same mistake repeated in the new youth criminal justice bill. This is one of our fundamental concerns.

As has been said by members who spoke earlier, the act is quite complex, cumbersome and lays new responsibilities down for the provinces. It introduces new layers at the same time it does a good thing by introducing discretion. It does not introduce the resources to make the exercise of that discretion happen in a way which would be both constructive and speedy.

One thing we all know, and I think all the literature agrees on, is that when it comes to young people, it is important that there be as short a time as possible between the action and the consequences. What the minister has done is create a process by virtue of the increased complexity of the process and the lack of resources committed to making that complexity work, if that is possible. By doing this, the minister may well have created a situation where the length of time between action and consequence has been stretched out even further. It would seem that this is indeed one of the key criticisms that will be brought to bear on this legislation.

The complexity was alluded to by the Alliance critic but probably not as explicitly as I would have expressed it. That might have to do with the fact that the Alliance critic is a lawyer. He alluded to the fact that this was going to be a field day for the litigious. I think what meant was that this could well be the biggest job creation program for lawyers that we have seen in a long time. However, it is not the first job creation program for lawyers that I have seen go through this place.
For example and as I understand it, the reverse onus provisions change the existing situation whereby the state now has to argue for youth between the ages of 14 and 17 to be brought before adult court. Under this new law it will be the youths themselves who will have to say why they should not be advanced. This is debatable in itself.

Leaving that aside for a moment, who is going to make these arguments on behalf of these 14 to 17 years olds? Are they going to make the arguments themselves? These arguments are going to have to be made either by the lawyers who their parents hire or, given the fact that a great percentage of the youths who get into such trouble do not have parents who can afford lawyers, it is going to mean a whole new dimension of legal aid and costs which have been put on the provinces without the added resources.

What we see is a pattern of downloading costs onto the provinces which is quite unacceptable. Unfortunately, it is part of pattern that we have seen not just in justice but in other areas, for instance medicare. The federal government wants to set the rules, but it allows its participation financially in the administration of those rules to constantly erode. At the moment the federal government is only participating to the tune of about 25%. That is high compared to health care which is 9% to 13%, depending on whose figures we believe.

There are other things that I could have spoken about, but time flies while having fun talking about the Young Offenders Act.

One of the things the bill does not do and I am glad that it does not do, and I want to put this on the record, is it does not deal with children under 12 in the context of the bill. That is a position taken by the federal NDP, which we continue to support. It does not mean there should not be a strategy for dealing with children under 12. One of the things that the Manitoba NDP government is looking at very seriously is how to deal with young offenders 10 and 11 years old, both in the context of what they do themselves and also what they are led to do by others who are using their young age to their advantage.

It was mentioned earlier that one of the virtues of the old piece of legislation, the Juvenile Delinquents Act, was that it dealt with children under the age of 12. We need to find, subsequent to this bill, a way for the federal and provincial levels to co-operate in facing up to the fact that we have a problem, in more cases than we would care to admit perhaps, with children at that very young level. We need co-ordinated federal-provincial strategy for dealing with that. It should be, at least as I see it at the moment, outside the ambit of the way we deal with 12 to 18 year olds.

I want to say that we support the release of names in some circumstances, but we believe that in this respect there should still be a role for judges in exercising discretion as to when and in what circumstances names should be released. The reason we have judges is to make these kinds of judgments. It is consistent with our overall argument that there ought to be more discretion built into the system not just for judges but also for police officers.

The rest of my speech will address the fact that not only do we need to be, in an appropriate sense, tough on crime, we also need to be tough on the causes of crime. Had I another 20 minutes, I would certainly go into all the social and economic measures which I think would help to support families and to create and reinforce the kind of values in our society that would go a long way in preventing young offenders from offending in the first place