EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Friday, November 1, 1996

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[English]

The Chair: Good morning.

This morning we have with us: Nancy Kinsman, chair of the Society for Children and Youth of B.C.; Gary Manson, the society's youth coordinator for the Municipality of Burnaby; Bill McFarland, the society's consultant in family legislation and services; and Valerie Fronczek, who's on staff with the society.

Welcome. I know you have a brief to present to us. Then we'll have questions.

Ms Nancy Kinsman (Chair, Youth Justice Committee, Society for Children and Youth of B.C.): Good morning, Madam Chair, and members of the committee.

I am the chairperson - or chairwoman, or whatever we call ourselves these days - of the youth justice committee of the Society for Children and Youth of B.C.

The Society of Children - we call it SCY - was formulated in 1974, so it has a long history of advocating for the rights of the child in many ways. We consider ourselves a multi-disciplinary group. Over 50 organizations are members. We have 300 active volunteers from all sorts of services within society.

In 1994, as a result of the strong media attention to youth violence, the board suggested that perhaps a committee should be formulated to help bring the voice of the child to the forefront, as it appeared that the media was reacting to extreme cases of youth violence and trying to tar all youth with the same brush because of those particular cases.

This group was formed in 1994 and went on into 1995. As a result, we produced position paper 5. I believe this is the last one we produced within the society. I trust you all have a copy of that. It's the document with the yellow heading. Its subject is youth justice.

I know it's boring to read a document, and I'm not intending to do that. I will direct you to some portions of the document.

First, though, we want to stress that as a society we believe advocacy can come in all sorts of forms, based on research on what children and youth need and based on education, programs and policy analyses.

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We have been involved at both a provincial and a federal level in presenting our opinions and views on legislation that involved changes, such as the Canada Evidence Act, so that the voice of the child could be heard within the justice system in a safe forum and be child-focused. We have recently been involved heavily with changes in the provincial law dealing with children and families and child welfare issues.

Our statement focuses initially and primarily on primary prevention, which I believe this committee has heard significantly about. I read recently that one of the ways our province is considering cutting the moneys is to double-bunk in the incarceration facilities. That does not help or assist. That's our opinion.

When you go out to our local facilities, what we call the YDC, or Youth Detention Centre, you see that this is already happening. It's overcrowded. There are young children there.

If you go into the court system on a youth day - and I urge you all to do this - it's shocking to see the size of these children faced with incarceration. They may be 13. In my eyes, they look like they're 7. They're not scary individuals, most of them; they're terrified.

So we've focused on primary prevention. We consider, as I believe this committee would, that youth violence is an issue that is worldwide. It is arising out of numerous underlying causes that need to be looked at and focused on to assist the youth in our society.

Economics obviously plays a large part in the creation and development of children. There are changes in the family structure as a result of economics. Consider peer pressure. A lot of studies have been done on that as a result of changes in the family structure. That's economics again.

My society doesn't want to blame, target or focus on one of those factors as a reason for youth violence, and we don't profess to know any of the answers or questions on how we would resolve the world problem. However, what we've stressed is that rather than change the legislation piecemeal because of strong lobby groups or fear in society, we should take a holistic approach.

In fact, it was my view, and perhaps my society's, that this should have taken place before any amendments to the act were implemented so that we don't piecemeal the lives of children and youth in an adult forum without a clear basis of where we're headed.

We need solutions that address the specific issues of youth, who cannot be considered adults; they are not. There are studies and research, and we know that. They're not developed. They're not mature. At times, we can't hold them responsible for their actions in the same way we hold adults responsible, particularly in the criminal justice system.

It can be recognized that a lot of young offenders have been victims of abuse themselves. That is an issue our society looks at in many forums.

I'll address the recommendations to you, from one to five, which we have considered to be areas that should be considered by this committee, this government and all areas of society.

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First, all levels of government should redouble their efforts to support families with young children in their important task of child rearing. It's important that the long-term effects of cutbacks be considered, particularly in the area of abuse, which often leads to young offenders being within the criminal justice system.

Two, everything possible should be done to encourage communities to foster youth participation in decision-making and to work toward making the social environment more youth-friendly and accessible. Our society is looking at such things as housing for children and other formats for the voice of a child to be heard, including staff members and having youth on our board.

Three, neighbourhood-centred planning, preferably with school at the centre, should be encouraged. This would involve facilitating the integration of services to youth on a manageable scale and ensuring greater accessibility to all youth. I understand Quebec can be looked at as an example in this area.

The portrayal of violence in the media should be restricted as much as possible. This is an area we have heard much about in society, and now we have the computer world entering into it as well.

Finally, we ask that school-based violence prevention programs be implemented and sustained through all grades. Often these programs are started and then not followed through. Conflict management programs are introduced, they have one session and that's it.

Primary prevention is the real area we wish this committee and our world to look at, for the youth and children of our society.

Often a child or youth does commit a crime, and it is our position that the definition of ``crime'' has changed over the years as well. What once, in our early days, were considered just youthful antics are now considered criminal activities, resulting in children coming before the courts, when in fact that is a reaction from the adult population.

We wish the committee to hear that there is a need for effective rehabilitation programs based on effective research and based on hearing from programs that have worked and from programs that have not worked, because the ones that don't work often create the hardened criminals. I'm referring to the hardened adult criminals. It's a fact as well that once a child is labelled, they often reoffend into their adulthood.

I address you to recommendations 6 to 10 on the same page.

The youth justice system should continue to be based on the philosophy that young offenders can be rehabilitated. This is not often the focus in the adult criminal world.

The Department of Justice should give leadership to the creation of partnerships between governments, employers and local communities to enable the development of a comprehensive system of youth justice programs that meet the wide range of needs of young offenders. We want to emphasize programs for first-time offenders, who may be terrified. Examples are community-based programs. We have examples within our province of diversion programs, such as the Maple Ridge program, which my colleagues can address if you wish.

Eight, the number of sentencing options for youth should be increased, with emphasis on establishing a variety of residential attendance programs - wilderness, rural and urban programs specific to age, culture and gender. An example is the Cariboo Action Training Society, which I understand this committee has had information about. That program is very successful.

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Recreation and other community-based services should become more closely integrated with correction programs. Particularly, again, we stress the need to look at first-time offenders to help reduce the likelihood of reoffending.

Integration should be effected between child protection, mental health and youth correction services to facilitate early intervention and ensure continuity and appropriateness of programs. This is being done in Quebec, in New Brunswick and in our new Ministry for Children and Families in B.C. There is integration going on. You can see our model is based on trying to look not at something global but at something that starts small and works out, something that's manageable.

Finally, on the Young Offenders Act, we've set out our position that we don't recommend any changes to the act. We stress the urgency and the need to incorporate at all levels the Convention on the Rights of the Child. We've looked at articles 37 and 40 in our presentation today, and we have copies of the convention for you if you wish. In 1991 it was ratified, with 170 countries as signatories.

The proposed amendments to lower the age of the child within the Young Offenders Act are in contradiction to the UN Convention, which stresses that children and youth must be considered different. It recognizes that they are developmentally different from adults and should not be put with adults. They should be treated with dignity.

Our society wishes to be the voice of the child when the voice of the child or youth cannot be heard. Particularly in our youth justice system, that voice is not often heard. Adults speak for them and there are adult judges, and the voice and needs of a child or a youth get lost within a system that is structured and created by adults.

Thank you.

The Vice-Chair (Ms Torsney): Does anybody else want to make a comment?

All right, then, we'll move to 10-minute rounds of questioning, starting with Mr. Ramsay.

Mr. Ramsay (Crowfoot): Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'd like to welcome our witnesses this morning and thank them for coming and making their presentation to the committee.

As a committee, we have to look at and deal with both sides of the equation. At one end of the equation is the area you're concerned with: the preventative programs that will keep our young kids out of the criminal justice system. But we have to deal with the other side, and that other side is reflected in our visit to a closed custody facility in Edmonton, where there were about170 individuals, among them 35 high-profile individuals.

I want to give you four or five, or maybe six or seven, of the reasons some of these people were incarcerated.

There was a restaurant murder; a young offender committed a murder in a restaurant. Another was a murder of a cab driver. A third was just a murder; we don't have any other details. There was a murder of a nine-year-old foster brother. There was a manslaughter during a break and enter; that means someone was killed by this young offender during a break and enter. There was another manslaughter during another break and enter, and another manslaughter during another break and enter. There was a murder of a cab driver and a woman passenger. There was an assault towards staff of the closed custody institution and two attempted staff hostage-takings.

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So I guess what we have to do, in our job, is to make recommendations to the Minister of Justice that would put more resources and more attention into the early detection and prevention of youth crime. We are told the signs of aggressive behaviour can be seen as early as 18 to 30 months.

If we were to invest more of the $9 billion we're spending on the criminal justice system into these areas, we might be able to reduce the number entering the justice system. On the other side, what do we do with these young offenders who fall through the cracks and are committing very heinous crimes of murder, rape and serious assault? What do we do after their warrant has expired and they still have not embraced the good rehabilitative programs that are available to them?

We've been into those institutions and there are good programs. We asked the young offenders about the programs and if they're good, if they're helping them. Some say, yes, if we want help, they're good. Others say it's a crock, because of their attitude. They're not looking to change their behaviour and they're not seeking help to change their behaviour. What do we do with those young offenders at the end of their term, when they're to be released and they pose a high risk to target some innocent individual? We see that in the adult area as well. We have to wrestle with that and we have to deal with that.

There has to be a balance between those two issues - the rehabilitation of those who do come in conflict with the law and their early detection and prevention. What do we do with those who haven't been rehabilitated and have proven by their actions that they're a danger to our children and to innocent members of society?

What we're looking for and what I'm looking for is a balance between those two requirements, so that, one, we're doing justice to our children, and two, we are assuring society it is safe from these young people who for one reason or another become violent and are a threat.

I just make those comments, and I'd like to ask a couple of questions within my 10 minutes. We never have enough time with our witnesses. I'd sure like to ask a number of questions, but I have10 minutes and then I'm gone, or you're gone, and that's the last interchange we will have.

You say there should be no automatic transfer to adult court. Would you disagree, then, with Bill C-37, that allowed for the transfer?

Ms Kinsman: Yes, we would. We look at the United Nations conventions and articles 37 and 40.

Mr. Ramsay: Okay. What about the other amendments Bill C-37 brought in, which was an increase in the penalty for murder? Would you agree or disagree with that?

Mr. Gary Manson (Member, Youth Justice Committee, Society for Children and Youth of British Columbia): I'd like to make mention of the background you talked about. I worked for a period of time in both open- and closed-custody centres with young offenders. I've done community programs with young people, but I've also worked in the institutions.

I was assigned to the serious offenders unit we have here in British Columbia, offenders who committed murders and this type of thing. I found it very interesting. At night I'd go home, maybe after something had come on the news, and it would just so happen that this young person may arrive on my unit and I'd often hear the stories from my relatives and friends about how horrible this sounded. Indeed, some of these crimes are very horrible. But a lot of things occur within these young people that the public will never know. There's a lot more in-depth stories behind those individuals. Some of them have serious emotional or psychological problems that may have contributed in part to some of this behaviour. So I think we almost have to look at these individually.

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I also have to say, personally, I'd be less concerned with some of those individuals than I would with some of the others who may be an ongoing nuisance in the community. I wouldn't feel uncomfortable around some of them because it is an individual type of thing.

In some cases I'd agree that some do need to be incarcerated for a longer period of time for the protection of society, but I don't think this can be a broad brushstroke against all young offenders. I say this based on my own experience working intimately with some of our more serious offenders here in British Columbia.

Ms Kinsman: This was our information as well. Our research showed homicide within the youth population is not rising. Your unique cases and your high profile cases aren't changing within our population. It's the property offences that are changing. As I said earlier in our presentation, the definition of crime has also changed. What used to be shoplifting, where we would turn a blind eye, is now becoming a criminal offence and the child is brought before the court.

In the second part - I know Mr. Manson could also comment on this - you talk about the offences that occur within the detention centres. If you go into those detention centres, it's easy to understand why the youth are reacting. They're overpopulated, as is the adult criminal system. This creates new conflicts and creates new problems for those youth. They may be first-time offenders put in with habitual offenders.

So you've presented two types of young offenders. There are the ones who are unique. There are also others, and probably if we looked at their lives we'd be appalled at what they have been submitted to. Then you've presented those arising out of the very fact we've incarcerated those children and youth.

It is our belief and our position that incarcerating creates more problems, particularly within the model we apply to adults. We know as a society this model does not work. We're saying we release those individuals out to society, and society is fearful of adults.

The Vice-Chair (Ms Torsney): Thank you.

Mr. Maloney, you have 10 minutes.

Mr. Maloney (Erie): Thank you.

If I could go back to some of the recommendations you've made, there are a couple of points. In the second one you recommend everything possible be done to encourage communities to foster youth participation in decision-making and to work towards making the social environment more youth-friendly and accessible.

Could you elaborate on this recommendation? What specifically do you mean by youth participation in decision-making and a more friendly social environment?

Mr. Manson: Again, I can speak on some of the work I've done in my own municipality. We've conducted quite a bit of research into this particular point. I think many of use who work in community-based programs would like to see this as an accepted principle in all our communities. In research studies and reports, one after another, it states clearly this is a key thing that marks the success of any of our programs we run in the communities. We must involve youth in decision-making. We must involve youth in any decisions that may or will affect young people. This has a long history to it. It has been said for a long time.

I can speak to this based on personal experience. On those projects where I involve young people, and they truly are involved with the decision-making with guidance from adults and others who might have experience with those types of processes, they are very successful. They work well. Not only is the end product important for the community, the process itself is very constructive and a good one for the young people. It is something they'll take with them and hopefully use in many other aspects of their lives. When it comes to making decisions they will use better judgment.

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Mr. Maloney: In the seventh recommendation you make reference to the formation and creation of partnership between different levels of government, employers and local communities. You refer specifically the first offenders to community-based diversion programs. Can you provide other examples of some suggested partnerships that might be prudent or advisable?

Mr. Bill McFarland (Member, Youth Justice Committee, Society for Children and Youth of British Columbia): I can provide you with some examples. I've been involved in the area of child abuse and self-protection of the young offender since 1949, so I have a fair amount of experience. I am president of a treatment centre for teenage drug addicts and advanced alcoholism. I've been the president for five years, and we have about a 60% success rate in this institution. This is the percentage of kids who never repeat their addiction to either drugs or alcohol.

Our problem is, we are almost totally government funded by the Department of Health, but we have insufficient beds. We have 35 kids on the waiting list right now who want treatment for their alcohol and drug problems. If we tell them we cannot accept them until next May, it doesn't make sense. To tell a teenager who wants help with his drug and alcohol problem that the earliest we can admit him is next May doesn't make any sense.

One of the programs I'm involved with is what we call Parents in Crisis. Parents in Crisis identifies parents who are starting to abuse their children. We have 50 of these groups around British Columbia and I've been on the board for about 20 years. It's fascinating to see the change in the parenting skills when these parents share with each other, cooperate with each other and work in the community.

These are parents who are starting to abuse their children and many of those children will eventually be delinquent children. We have been able to intercept many of those kids right at the first instance. When the parents say they are doing something wrong and they need some help, this is what we do. We have many programs such as this.

The program I'm most concerned about - Mr. Ramsay mentioned an Alberta example - is the treatment of the teenage sex offender. There is a great deal of literature and material available on this. American statistics say if you don't get the beginning sex offender when he is 14 or 15, he is going to molest at least 30 children down the road. Americans have documented this very thoroughly and we have documented it pretty well across Canada. We have to start treatment of the beginning sex offender at 14 or 15 or he becomes the adult pedophile who gets all the publicity later on.

Alberta has three very good programs for the treatment of these kids and they are extremely successful. I know the Manitoba programs and I know the Toronto programs. The one in British Columbia is extremely successful. There is a six-year study coming out of the British Columbia program showing it is a very small percentage of these children who have been treated over six years who are molesting or sexually abusing younger children. This research project coming out in B.C. is very startling.

I'm sorry. Does this answer your question?

Mr. Maloney: Ms Kinsman mentioned about 50 different groups belong to your organization. I think Mr. McFarland has touched upon a few of these. Are there any others that you think stand out? I'm sure they're all excellent.

Mr. McFarland: In my spare time I'm also on the board of the Elizabeth Fry Society. We provide the alcohol and drug therapy treatment at the training institutions.

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We also have three major intervention programs in the community, one of which is in the Hindu and Chinese communities, for parents who are obviously having trouble, who want help, who recognize right away they have trouble with their child. The Elizabeth Fry Society of British Columbia operates these programs, and they've been very successful to the present.

One of the most interesting programs you might look at is the one in the Children's Aid Society of Metropolitan Toronto, where they identify the mother who starts to abuse her child almost from the time she leaves the hospital. The society has set up a tremendous program using nurses who intercept the mother with the beginnings of an abused child who will become the neglected, abused child later on. The Metro Toronto Children's Aid Society has an exceptional program in that area.

Mr. Maloney: You make the statement that there should be no widespread media publicity of a young person's identity. What do you mean by ``widespread''? Does that qualify no media publicity? Are you saying some is tolerable? What do you mean by that?

Ms Kinsman: It's our position that there should be no publicity of the young person's identity whatsoever. So ``widespread'' really is a word that -

Mr. Maloney: Should be removed, I guess.

Ms Kinsman: - should be removed from that paper.

I recognize the fear factor in society at a personal level and at a society level. I know in the local paper in the community I live in they now report the break and enters weekly. They put out a grid map and they put the numbers of the break and enters, the fires, the accidents. That kind of thing just raises the fear of members of society.

If we look back twenty years ago, it would be our submission that those wouldn't be much different. But it's focusing on the fear, and as a result society feels there's a need to react. The media are helping to continue the fear-based factor that surrounds youth.

The Vice-Chair (Ms Torsney): Mr. Manson.

Mr. Manson: Madam Chair, I may also mention that we're aware of several studies. It's back to your query about question seven and our last sentence about preventive programs for first offenders and this type of thing. A number of studies have been done to indicate that indeed if we are able to intervene and do some constructive programs with first offenders the risk level and rate of recidivism amongst those as first offences actually go down, compared with if quite radical intervention and much more in-depth actions are taken. On the other hand, some of this research does indicate that for those who might be deemed more serious offenders more radical intervention may be required. It's a sort of opposite thing. To me, at least, it underlines the importance of positive first steps for first offenders.

The Vice-Chair (Ms Torsney): Mr. Ramsay, please.

Mr. Ramsay: Thank you, Madam Chair.

I would like to follow up on your feelings about no publicity of names at all. Would you disagree with the sentencing circles, where they pretty well abandon the non-disclosure requirement? How do you feel about the smaller communities, where everyone knows when a serious matter occurs, or when a crime is committed by a young offender?

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I'm looking for consistency we don't have simply because of the make-up of our country. We have been into small communities, particularly in the north, where everyone knows when an offence has been committed. If there's any labelling taking place, and if there's any negative impact upon that labelling, it's taking place without the news media, because they don't need the news media to know.

What about the young offender who is released and poses a continued threat, such as a sexual offender? What about the lady who suggested to us here that she wouldn't want...? Most of her babysitting has been done by 15- and 16-year-olds. What method of warning or defence does she have against hiring a 15-year-old if she does not know that he has been convicted or been involved in a sexual offence and has come to the attention of the authorities?

It has been recommended to the committee by some witnesses that names perhaps be made available through the news media in these special cases where it is of interest to the safety of the public, or through any other way that would suggest we take a look at the non-disclosure features of the act. How do you feel about this?

Ms Kinsman: Personally, I would ask how I'm supposed to know if I'm hiring an adult to care for my children. I think that's a moot point regarding the concern of the woman checking out her babysitters. We don't know our caregivers of any age. We take that risk, and as parents, we take that responsibility to ensure as much as we can. I don't believe that publishing the names of children, and thus further labelling children and youth, is going to protect society from your and that person's concern. It just will establish the label, the stigma, and it certainly will not assist in any type of rehabilitation.

As we've just heard from the panel members on the studies of 14- and 15-year-olds, if you have programs that continue after they have served their sentences and they're in these programs, perhaps society can then feel more safe.

Mr. Ramsay: Would you disagree with what's happening within the sentencing circles, particularly in our aboriginal communities, where there seems to be an abandonment of the disclosure requirement, at least to a degree?

Ms Kinsman: But my understanding is that it's not in the media.

Mr. Ramsay: No, but the point I'm making is that it doesn't matter how I find out. As long as I have that information, I can use it to protect my children in any way I might be able to.

Ms Kinsman: We're not here to suggest that gossiping or any of those things that we don't have any control over in a small community or a large city don't happen. What we're suggesting is that we can stop the media. We can stop the suggestion that the names be published as a means to protect society.

Mr. Ramsay: Thank you, Madam Chair.

The Vice-Chair (Ms Torsney): Thank you, Mr. Ramsay.

Ms Cohen.

Ms Cohen (Windsor - St. Clair): Have you given some thought to the issue of age at both the lower end and the upper end? Right now, it's 12 to 17, both inclusive. There are some who think we should not have a lower age at all, that we should define it by the crime, not by the age of the person. There are others who think we should choose yet another arbitrary number of 10 instead of the arbitrary number of 12. In Quebec, I think there's a strong feeling that 12 is too low. In parts of the west, there's a strong feeling that 16 is high enough, and that sort of thing.

One, have you turned your minds to that issue, and two, can you give us your impression of the interrelationship between the criminal justice system for youth and the child welfare system?

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Mr. Manson: We don't think the age should be lowered. In terms of the question on the lower age being increased, to be quite honest, I personally hadn't thought about that. I don't know how much discussion we really had around it. On behalf of our committee, though, I think we're saying not to lower the age.

I can reflect on all kinds of personal experience, having worked with high-risk and non-high-risk youth and encountered some of the feelings around that. I know it's complex. Maybe there is the odd 10- or 11-year-old who is a little more mature than the others, etc., but for the better well-being and welfare of our young people, I think it's best not to put them into those environments. In effect, that would put responsibility on the justice system that maybe really should have been, if not the responsibility of the family and the parents, the responsibility of the state as a social agency, a social welfare agent, whatever.

I think it's a dangerous precedent to get into putting our younger children into a criminal justice system. I personally think it would not be a better thing for them. If we can't work more effectively with our young people at that age and provide better alternatives, I think we really do have a much more serious problem than just our talk around the justice system and that type of thing.

Mr. McFarland: With the change that's occurring in the B.C. child and family correctional system, I think we have solved some of those problems.

I think Quebec probably has the best answer. For a number of years, Quebec has had the child protection workers sitting right next door to the youth workers. If it's a family problem, it's passed over to the child protection workers. When B.C. gets going here, I think it's worth examining what Quebec has been able to do over a number of years by saying this is really a family problem, not a criminal problem. The flexibility that Quebec has in this area is something B. C. should be looking at.

Ms Kinsman: I work within the child welfare system. On funding, again, we've heard there is a five-month wait for a youth who wants to have alcohol treatment. What is true about getting your children into alcohol and drug treatment is also true about getting them into sexual abuse counselling or other forms of counselling. They're looking at a five- to six-month wait before they can get into the counselling that's available to them through our social workers in this province. It's the social workers who are being held accountable within a structure that doesn't have the funding to do the primary prevention and to assist those children who we have already identified as having been abused and who are at risk of offending.

So in terms of the funding, again we say it costs so much per day to put a child into jail. That funding would go a lot further in a counselling form. That's my personal opinion.

Ms Valerie Fronczek (Executive Director, Society for Children and Youth of British Columbia): In case you think I'm just sitting here quietly, I'd like to explain the different role I have here.

The Society for Children and Youth is a voluntary organization. We have, as Nancy said, over 300 active multi-disciplinary volunteers and volunteers from all disciplines working for the organization. I'm simply a staff person. The volunteers speak in situations like this. I do want to say, however, that the Society for Children and Youth has been working, and is currently working, on a major project promoting the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

We are doing an analysis of B.C. legislation and federal legislation that affects children and youth. Of course, one of these is the Young Offenders Act. We are applying a ratings system to legislation. We will be finishing the first stage of this component of the project by the end of this year, but I do have some early material on the Young Offenders Act.

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It isn't coming out too well in our ratings system. I want to draw the attention of this committee to the fact that Canada not only signed this document but also actually gave leadership to it. At this point, as we progress and make changes to it, the Young Offenders Act is actually falling shorter and shorter of the target we should be aiming for.

It is clearly written in article 3 of the convention that the best interests of the child should be a prime consideration. I think we must bear that in mind as we proceed.

The Vice-Chair (Ms Torsney): What's the timing for your report?

Ms Fronczek: We will have the first draft by the end of this month. This is a very large amount of material and is not really a public piece. We then need to turn it into understandable language, which will take us a few more months. In March we have a forum in Vancouver that Stephen Lewis will be speaking at. We will have the information then for anyone who wants it.

The Vice-Chair (Ms Torsney): I ask because we have to start writing our report, so if you did want to get some preliminary information to us....

Ms Fronczek: Yes. I will be able to give you some information immediately.

The Vice-Chair (Ms Torsney): Thank you very much.

Mr. Ramsay, do you have more questions?

Mr. Ramsay: Yes, thank you, Madam Chair. The Bloc member is not here, so that means we get more time.

You speak about the best interests of the child. I hang my head, because I don't think we're focusing on the best interests of the child. If we were, we'd be focusing on drug trafficking and alcohol abuse, which are such great contributors not only to crime in general but also particularly to youth crime.

Mr. McFarland, as you indicated, you have a long waiting list for those youths who'd like to get into your program. Your program would give them a chance to shake the habit they've developed because someone is pushing drugs in their community.

We were in a little community of 400 people in the Yukon. They're suffering from drug and alcohol abuse and yet everyone knows who the drug pushers are, who the bootleggers are. Why can't we do something about that? Would you recommend that the state focus greater attention on dealing with major drug traffickers and perhaps increasing the sentences?

If we're really serious about eliminating the need for these programs, then why don't we attack some of the causative factors leading to drug abuse and so on? Why don't we simply move the drug traffickers out of our communities? Would you support stronger measures and penalties against the adult major drug traffickers in our society?

Mr. McFarland: I certainly would. I think we can't separate the two. Eighty per cent of the teenagers we treat for alcohol and drug addiction have been sexually abused. We started running a program for treating drug and alcohol but we're really running a treatment program for sexually-abused teenagers. It's not that they're using drugs or alcohol. They're using drugs and alcohol because of what's happened to them in the past. We must not forget that.

Mr. Ramsay: So we would go back to the parents or to the adults or to whoever has sexually abused these children and see what their problem is. I suppose if we went back to them, we would find there's probably an alcohol or drug abuse problem with them.

Mr. McFarland: Very much so, yes.

Ms Kinsman: I think you would find they have also been victims of sexual abuse or violence -

Mr. Ramsay: Yes.

Ms Kinsman: - so it's not that simple. The alcohol and drugs are one of the causes of youth violence, but simply putting higher sentences on that drug trafficker.... Youths will find other ways to get their substance, to self-medicate.

So to support that, yes, but it's just one factor in the very large and complex underlying causes for youth violence, for violence in our society.

.1155

Mr. Ramsay: Where I grew up I didn't have a problem with drugs because there were no drugs. So I'm asking again, because we hear repeatedly that alcohol and drug abuse is such a contributing factor to crime generally and it's being passed on to our children, should we not look at that as one of the root causes and be attacking the root causes with either harsher penalties or better education?

We see what's happening with tobacco abuse. There's an enormous public campaign to bring the dangers of smoking to the awareness of everyone. The laws are getting tougher in terms of advertising and so on. Would you consider this kind of frontal attack on what I consider to be two of the major contributing factors to crime, youth crime included - drug and alcohol abuse?

Mr. Manson: Before coming here I sat down with a group of young people, some of whom are high-risk individuals and well known among some of our police forces in the Lower Mainland. I told them we were coming here today. We talked about several issues, including the root causes and this type of thing. I asked them what would help prevent them from getting into some of the things they're currently in and have been involved in. A couple of key issues that came up were to give them jobs and things to do.

I know a lot of times we argue that we have lots of things for our young people, but maybe we don't offer them effectively. I think we have to re-explore that.

We say we speak on behalf of young people. I want it to be known that we could spend some time sitting with young people asking them some questions that might relate to some of the subject matter here today.

But that was some of their feedback. Give them jobs and they won't have to deal with drugs necessarily. They want to feel good about themselves. They are sophisticated, as well, and they want to understand who they are and they want to contribute, but it can be a very tough grind for some of them.

Ms Kinsman: I think also that the alcohol and drug use in the youth segment of society is self-medication. That's not a root cause. They are medicating themselves against what's going on economically within their families with their abuse. Taking away the drug doesn't take away the underlying root cause of why they're in trouble. We need to look at it in a more in-depth way than as an alcohol and drug issue.

Mr. Ramsay: So we should just leave the alcohol and drug thing alone.

Ms Kinsman: I'm not suggesting that, sir.

Mr. Ramsay: Thank you.

The Vice-Chair (Ms Torsney): Ms Cohen had another question.

Ms Cohen: It's more of a comment.

For some people, life is very simple. You just come crashing down on drug pushers, but the fact of the matter is, if we don't create an environment where the economy is healthy and there are jobs, we're not going to do anything.

Mr. Ramsay can ride his horse into Carcross and deal with drug dealers all he wants, but the fact of the matter is, there are no jobs there. There is nothing for the kids to do - literally. This is not Vancouver he's talking about, this is a place where they don't even have a centre for youth to hang out at, and where they have to commute for an hour to a high school. As a result, they transport their kids to Whitehorse when they're 15 years old, and take them away from their parents.

Whether it's Carcross, Vancouver or Windsor, where I come from, the issue is having a healthy community, and part of that has to do with the economic prospects of the community. I think sometimes some people don't see those linkages in society and look for a quick fix.

That's just my comment. Nobody needs to comment on that.

The Vice-Chair (Ms Torsney): Thank you very much for coming to the committee today and making a presentation. We really appreciate your input and wish you continued success in your work advocating for children.

The committee will rise for a couple of minutes so we can get the next group before us and get the cobwebs out.

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.1213

The Chair: We have with us now the Vancouver Board of Trade. Brian Smith is the chair of the Vancouver Board of Trade task force on property crime. Dennis Farrell is a member of the task force on property crime. John Hansen is chief economist and assistant managing director of the Board of Trade. Darcy Rezac is managing director of the Board of Trade.

Welcome.

Mr. Darcy Rezac (Managing Director, Vancouver Board of Trade): Thank you very much, Madam Chair. John Hansen will be joining us directly.

I'm delighted to appear before the committee this morning and tell you just a little about what the board of trade is doing and why we're interested in this subject.

We're delighted to have on our panel the two gentlemen on my right.

I'd like to read a correction into the proceedings, if I may. Dennis Farrell is a member of the board of trade task force on property crime and a recently retired deputy commissioner of the RCMP.

The Vancouver Board of Trade is a business association. We've been around for 109 years. We were formed to help rebuild the city after the city burned to the ground in 1886, and have been involved with public policy issues ever since. We're especially proud of the opening of the new Vancouver International Airport runway, runway 26 right, 08 left, on Monday. That was a major project we lobbied for. It's the kind of thing we do. We try to have an impact on public policy on behalf of our members in pursuit of our mission, which is to promote, enhance, and facilitate the development of this region as a Pacific centre of trade, commerce, and travel; a good place to live, to work, and to do business.

We are also members of many organizations. One organization we've been a member of since 1989 is the World Economic Forum, which has its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. The World Economic Forum publishes a annual report, a world competitiveness index, which I will refer to. The 1995 report ranks all countries according to international competitiveness on a series of factors, one of which is serious crime.

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John Hansen has just joined us, Madam Chair.

There is a perception that Canada is a kinder and gentler place than most places in the industrial world. According to this report, we're not. It records serious crime as murders, violent crimes, and armed robberies. They list 45 countries in this rating. The number they use as an index is the number of violent crimes per 100,000 population. At the bottom of the list - we're not surprised - is the United States, with a rating of 272.5; they rank 45th.

I suspect Canada considers itself a kinder and gentler place because, against the U.S., our violent crime rate is significantly less. However, we rank 36th out of 45 countries in this study. Our violent crime rate, at 122.3 in 1993, is 60 times worse than Japan's. It's twice as bad as Chile's and twice as bad as Italy's. It's worse than Taiwan, Greece and Portugal. Portugal has a violent crime rate one-tenth that of Canada's. We also know our crime rate in Canada overall has increased dramatically since the late 1960s.

We looked to triangulate this with other reports. Prentice-Hall published a report in its latest, all-new edition of its places-rated almanac, using 1993 data. These are the best cities in which to live in North America. They rated 343 cities, and on this score our own city ranked 283 out of 343 - not a very proud rating in crime. It ranked much, much higher overall as a place to live, as one of the best places to live, because of other factors, but our crime rate was comparatively high.

The Board of Trade felt that it should be looking into this, but that we should do something in an area where we could make a contribution, and property crime seemed to be the area where we claimed top status in Canada, which turned out to be true. In fact, in terms of property crime, Vancouver is amongst the worst cities in North America. I believe there are only 6 cities out of 343 in North America that have a worse property crime rating than ours. Our property crime rating has gone up dramatically in recent years. We're concerned about that. We like to think this is a safe city, and our purpose is to try to keep it that way.

We have done some work on our own, and we find that our property crime rate in Vancouver is considerably higher than it is in Toronto and Calgary and Montreal, and that is of real concern to us. So the perception, regrettably, is not entirely accurate. The rates have gone up dramatically. The number of cars stolen in this city has gone up dramatically. We have statistics available, and can make them available to the committee. The number of B and Es, home invasions and other such crimes are increasing. These tend to be treated by police as not serious crimes - they sometimes don't even respond to B and Es.

We did a survey of Board of Trade's 4,500 members. Fully 75% have been victims of property crime in the last two years. We have a serious problem.

We struck our task force, and are delighted with the quality of people on it. Brian Smith is chairman of B.C. Hydro and is a former attorney general. In fact, he was appointed attorney general just as the Young Offenders Act was passed in Ottawa, and he argued for it not to be proclaimed. I'll let him share that with you himself.

Dennis Farrell has much experience in this business, having recently retired as deputy commissioner of the RCMP. We have lawyers on our panel, and former police people.

We are holding a public policy forum on the 27th of this month so that our members can come and listen to some of our findings and also share their experiences with us, so that we can finalize our report to our members early in the new year.

We thank you very much for having us come and appear before you - we welcome this opportunity.

Brian.

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Mr. Brian Smith (Chair, Task Force on Property Crime, Vancouver Board of Trade): Madam Chair, members of the committee, this task force of the Board of Trade dealt with property crime and ways of preventing property crime, so we really did not get into violent crime or other aspects of it directly, but of course indirectly you can't avoid getting into it.

Property crime, break and entry, car thefts - all of these are on the increase in Vancouver. The statistics are in graphs attached to our little brief. Vancouver has quite a problem with break and entry, car theft, this type of thing. It's on the rise. You might well say, so is your population on the rise, and so is the global nature of your population on the rise. All of that is of course true. But property crime in Vancouver is I think even worse than the statistical story.

When you survey the membership of an organization like the Board of Trade, with about4,400 members, and you find that 75% of them have experienced this themselves within the past three years, it's a rather telling survey figure. We feel this is a serious problem. What do we have to say that might help you as you travel the land and look at issues involving youth crime and young offenders?

In British Columbia, of the 180,000 new criminal cases every year, 20,000 of them - that is, about 12% to 14% - involve youth. These crimes run the gamut from adventuresome youth committing their first offences all the way to mature, hard-core criminals. I'm going to talk about some of these.

Let me put a little bit of perspective on the Young Offenders Act, arising out of that introduction, because I did spend years as a provincial justice minister dealing with the Young Offenders Act even before it was first proclaimed, and did attend a half-dozen meetings with Robert Kaplan and other provincial attorneys general, the solicitors general, trying to persuade him not to proclaim the act until there had been a little more practical thought as to some of its features.

I know we were very concerned about raising the upper age limit. We didn't care for that aspect of it. We were also concerned with the lower age limit and what was going to happen to the minor but perhaps troublesome youths who fell below the lower age limit. Those were two concerns, but there were others.

The act was proclaimed, and it has had a lot of criticism ever since. It's had some modifications. Some of the criticism I think has probably not been borne out. There hasn't been a huge rash in Canada of Fagan-gang crime - that is, you don't have a lot of ten-year-olds being exploited by adults committing serious crime. But it still is a problem for those young people who give all the ingredients of being a hardened criminal below the age of twelve.

I think there are probably more fundamental problems with the Young Offenders Act than those age problems. There is the issue of how you deal with young offenders in the courts.

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In an earlier life I was a criminal lawyer. This last year I went into the courts and prosecuted a somewhat lengthy Asian gang case for the Crown, having done none of these for about 15 years. I might share that experience just for a minute.

It was a not atypical break-in of a store, where five youths put on masks, take a machete, rush into a store at about 5 p.m. and terrorize everybody inside. They threaten the female employees, tie them up, put masking tape over their mouths, threaten their lives, take a machete, and cut all the telephone lines immediately for a kind of dramatic terror effect.

Then they emptied the store. They were looking for chips. Chips are the big spoils here for a lot of the these computer store break-ins, because you can sell them and they fetch a lot of money on the secondary market. They didn't get any chips. They got about $500-worth of worthless products. They ran out of the store into the arms of the police. It had all the earmarks of an Inspector Clouseau-organized robbery. They were all apprehended and caught red-handed.

Eventually there was no problem in getting guilty pleas out of these five youths. The problem was trying to get the next levels of people who organized the robbery. That is very difficult to do, because these gangs are recruited on a cell-type basis, so the helpless five who committed this crime never met anyone over the next level. They didn't meet the person who financed this. They didn't meet the person who planned it. They simply met the recruiter. So they couldn't identify anyone, and they wouldn't identify anyone anyway, because these kids in these situations have no intention of testifying. Rightly or wrongly, they believe after testifying they won't be around if they squeal and they tell who recruited them.

In this case the police had obtained full admissions from the next two levels of perpetrators of this, the ones who had organized it, but neither of these statements were admissible, because these streetwise kids had given the statements verbally but then didn't sign the waivers and didn't consent to having a formal statement taken. We had to let them go and couldn't prosecute them.

It's my opinion that the Young Offenders Act should be modified so young offenders are not granted that kind of special protective treatment but are given only the treatment every other person in Canada is given under the Charter of Rights and under the evidentiary rules, and that is the right not to be convicted by a statement that is other than free and voluntary. There should not be a whole lot of bureaucratic requirements that you have to have a certain thing read to you and you have to sign a certain document. I don't think that's realistic, and it makes law enforcement in this area very difficult. That's a much more serious working problem than the age limit problem of the Young Offenders Act.

Now a few comments from the findings of our task force on youth crime. For the first level of offenders, the so-called adventurers or nuisance gangs, everything we heard was that there should be more emphasis on counselling, diversion, community service, and the availability of some very good correctional programs and some diversionary programs. There are never enough resources in this area at the provincial level and at the local level.

About youth in gangs of the nuisance variety, we heard accounts of some cases where young people have been recruited for front-line criminal activity. I mentioned that example I had encountered with the evidentiary protections of the Young Offenders Act.

Then there are the hard-core criminals. We believe, and our task force certainly heard almost unanimous views, that the full weight of adult law should apply in the case of hard-core criminals. More of that is happening now, of course, with the amendments that took place to the Young Offenders Act and with the policy of raising young adults.

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Our recommendations are: more flexibility under the Young Offenders Act; change in the evidentiary rules; and very definitely, tougher punishment for those recruiters of youth criminals - extremely tough penalties for them.

In our experience, the one penalty holding the most fear for these offenders is deportation. In some cases that's not possible, because you're dealing with Canadian citizens or landed immigrants. In other cases it's not possible practically, because countries they would have been deported to won't take them back. In our experience, this is just about the only deterrent we can find.

Another area of federal responsibility we heard submissions on was the problem of the returnable warrants. These warrants are often not executed in other jurisdictions, and criminals seem to gravitate to the west, particularly during the winter. They're around here with returnable warrants in other parts of Canada that don't get executed because, quite frankly, it costs money to bring these people back. They represent quite a burden and quite a cost.

I think it would be our recommendation that there be some kind of interprovincial or federal cost inducement or subsidy that would make it more likely for these sorts of warrants to be enforced.

I mentioned the deportation for hardened, seasoned criminals who recruit youth gangs. That would have a salutary effect. Several deportations would have more deterrence than any kind of prison sentence would.

In our brief we say that the federal government should take part in a strike force in Vancouver to run the top 100 property criminals to the ground. We did find that about 75% of breaking and entering is being done by a small group of people who are seasoned B and E artists in Vancouver. Most of these crimes are drug- or alcohol-related. We think there should be a crackdown on these 100 to 600 people who are committing all of these crimes. We're going to recommend that. Some federal participation in that would be a very healthy thing, although we realize it is largely the responsibility of the City of Vancouver and the province.

Targeting particular types of crime with task forces has been effective. British Columbia has had task forces before that have tried to target youth crime and has had special prosecution teams that followed these serious gang crimes from the preliminary hearing stage right through to the trial stage, with the same group of prosecutors and the same police doing the investigating. It's been quite effective. We think the same thing should be done to try to eliminate the worst of this B and E property crime that's going on in Vancouver with a very small group of people.

We also came to the conclusion that the drug squad probably needs to be beefed up. While drug cases have declined in the last five years per population, it maybe doesn't indicate less drug activity. It may indicate less drug-policing activity.

We're going to have a public forum for our task force on November 27 to outline some of our major findings and to try to get further public feedback. We're going to release our report in 1997.

We very much appreciate the fact that the parliamentary committee has come here. Most of the members of the task force are here, so if you have questions for us, there is quite a depth of expertise here for responses. I'm not going to respond to all of the questions. I'll let members of the committee respond.

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The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Smith.

Mr. St-Laurent.

[Translation]

Mr. St-Laurent (Manicouagan): You just said that you will table next week a document including your conclusions. I will give you my business card, and I suppose the others will do the same, because I would very much like to receive a copy of that document. It should be very interesting.

You stated at the beginning that, according to your figures, the number of crimes is rising, but not necessarily the seriousness of those crimes. Your data must be different from ours. I could even say that it is completely opposite because we have statistics showing that the number of crimes in Canada tends to decrease, whereas the seriousness tends to increase, specially relating to crimes against the person. If I understand correctly, your focus is property crime, and I have nothing against that.

I don't want to contradict you but Vancouver's problems are different from those of other cities. Vancouver's rank is 280th among the cities where people would like to settle, which confirms your statements.

I would like to question you about your suggestions. In fact, I see that you're suggesting tougher measures, such as increasing the drug squad - and I am not saying that this would be bad but one to consider both sides of the coin - and to deport reoffenders or those offenders that are too famous. Do you not think that it would be better to get closer to the young offender rather than to fight crime as such? If we get closer to the offender, we will fight the roots of crime whereas, according to your suggestion, we might solve some crimes today but there will be three or four that will reoffend tomorrow. What's your position on that?

[English]

Mr. Smith: I don't think we're at odds on this at all, Mr. St-Laurent. Our emphasis on dealing with the really serious drug dealers and the criminals who recruit young people for gang activity does not require changes to the Young Offenders Act. It requires more resources and may require a particular policy on what to do with these people once they're convicted.

We think the other side of that equation, which is how to prevent young offenders from becoming habitual criminals and how you have programs for them and resources in the systems so that they don't go that route, is very important.

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As a matter of fact, the only real suggestion I made for changing the act was to remove these special evidentiary protections. I don't consider that to be repressive. I consider that as trying to inculcate responsibility in young offenders and not just privileges.

Mr. Rezac: Madam Chair, I'll be happy to deposit into the record the two reports from which I'm quoting. The fact of the matter is, property crime in Vancouver has increased significantly since 1990. In 1990 we had 12,373 property crimes in total, and the number now is 15,202. So it has gone up. There have been dramatic increases in the past year - about a 20% increase in theft of motor vehicles, for example.

In the area of serious crime, where there have been dramatic increases across the country, I think it's important that while we record drops in crime and reductions in crime from place to place or in aggregates - those I've read about have been fairly small percentages - I don't think it's adequate to measure what our crime rate is compared with last year or the year before. How do we compare in a world setting? What's reasonable around the world?

On that score, in violent crime Canada does not rank very well at all. We rank 36th out of 45 countries according to the World Economic Forum in 1993. Our violent crime rate is considerably higher than 35 out of 45 countries in the industrialized world.

[Translation]

Mr. St-Laurent: I understand, sir. First, I did not intend to criticize your statements, not at all. I am just saying that 36th is not a very good rank. It means that we have lots of work to do. However, we should at least be satisfied that our statistics show that crime is not rising anymore. Let us be realistic. There is lots of work to do, and there will be always be lots of work to do as long as there is one breathing soul on this earth.

My next question is related to your organization and to the persons you represent. It seems to be rather unique. Can you tell me if the victim will be involved in the correctional process for the young offender? How far can we let the victim be involved into the process?

Your organization seems to deal more with victims of property crimes than with victims of crimes against the person. Are your members open enough to get involved into reintegration programs for young people found guilty of property crimes? Would they be ready to spend some time with them? You will perhaps tell me that this is rather ironic because, in the end, one does not always wish to get involved, but is there some consideration in your organization to getting involved into the process that would allow the young offender to be more aware of the expense and the impact of his crime?

Your clientele is so unique that it would be very interesting to hear your opinion on this issue.

[English]

Mr. Rezac: I'm delighted to respond to that question, Madam Chair.

The Vancouver Board of Trade is comprised of 4,400 members, most of whom volunteer in the course of their lives and in the course of their working day for the better good of our community in one way or another, be it the United Way, the Salvation Army, doing voluntary work at the local church or whatever.

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I should also point out that the Vancouver Board of Trade was instrumental in starting an organization in Vancouver called Volunteer Vancouver, with another organization called Leadership Vancouver. We actually train a cadre of young people or people who are in non-profit organizations, government and business who are mid-career, to be volunteers.

If our findings show there are programs that can be emulated here in Vancouver that work elsewhere that would help integrate young people who have come in contact with the law unpleasantly and there's a success rate, I would have no difficulty saying the Board of Trade would have people amongst our membership who would be prepared to work on such a program, as we have done for 109 years previously. Whatever works we're prepared to do. For the first time, public opinion polling has shown the number two issue of concern for the people of Vancouver is crime.

I would also ask your researchers - just to go back to your earlier point that crime is in decline - whether it's statistically and substantially in decline. I would like to see that data. I'd also like to look at the time series, because my understanding is that since 1968 there has been a dramatic increase in crime overall and only in recent years has there been a slight or marginal decline. I certainly could be corrected on that, but I would like to look at your data. I have some other data that I want to look at as well, which I'll be happy to file with you.

The Chair: Just as a point of information, there is an official here from the British Columbia provincial government - not to put him on the spot - who is a co-chair of a task force on the Young Offenders Act set up by the federal and provincial Justice officials. We can have all the arguments we want about statistics, but I think the task force probably has the latest. We have some researchers with us and a representative of the federal Department of Justice, as well.

Maybe we should get on to substantive things.

Mr. Ramsay, ten minutes.

Mr. Ramsay: I think statistics are substantive because that's really what we have to go by; it's the manner in which they're used. But since statistics have been kept on crime since the early sixties, they have shown that there has been over 400% increase in property crime. Yes, it has been levelling off in the last couple of years, but if we go back, as you say, there has been a substantial increase.

We heard from the insurance brokers yesterday and they indicated that there are some areas in this city where every house on the block has been broken into, not only once but more than once. They indicated that $200-million worth of cars are stolen each year, and according to them there are indications that 75% of those cars are stolen by young offenders.

I'd like to ask Mr. Rezac this question. You gave some international statistics that are a little bit concerning to me. From an international perspective - you may not know the answer, but I'm asking it anyway - is Canada viewed as soft on crime?

Mr. Rezac: I think from an international perspective, and certainly from a domestic perspective, Canadians think this is a kinder and gentler place to live in the world. That may be true compared with the combat zone of downtown Boston, but according to this report, our overall crime rate is worse than Seattle's, for example, and worse than Washington's.

If you look at the murder rate, it is higher in Washington or in the States. I understand it's about twice as high or some multiple of what it is in Canada. But other crimes, including property crime, are very high here.

The international perspective is that Canada is soft on a number of scores. Brian Smith may want to talk on that. He has been over to the World Economic Forum many times himself.

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Certainly in the immigration area this is an easy place for refugees to come. That's a clear international perspective.

I don't think the international perspective is that Canada is a dangerous place. That's why these figures are so startling. It's only recently that these figures have been published.

Mr. Ramsay: Okay.

We were in an institution in Montreal when we were there, and one of the officials was talking about adult offenders. If my memory serves me correctly, he indicated the most dangerous to recommit in an escalating form of crime are those who are in not for murder but for property crimes, break and enter and so on. I gathered from what he said that these are the people who appear to be on an ascending rate of criminal activity. He seemed to know what he was talking about.

If that's the case, what you're telling us about what's happening here in Vancouver and area is very disturbing. It's clear that if our young people in this area are being recruited by adults and sent into criminal activity that's organized by the adults, as Mr. Smith indicated in that one particular case, that doesn't bode well for this particular area of the country.

Mr. Smith, were the members of the youth gangs you dealt with raised to adult court, or was the hearing in youth court?

Mr. Smith: Mr. Ramsay, in the case I dealt with they were all first-time young offenders, so it would not have been appropriate to have raised them to adult court. There was certainly some perception that those first-time offenders for property crimes maybe hadn't been dealt with too harshly. I can tell you in my case they were dealt with very appropriately by the justice system. The least culpable of the five who pleaded guilty to robbery received six months - the least culpable - and the most culpable got a year in youth court and the adult got eighteen months, I think it was.

If you were to discuss those sentences with someone in Taiwan, they might think they were pretty lenient, but in terms of the sort of sentences that have traditionally been handed out under the Young Offenders Act for first offenders with absolutely clean records, for good students, in some cases, with caring parents, the days have gone when the courts in Vancouver are going to put those sorts of offenders on probation. They're going to do some time.

So I wouldn't at all say the system is soft. I think the system adequately responds to those. But when you get to the recruiters - and that's what you're talking about - the recruiters are either adults or they're 17 going on 40. It doesn't matter whether they are adults or not.

The recruiters should be dealt with very differently. In my case we couldn't get to them because two of them had given totally inculpatory statements but they were not admissible.

The Chair: Mr. Farrell may have something to add.

Mr. Dennis Farrell (Member, Task Force on Property Crime, Vancouver Board of Trade): In the problems we're talking about and we're going around in circles on, the fact is, asMr. Ramsay said, a preponderance of the people who are in the penal system are going to reoffend. The simple fact is that the economic situation in the country, the situation that requires these people to commit crimes, is that they need the money.

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We in Vancouver have a very desirable climatic condition compared with that of the rest of Canada. Although it has been sunny for the last few days, it's going to rain soon, I can assure you of that. But the fact of the matter is that a lot of these kids end up here with no means of support. The best way of getting some money is to commit a property crime.

Our courts are just completely full. There's no more room on the calendar. I think Brian Smith said 180,000 new cases come before the courts every year. Thank goodness 80% of them plead guilty and 20% are dealt with by the court. Otherwise, the system would be completely blocked.

There simply aren't the facilities, whether that's with the police, the courts or corrections people, to deal with the number of offenders who seem to end up here. So something has to happen. It will be interesting to see the recommendations or conclusions of this committee.

Mr. Ramsay: I thank you for that.

We also have information that was submitted to our committee indicating that by the time some of our young offenders reach the closed-custody situation, they have committed probably as many as 20 offences in the past, many of which have not been dealt with in an official way. They've never been brought to court.

Was there any indication, Mr. Smith, in the particular case you have placed before the committee, that these young people were just fresh off the street and had never been involved in crime at all? Or could they have been involved in offences that were never dealt with by the justice system?

Mr. Smith: That would be true for the recruiters, but the five were absolutely first-time offenders. They hadn't had diversion or been in trouble before. They were just recruited in their schools. Several of them were recruited on the school grounds by peer pressure. They had absolutely clean backgrounds.

For a long time, as for Young Offenders Act cases, those people didn't get closed custody. I think the public attitude and the attitude of the courts here has certainly become considerably tougher in that regard.

There's a belief that if somebody goes into a store with weapons and terrorizes people - it was an unloaded magnum Oxford pistol in this case that was held at the head of several of the victims - these people have to go to closed custody. But there was absolutely no criminal history at all.

The Chair: Thank you. Ms Torsney.

Ms Torsney (Burlington): Thank you.

I have to say from the start that I'm always concerned about presentations like this, because my goal is to try to see how we can prevent more people from becoming victims in our community and how to have fewer crimes committed. I find it hard - I appreciate that everybody is a volunteer - to accept that you've been meeting since spring, but what you have is a picture of what's happening on the crime side.

The heading on page 4 is ``Youth Issues'', but I don't see anything in here about the unemployment rate among young people or the number of young people who are living on the streets who are involved in the sex trade, which puts them into the drug trade and everything else. I don't see anything about recreation.

I see information about how horrible the situation is, without a lot of discussion about things we all know right across the country that will help prevent kids from getting involved in crime in the first place. So I'm wondering where the information on jobs is.

I was kidding with you earlier, Mr. Smith. When we were here in January, Paul Martin had challenged the board of trade to produce some jobs and get innovative about creating jobs. I was thinking about adults at the time, but clearly it has a more important impact for young people. If they're bored, they get into trouble. They don't have great economic futures, which Farrell has already identified.

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Increasingly, there are many young people who are dropping farther and farther and farther behind, and we need the intelligence and creativity of people such as those on the Vancouver Board of Trade to come up with some solutions.

You're probably going to tell me a lot of that will come out in your forum in November, but I'm surprised there isn't more information in your presentation. There's no discussion about aboriginal youth in this paper, yet of course we know that's a huge issue in Vancouver and in British Columbia. There's no information about what's happening.

Mr. Smith, I appreciate your background is in the justice system, but we all know the social services department has done a whole lot and this new Ministry for Children and Families will hopefully prevent a lot of the pain and suffering a lot of these kids have experienced before they end up being in the justice system.

Mr. Rezac: First, this is not a report, it's an outline of what we have been doing to date. We're a group of volunteers. We don't have any research staff and we have no budget. It's a zero-budget exercise.

We have a number of recommendations we're going to make. There's terrific interest by the press, because some articles were around this summer about the crime rate in Vancouver and what was happening across the country, but certainly in Vancouver, which seems to be worse.

What is significant about our being here is that two years ago this was not considered to be an issue in Vancouver. Crime was something that happened to somebody else. While the statistics would show that wasn't true even two years ago, that's the public perception and the public awareness. We've kept our deliberations going because of the interest in what we're doing.

We have met with judges. Judges have come and appeared before our committee. Some victims have come before us.

What we're wrestling with is the solutions. It's easy to say we should have more policemen. We probably should. Policemen should stop investigating fender-benders. They should be spending more time on substantive crime and less on administrative work, which perhaps somebody else could do. After all, what are the firemen doing? Maybe they could investigate fender-benders; I don't know. There might be some other solution.

But the fact of the matter is, community policing has been terrifically successful. So that's an area we're looking at.

Programs such as Crime Stoppers, Outward Bound, the kind of programs suggested earlier by Mr. St-Laurent, are things we're looking at. But because there's been so much interest in what we're doing, we have chosen not to close off our proceedings. We want to get more information, more data, so we can come up with the best results.

But I can assure you, our report will not be comprehensive. We're in no position to make.... All we can do at the board of trade is to make a contribution towards solutions in some specific areas. We haven't attempted to cure the unemployment problem. We do that with other work we do, on the business climate and the investment climate, and these days we direct most of our effort in that regard towards the provincial government. We didn't think it appropriate to talk about that in this instance. We hope to make some small contribution, with knowledgeable people, based on having spoken to a lot of people, including you folks, and any data you have and we can use.

Mr. Smith: You have highlighted the fact that this is not just an enforcement problem or a penalty problem. We know that. But a huge amount of work has been done in Vancouver on that by a ``safer city'' task force, which the city set up about a year go. It has massive sociological, employment, and economic material. We know all of that bears, and we weren't presenting that material today. You've reminded us you have to look at both ends of this, and we agree.

Mr. Farrell: I would like to respond to your comment on the aboriginal programs and so on. The RCMP and the Vancouver Police Department run a student summer employment system. If you look at the force in the context of the provincial police force, and also the municipal police forces in all municipalities except for 12, the RCMP is the predominant force in the province. The last year I was the head of the force here we had 70 positions, mostly for aboriginal youth and minority youth, in the summer employment program.

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The whole thing is limited by funding. It costs $6,000 to hire a youth for that period of time, so 70 were as many as could be handled. In many instances, the bands put up the $6,000, which was paid back to the student in salary, and the RCMP furnished the training, transportation, uniforms and so on.

There are many programs. The Vancouver Police do exactly the same thing with minority youth, primarily.

You might say, ``Well, it's done to recruit these people'', but it's not. We'd be happy to recruit some of these kids, but the fact is these programs are looked upon by many of the reserves as very desirable. We include the leadership of the band or the leadership of the community, if it's a minority community, in trying to identify these kids.

It's very successful, but it takes money and it's limited by funding.

I'm sure, in going across the country, you've heard from many different individuals. The police forces try to put into effect many programs within the communities. There is a great enthusiasm for the first year or two, and then all of a sudden there's no more money and of course it drops off, because the police are funded to do what their primary function is, and that's to be a police force.

There are programs. A great deal of effort and thought is put into these programs, and there are many successful ones out there, and I'm sure you're aware of them. But at a point in time, you have to limit yourself.

Ms Torsney: Maybe I can give you some suggestions, then.

Start co-op education programs amongst all of your members and the high schools and perhaps even the grade schools in your city.

Support the NGOs that are delivering alternatives to custody, such as Camp Trapping and others. There aren't enough alternatives in this province for young people. There are no alternative programs for girls to be out in a Camp Trapping type of facility. There are 40 applications for every six beds at Camp Trapping. It's not enough.

Start a buddy system to do something for the kids. Support PLEA for the kids who are looking as though they're going to be in trouble. Get DARE into all of your schools; it's a fantastic program worked out with the police.

Start a campaign amongst your members to stop their use of teenaged prostitutes in this city. We know from the profile of who is frequenting teenaged prostitutes that some of them would fit into the profile of members of the Board of Trade, unfortunately.

Get your members to sponsor more recreation programs. It's pretty frightening to see a lot of kids hanging around and to know that when you advocate, on the one hand, getting the economy in order in this province, that will mean funding cuts to certain areas. You should be telling the provincial government that when it comes to kids' recreation, user fees and cutting in those areas are just not the answer.

Herald all your members who are already sponsoring recreation programs and being hockey coaches, soccer coaches or Girl Guide leaders, because those are the things that are keeping kids going.

Work with the police forces to do more. It's always a challenge, as you say, Mr. Farrell, but community policing has worked in lots of communities, and it creates a better atmosphere for everybody.

Certainly the increasing number of school-yard shoves that are counted as level-one assaults will give you information that crime and violent crime are on the rise in your community, but really it's a false perception. Things that all of you guys probably did in the school yard when you were kids could very well come up in these stats now, since we have zero-tolerance policies in lots of communities.

Mr. Rezac, not even one school-yard shoving incident?

Mr. Rezac: The evidence we have is that more and more crimes are not even reported, because there's not much done with them.

Let's look at the one in six banks in the city held up by armed robbers last year. This isn't such a kind and gentle place; I'm sorry.

Ms Torsney: Well, Mr. Rezac, what we've heard across the country is that the school-yard shove that's charged as a level-one assault puts the kid into the juvenile justice system and then gives the kid a very confused message, because it doesn't deliver swift consequences and appropriate action. This creates an additional problem for a lot of these kids. You then all of a sudden do have your little bank robber who is causing you all these difficulties in your increased property crime.

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So maybe there's a way to deal with some of these things well before they present themselves and you need to do these alternatives or deal with these tougher issues.

To your point about organized crime, I absolutely hear you. It's a serious problem. We have to make sure there are fewer kids dragged into the nets of these groups. Perhaps police can use the Criminal Code sections on aiding and abetting more to deal with some of these individuals and find some solutions.

Mr. Farrell's ready to go.

Mr. Farrell: I would just like to respond. I don't think the school-yard shoves you speak of in this province are a factor used to inflate statistics. To the best of my knowledge, these are dealt with other than by the traditional system and the court system in British Columbia. I'm not prepared to comment on other jurisdictions from across the country.

Ms Torsney: I guess I'd be surprised if they weren't given that.... The school boards here have a program to recover property damage money, and I'd be surprised if they aren't doing so. They usually go hand in hand. If they're already working on this property recovery, then they often are dealing very severely. If they're not, I stand corrected. But we have heard it, certainly, across the country that they are charging them.

The Chair: Just to give you some idea statistically, we're pretty focused now because this is our fifth week of travel. I can tell you that level one assaults account for 60% of what are called violent crimes across the country, so on the number you gave in the statistical analysis - I think you gave it, Mr. Rezac - of Canada in relation to other countries, we do know that level one assaults are accounting for the vast majority of the so-called violent offences.

I can assure you that in the province of Ontario, at the very least, a school-yard shove in a school board that has zero tolerance - and most of them do - ends up in court. It's something that has just been revealed to us, and it really does distort the statistics. Nobody talked to us about that specifically from B.C., but it's hard for us not to believe that it isn't contagious.

Mr. Rezac: Our focus, Madam Chair, is mainly on property crime, but the anecdotal evidence I'll give you is that my wife and I have had our cars broken into four times in the past year. The last time, my wife didn't even report it because she would have had to go to the insurance company and get a police report, but it's difficult because the police won't come. So you get a police report, then you go to the insurance company, and then to a dealer to get it fixed. Well, she's a working mother, she took it to the dealer and paid the $400 herself, and it wasn't even reported. Every single car in our apartment area was broken into. I think maybe two were reported, so there's an epidemic of crime in that area.

But I'd be interested in knowing what's happened to murders and armed robberies in Canada. What's the data on that?

The Chair: I can tell you. I have the numbers here. Murders among youth have remained constant over a 12-year period, homicide accounts for -

Pardon?

Mr. Ramsay: Oh, I was just muttering to myself that it's very comforting that murders by our youth have remained constant.

The Chair: Homicide accounts for 0.2% of all violent crimes and has registered significant decreases in the last four years - but that's adult and youth. The strange thing about changing from the Juvenile Delinquents Act to the Young Offenders Act - and I shouldn't say ``strange'', but it's sort of a curious statistic - is that even though we changed the approach substantially in 1984, the numbers on the most serious crimes have remained almost constant. They went down a little bit or up a little bit in one particular year, but they have remained consistent, so this may not be the vehicle for controlling that kind of crime.

Mr. Rezac: You mentioned the last four years, but what about before that? Do you have data on what's happened since the sixties?

The Chair: Probably. We'd have to go through it.

Ms Torsney: The last thing I want to suggest to you, particularly on the issue of car theft and break and enters into cars, is that there's a lot of work that can be done with the car manufacturers. I was visiting my local police force and they told me exactly which make of car - and since we might be on radio later, I won't tell you which one - is the number one car to be stolen. Do you know why? The plastic steering column is so easy to break into.

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So the police invariably know which manufacturer's car is going to be stolen, yet the manufacturers don't seem willing.... They perhaps prefer to collect the $400 rather than deal with the problem, but it's creating all kinds of problems for the individuals. Of course there are chases and everything else that end up being involved when there's a car theft.

Mr. Smith: It may be comforting to know that the statistics for homicides and serious crimes remain flat. It may well be that there is some inflation of current statistics on school-yard shoves across the country, but all we were sent to do was to look at property crime in Vancouver, and that's what we've been doing. I'll just give you the raw figures. They speak for themselves.

In 1991, 14,826 residential and commercial B and Es were reported. In 1995, there were 18,510. That's about a 30% increase. Those aren't school-yard shoves. Those are real things that happened. It's there.

Ms Torsney: I apologize, Mr. Smith.

Mr. Smith: Of those 18,510, about 10% are actually going through with a conviction in the justice system, for a lot of reasons. Police forces are dealing with violent crime and haven't got time to go and tend to your house. People don't want to follow through with them. The system is jammed. There's diversion. There are all sorts of good reasons why we have a low percentage, but other provinces have a better rate, up to maybe 18% and 20%.

I'm not saying this is a federal responsibility. I'm just telling you what we found. I can tell you for sure that we're going to be putting this under the beak of the Attorney General. We have policing problems here in Vancouver that are different from those in other cities. We know that. But it's a lousy statistic and we're not doing a good enough job here. That's all I'm telling you.

Ms Torsney: That's absolutely right. I certainly think it is a serious issue that needs to be addressed for two reasons.

First, people like your spouse, Mr. Rezac, are victimized and don't feel safe. Second, often it does escalate, and that's what we're concerned about.

When we talked about violent crime and personal injury crime, Mr. Smith, I was picking up on your comments about a very sensational incident. It does concern me. We're trying to make sure that fewer people become victims in our communities and that fewer kids end up in the system. There are a lot of things all of us can do to make sure that it doesn't happen, and that when it does happen, that it's dealt with appropriately. That's what we've been across the country trying to find out.

I'm sure my ten minutes are up.

The Chair: Yes, they are, way up.

I want to thank you for coming. You've given us a different perspective than we're accustomed to getting, and it's very seldom, quite frankly, that we get an enforcement perspective, although we do get perspectives that are related directly to the communities we visit. So we're glad to have an understanding of how things are different in Vancouver.

We'll adjourn for a few minutes.

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The Chair: We're back on the record.

We have with us some people we've been hearing about from the Sparwood Youth Assistance Program: Sergeant Jake Bouwman, the officer in charge of the Sparwood detachment of the RCMP, and Glen Purdy, a lawyer and I assume on the board of directors.

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Mr. Glen Purdy (Co-founder, Sparwood Youth Assistance Program): Madam Chair, we do not have a board of directors. I'm a lawyer in private practice. I'll explain that to you today.

The Chair: Great. We're dying to hear from you.

Mr. Purdy: Madam Chairman, hon. members, I'm a lawyer in private practice in Sparwood, British Columbia. Sgt. Bouwman is the officer in charge.

Sparwood is a small community of about 5,000 people in the Rocky Mountains just this side of the Crow's Nest Pass. What we're going to do today is explain to you what we viewed in 1994 as the essential dilemma of the youth court system. I stress ``system'', not ``act''.

To explain our solution, Sgt. Bouwman is going to outline the program as it operates in Sparwood. Then I will give you some anecdotal reports of what has transpired in the program as representative of what is occurring.

The first point about the youth court system is that for the vast majority of offences, excluding homicide, serious sexual assault, etc., the system is very punitive. I'm going to give you some statistics that I'm sure you've heard before. These are all from Stats Canada.

The adult incarceration rate in the United States is 330 per 100,000. In the United Kingdom, Spain, France and Austria it is 90 per 100,000. These are adult rates. In France, Portugal and Australia it is 80 per 100,000. In Finland, Belgium, Sweden and Italy it is less than 60 per 100,000. Canada's adult incarceration rate is 130 per 100,00.

On youth incarceration rates in Canada, from 1994-95, 25,160 youths received custodial dispositions. The next statistic comes from Judge Lilles of the Yukon, with whom I was speaking yesterday. He gave me this number, which I found astounding. I understand you've heard this before. The rate in Canada is now 1,040 per 100,000. The U.S. rate is 500 per 100,000.

As well, 70% of the youth convicted were involved in offences related to property and 18% were violent offences, including the school-yard shove we heard about before. Of that amount, 38% were custodial dispositions translating into 18% open custody, 16% secure custody, 48% probation, 16% fined, and 2% absolute discharges. All these statistics are on the Internet from Statistics Canada.

The vast majority of custodial dispositions were for three months or less. Youth court judges are imposing the short, sharp shock rather than giving sentences that reflect rehabilitation. That is what is transpiring.

In 1994-95, 40% of the youth in youth court were there for their second or better offence. That second or better offence had occurred within one year of a disposition previously being imposed. Given that the Canadian experience is one of significant punitive action taken against youth in the vast majority of offences, that reoffence rate is really quite astounding. The system is not working to prevent reoffending.

On the speed of the system, I'm going to give an example of what the usual case is in our area. I'm going to use the start date as the report to crown counsel date, when a police officer forwards a report to the crown counsel.

Generally, after a report is forwarded to crown counsel by the investigating member it takes two to four weeks in our area for the Crown to actually swear an information and get the summons process rolling. Generally, the first appearance is four to six weeks after that summons. The minimum, from the date of report to crown counsel, is two months to the first appearance. That's presuming the RTCC is completed immediately upon conclusion of the investigation. Often there is some delay by the officer in getting that to crown counsel.

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Usually nothing happens at first appearance. There will be an order appointing counsel and an appearance set again for plea two to three weeks later. If there's a guilty plea in that second offence, at best it occurs approximately three to four months after the RTCC is forwarded. That's operating at best speed before you get a guilty plea. If the offence is a second or better, generally a predisposition position report will be ordered. In our area that takes six to eight weeks to prepare.

To get to a disposition being imposed in our area for a second or better offence or a serious offence on a guilty plea, we're looking at a best time of five months, usually six months. That's with a guilty plea proceeding at utmost speed.

Generally, a minor first offence is going to attract at least six months probation. So in most cases in our area it is going to be at least a year, on a minor first offence, before a youth actually completes the matter, from the date of RTCC, before he's finally off probation. It takes him a year to deal with it.

If there's a not guilty plea and a trial, the fastest it's going to occur in our area is eight months from the RTCC date, and that's without adjournment. Generally, most cases have at least one adjournment of the trial by reason of witness unavailability or court delays. Frequently you get set two to three times before you actually reach a court date. That's for a half-day trial - not a full day, but a half day of court time.

Generally, the second trial date is at least four to six months in our area for a half-day trial after the first trial date. It's not unusual to have a trial at least a year from the RTCC date. Presuming that the offence is minor and the trial date is in six months, if the matter goes to trial we're talking at least a year and a half before a matter is concluded for a youth. In a serious matter, if it's custodial, there will be at least a year's probation.

So think about it. If a custodial disposition is going to be imposed for an RTCC date, we're talking about three years before the matter is concluded for a youth. That is a very significant portion of a youth's time. We have youth who are spending most of their youth involved with the court system. If they're involved once, it's going to be with them for a long time. Our system is incredibly slow. You've heard it before, I'm sure.

As every parent knows, if a child misbehaves you don't deal with the matter a year later or a year and a half later, you deal with it now for anything to be effective. No wonder our reoffence rates are as high as they are.

In terms of the cost of the system, it's incredibly expensive. In B.C. - and this is strictly the court time - it's $800 per hour to run a courtroom.

Mr. Ramsay: How much did you say?

Mr. Purdy: It's $800 per hour, not including crown counsel wages or defence counsel time. It includes the court costs, sheriff costs, clerk costs and facility costs. That figure is from former Chief Judge Diebolt of the Provincial Court of British Columbia.

What our system does, particularly the youth court system, is exclude one very important player - the victim of any offence. This person generally has little or nothing to do with the process. Often, after a matter is reported to the police, the victim does not know if the offender has been apprehended. The victim does not know what happened in court and has nothing to do with it. The victim only has something to do with it if there's a trial. In essence, the Crown uses the victim as a witness to gain a conviction. That's the purpose of the victim. They're excluded totally.

The closest input a victim ever has to expressing to a youth the impact their offence has had upon them is through a dry victim impact statement. Those are used very rarely in British Columbia. It's very rare that a victim of an offence can actually deal with the emotional impacts and actual effects upon them of the offending behaviour. They do not get to express that directly to the youth.

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In late 1994 we received a copy of Judge Lilles's paper, Canada's Young Offenders Act: Some International Perspectives for Reform. I understand the members of the committee have that paper. We read that, and it appeared to us to provide a form of solution. We commenced the Sparwood program in January 1995.

We differ from the Australian model, the one from Wagga Wagga, in that we are a police-based diversion program. However, the facilitator is a member of the community. We do that for several reasons. One is to avoid the perception that the police are conducting a Star Chamber type of operation. The second is that by our having a facilitator who is a member of the community, the RCMP is not directly involved; at least the perception is that there is more community involvement in the process. We'll talk about that some more today.

We differ from the New Zealand model in that we are completely without any direct legislative authority. We do not accept, nor do we need or want, any funding.

To date in British Columbia 16 other communities have adopted the Sparwood model, with some variations depending on the community. The program is now being implemented in various communities in southern Alberta. In Ontario recently the program was implemented in three aboriginal communities, I understand, or is about to be in the next few weeks.

In 1994, before implementation of the program, we had a total of 65 youths dealt with in youth court in Sparwood. In 1995 we dealt with 48 youths in the resolution conference process. To date in 1996 we've dealt with a total of 17 through the resolution conference. Since the implementation of the program no youths who reside in Sparwood or the surrounding communities have gone to youth court.

One of the most important statistics - the other statistics probably don't have much meaning, given our limited timeframe of operation of 22 months - and the one statistic that may have meaning is the reoffence rate. In 22 months we have had a reoffence rate of 9%. The national reoffence rate within one year is 40%. Within one year - we use that as the date - we're sitting at about a5% reoffence rate.

We have dealt with matters of property offences. We have dealt with assaults, assaults causing bodily harm, break and enters and minor sexual assault, at the direction of the Crown, in fact. We do a broad range. We wouldn't consider looking at any type of homicide or serious sexual assault. I'm sure an armed robbery, if it occurred, would not be something we would look at. We are parallel to the court system in some ways, but the court system certainly is necessary to deal with the more serious upper-end type of offences. They complement us. We think we complement them.

Sergeant Bouwman is going to tell you about how our program operates.

Sergeant Jake Bouwman (Co-founder, Sparwood Youth Assistance Program): Thank you.

I guess our program is unique in the sense that it's probably the first program in Canada that has a defence lawyer and a policeman in total agreement on how a system should work. I think it bodes well for the community of Sparwood and any other community, because people can work together if they would just try.

As Glen mentioned, our program started on January 1, 1995, so we're young.

The program itself does nothing different for investigators from what we have always done. We receive a complaint. We investigate the complaint. We identify the suspect, if we're lucky. Upon identification of the suspect we decide, as we do in all matters, even without this program, whether or not there should be a report to crown counsel recommending charges.

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There's the old way of dealing with it if it's very minor - say, an alcohol involvement. If we take the child home and we are confident his parents can deal with it in an effective matter, then that is the way we wish it to go.

Once we have established the fact that there is a need for a more formal, structured intervention, we look at whether the child - and I'll refer to him as a child rather than as a perpetrator or anything like that - is a resident of the community, with roots or support there, such as maybe a foster parent or something. Then we will offer him the program. This is an agreement in which he agrees to tell everything that has had to do with the offence, and that he voluntarily submits to attending a conference with his support people, as well as to undertake whatever resolution he and the victim agree upon.

At this point, there's nothing different done by an investigator. Once the investigator has identified the youth as being suitable for the program, in my community - we'll refer to Sparwood - he calls a facilitator. In this case, Glen volunteers as a facilitator. We also have a minister of a local church who volunteers as a facilitator.

We phone them to see if they are able in the next 10 to 14 days to sit in a conference. We arrive at a date. We then phone the victim. We advise the victim about what we wish to do, and we solicit their support in attending this conference. Then we advise the youth that this conference will take place at a certain time and date and that he should be there with as many of his support people as he wishes - mom, dad, brothers, sisters, school teachers, uncles, whomever.

It's the same thing for the victim. We encourage the victim to come not by themselves but with as many support people as they can. We try to have it at a convenient time for them to be there, such as 7 p.m. or Saturday or Sunday afternoon so that the victim doesn't have to be revictimized by having to take a day off work to testify.

We try to make it the best we can for the victim. As well, we try to make it so that our police personnel are working in the early evening hours. It might be a little quiet. It saves money on my overtime budget. We try to make things work in that sense.

Once that has been agreed upon, we attend this conference. The facilitator sits down and explains to the youth what his rights are under the charter. He confirms that he has agreed to be here and that he has completed the agreement. Then he starts by asking the youth what happened and what was he thinking about what had happened. There are questions like that.

Once it has been established what the youth has done, the victim is asked to confirm those facts so that it's no longer the policeman telling the youth and his parents that this is what he's done; the parents now hear it from the youth directly that this is what he did. It's no longer the bad policeman who has taken innocent little Johnny home to mom and dad, but it's in fact little Johnny himself who is admitting what he has done.

There is usually some clarification of the facts by the victim, because they sometimes see it differently from that of the investigating member. The investigating member is then asked whether this is essentially what occurred.

Once that has been established, the facilitator will then ask the youth about the impact and who he impacted with the offence he has committed. His support people and the victim will be asked what impact this crime has had on them. It's not just the fact that the window was broken, but maybe the fuel bill had to be increased as a result of the two weeks of repair before the window could be replaced. So there was a greater impact.

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After about 45 minutes of this taking place, we usually take about a 10-minute break, at which time the young person is encouraged, with his supporters, to come up with a resolution. It's the same thing for the victim.

We stress that the victim should be compensated. If there's a $100 bill involved in certain damages, or if a $300 bicycle has been stolen and not returned, then we stress that the victim should be compensated.

Second to that, we stress that there should be a reintegration. The young person, once he has admitted and has been shamed for what he has done - and his head really hangs down once the victim has vented at him - is given the chance to make good to the victim. That may mean working some punitive time for the victim. If the victim doesn't feel that is good, then he may volunteer to do some community hours for the district, working for the ski hill or the campgrounds - whatever will work.

We adjourn for the 10 minutes, and when we get back together again, usually the young person will readily admit to reimbursing the victim, because he really now understands what he has done. It's not some large corporation he's ripped off. It's a person he has dealt with, maybe the manager of this large corporation. But he now has put a face to what he has done and who he has done it to.

Then the victim is given a chance to either agree or say no, there should be some alternate measures. In probably 95% of the cases, we have been finding that once the youth has said, ``This is the work I should do in order to reintegrate myself into the community'', the victim usually says, ``Well, that's a little bit too steep, now that I understand who you are and why you have done this''. They usually ask for a lesser sentence, if ``sentence'' is the right term.

The youth will sometimes say, ``I will do 1,000 hours of work for you, because I really feel badly about what I have done to you'', and the victim will say, ``Well, I think that's a little bit much; 20 or 30 hours is probably enough''. These are the kinds of differences we get in our conferences.

Once the disposition is signed and agreed upon by all parties, I encourage my members to meet with the victim once during this disposition time, which we stress should be completed before six months are over, so if the youth does not wish to continue in this diversional system, he has the option to go to criminal court. Because most of these offences are summary conviction offences, we are limited to six months. So we stress that the period from the offence date to the completion of his sentence, or resolution, be less than six months, so that we can deal effectively with him if he decides not to complete or fails to complete his agreed upon resolution.

In this time period, my member will meet with the victim to touch base with the young person and establish, not a friendship, but an understanding. The youth will understand who the policeman is, and in the majority of cases has changed his view of what the policeman was intending to do when he was apprehended.

If he doesn't comply with his resolution, the victim will advise us, and then in some cases we have a second resolution conference to deal with why he hasn't completed. To date we have had none that have had to go to the criminal court system, because they've all complied.

We do a victim satisfaction report, and that is found in the booklet you have; it's on page 35. From the results of our victims, we have had a 95% satisfaction rate. So our satisfaction is extremely high, which does two things: it immediately makes the victim satisfied, and secondly, the victim now becomes more cognizant of what is happening in the community and becomes very supportive of initiatives and also of the policemen themselves. It's a win-win situation for me and my detachment and for the community as a whole.

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Initially more time is expended by members until they get an understanding of how this system works. There's a learning process. But after about the second conference, they find their investigations really speed up. There's less paperwork and court time involved, so they have more investigative time to deal with more serious offences.

As to the cost of the program itself, as I say, it costs nothing extra for police work to be conducted. In fact it's a savings in the sense that my overtime budget is less. The District of Sparwood donates the time for the court use, the coffee, etc., and also they support the program by allowing the youth to work with their public works department, if that is indeed the resolution. It becomes a total support with the community in dealing with this offence.

The estimate is that we have saved approximately $100,000 in court time, none of which comes back to the community. Maybe we wish it would come back for better programs, but it does save the victims in the sense that there are, or there should be, fewer taxes expended in the court system.

We went to the community when we first started, right from the service groups to the district council. They were extremely supportive, which allowed the program to function even better, in the sense that when the victim was victimized, he already knew about the program. It wasn't some new initiative. He had an understanding. Instead of being the first person on the block and a guinea pig, he felt more as though this were the way he wanted to deal with it, so he became more comfortable in it.

As to the member reaction to the program, the older the member, the quicker the buy-in of the program; the younger the member, the less buy-in. The traditional view of this not being a police function is very prevalent. However, I haven't had a cadet. I understand the training program in the academy has changed to reflect more of this type of thinking.

The policeman with three or four years of service was the hardest to convince. The policeman with 22 years of service, who had failed the promotion system twice, was my most ardent supporter. So contrary to the idea that you can't make somebody change, it became very easy.

The speed is the greatest thing, in the sense that we attempt to deal as swiftly as we can with the violation so the youth has an understanding of what he has done and his impact on the community. The fact that we've had so few repeat offenders - and three weeks ago our worst repeat offender was sitting in my living room having coffee with me and telling me how happy he was with the way we had dealt with him, rather than the traditional court time - speaks well for the community's buy-in and support.

Mr. Purdy: Thank you, Jake.

I'd like to relate to you some anecdotal examples. We have set out some of them in the brief to give you a better understanding of how the program actually operates and what is being achieved.

One case involved the theft of a very special shirt from a shoe store in Sparwood. The owner of the store didn't report it for approximately four months. He reported it once he saw a youth in the community wearing this special shirt.

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Initially, the shoe-store owner, who was a big man, a very shrewd businessman, an entrepreneur type, didn't want to participate in either the resolution conference process or going to court. He just wanted his $100 back.

Sgt. Bouwman convinced him that he should participate in the resolution conference. At the resolution conference, it became apparent to me why he was so reluctant. This theft, considered by many to be probably minor, had a very real impact upon him. He felt that he had the trust of the youth of Sparwood. With this one youth stealing this shirt from him, he felt that his trust in youth had been breached. This big, tough, entrepreneurial shoe-store owner broke down and cried. Believe me, the youth felt that. He was suitably ``shamed'', as we termed it.

In the disposition phase it was agreed that the youth would pay back the $100 and that he would then perform 75 hours of work at the shoe store, seven and a half hours on Saturdays for 10 weeks.

First, 75 hours of work service for a first-time ``theft under'' does not occur in the court system. This was a bit on the upper end of things. The shoe-store owner's position was that he wasn't going to have him shovelling the front walk or sweeping out the stockroom. He was going to teach him all about his business and how to run that business so the youth would understand what effect shoplifting has on a businessman.

The youth went ahead and completed the 75 hours satisfactorily and then started hanging around the store afterwards asking if he could help out. This went on for awhile. Eventually the shoe-store owner felt quite guilty about getting this work for free, so he gave him a part-time job. He holds this part-time job today.

I tell you that story because, first, it told me a lot about victimization. I'm a defence lawyer. I'm in there cutting victims apart. That's my job. I never appreciated how much a simple minor theft could affect somebody, but it's very real. Victimization occurs in all offences. It doesn't matter. It's there. It must be dealt with. The existing system does a very poor job of that.

Second, it's an example. Once a victim has been able to deal with their anger, their frustration and their emotions, they generally want to help the offender and rehabilitate him into the community. That's exactly what happened here. The victim takes a prime role in making sure that youth is not going to reoffend into the system. It happens frequently.

Here's another case. This is a case of a second offence and is about what occurred because we dealt with the youth a second time.

Early in the program, in the late winter of 1995, a young gentleman was apprehended for a property offence. At the resolution conference, his mother and her then-current boyfriend appeared. Mom was very well known to the police herself. She was in the habit of making rather spurious formal complaints about members of the RCMP, causing no end of grief. She had a significant record herself. The resolution conference proceeded satisfactorily, but mom was, you could tell...although she was saying the right things, the conviction was lacking, to say the least. The youth completed the agreed disposition satisfactorily, but a few days later he reoffended, with another property offence.

It was early in the program and we certainly had some great discussions about whether to send this youth to the court system or deal with him a second time. We did decide to deal with him a second time. At the second conference, the investigating member was able to locate the youth's natural father, who had been paying maintenance to the mother throughout the child's life, but who had had nothing to do with the youth. He was able to locate a former stepfather of the youth, and the youth's uncle as well.

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At the second conference mom didn't show. The three men did. These three men, who really didn't like each other very much, came together and made it very clear to this youth that he was not going to reoffend and they were going to do everything they possibly could to ensure that happened. It was confirmed that he would go to live with his uncle, and his natural father and stepfather were going to be seeing him at least once a week.

We gave people the opportunity to deal with the matter themselves through that conference process and it worked.

We don't do a lot. We set a process in motion. The participants really are the ones who make it work. The young gentleman in question in this case has not come to the attention of the police again.

Another matter was a case of multiple offenders. It came to the attention of the police late last year, at about this time, that a significant number of youths from a grade 7 class at the local elementary school were being apprehended for shoplifting. Upon investigation, what was learned was that this grade 7 class, and also some grade 6s and grade 5s, were engaged in a game of shoplifting one-upmanship. A youth would steal something from one of the local retail stores, go back, tell his friends about it, and the friend would see if he could do better.

We had thirteen youths. We determined to deal with them all at the same resolution conference, first to ensure the victims didn't have to attend numerous conferences, on into the next year, and secondly to ensure the youths were dealt with in reasonably level manner.

We held the conference in the school gym. Approximately sixty people were in attendance; no teachers. The principal was there. We understand the teachers felt it wasn't really a school matter, so they didn't show.

In any event, we started the conference at 5 p.m. and went straight through without a break until 9 p.m., until the matter was dealt with. Some of the youths in attendance were as young as ten. They were dealt with on the basis that they had no obligation whatsoever to participate in the process; they could leave at any time, and if they did so nothing further would happen. They were dealt with at the urging of their parents.

What transpired from that was that it was agreed that each of the thirteen youths would write a report about their shoplifting experience. Then the principal of the school would take those, collate them into a booklet, and run a shoplifting awareness program in the school.

That's exactly what happened. Those reports are attached to the brief for your review. It's an example that we can deal with multiple offenders at one time and we can have educational benefits for others arising from the program.

In the program we find that an ideal group to deal with is probably eight to fifteen people. The smaller groups don't work as well. The dynamics are not the same. The larger groups do appear to work quite well, though.

Another example, one of restitution. The court system does an incredibly bad job of making restitution to victims of crime. Rarely does a victim actually receive monetary compensation. In the disposition phase of the conference, that's the first thing we look at, making sure full monetary restitution is made. To date in the program we've had virtually a 100% success rate in ensuring monetary restitution is made.

I'll give you an example of why and how this can happen. We had a youth who was seventeen and who late one night, under the influence of alcohol, decided to vandalize some District of Sparwood signs, municipal signs, and chamber of commerce signs. He had a chainsaw to help him. At the resolution conference it was determined that the damage was about $4,000.

What was determined was that first he was going to help the chamber of commerce and the District of Sparwood in rebuilding the signs. Secondly, though, he was going to make full restitution, in the amount of $4,000, within six months.

His parents were there. Their position was that he was going to sell his car, his stereo, his weight set; whatever was necessary in order to make sure that occurred. They were taking that active role. In fact, the youth did. Within a period of three months, he had sold his stereo, his weight set and various other assets, but not his car. He got away with keeping that. So full restitution was made.

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What we find in this program is that the parents, after dealing with the circumstances and impact of the offence, may be a bit hesitant to believe their child has actually done something to start with. By the conclusion, though, after they've heard the youth admit to it and have heard the impact, they're often now going to take a very active role in ensuring that the youth makes compensation. Very frequently we hear the comment from a parent, ``Well, you caused this loss to somebody, so now you're going to experience an equivalent loss to compensate them''. The parents are saying this.

We insist that the youth make compensation in any disposition, not the parents. We believe the youth must be fully responsible for such compensation. We've had a 100% success rate. We haven't had a case whereby restitution was not simply possible, so we've been lucky that way. I'm sure, however, we'll have a case where that's not going to happen.

The last case I'll tell you about is assault causing bodily harm. In a dance at the school, we had two young girls who heard through the grapevine that a third young girl had a knife and was going to get one of them. They took a proactive approach to this, and got into a fight with her. They beat her up quite badly. She ended up with a broken arm that was fractured in two places, and was hospitalized. While she was in the hospital, one of the girls went down to see her and told her that when she got out, she was going to get it, they were going to kill her. So we had assault causing bodily harm and threat to cause death. This was fairly serious stuff.

Before the resolution conference, the mother of the victim wrote a letter to the newspaper and said something about one of the offenders' mothers. She said she was a terrible parent, she hadn't looked after her child, and it was just disgusting what she had done with her kid.

We had determined to deal with this in resolution conference. I was the facilitator. I approached it with a little bit of trepidation in terms of dealing with the participants, given the publicity this case had. We had about twenty people there - sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles.

Well, it turned out that there was another young girl involved. She had been spreading rumours about the victim simply to try to put a split between the offenders and the victim. She was causing trouble. She was the one who told the offenders that this girl had a knife. We worked through that, and the victim and the offenders started to realize that there really wasn't a problem between them. It was being caused by somebody else.

The dynamics in that conference were really quite unique. We started off with great hostility between the parents, but after we worked through this, at a break in the conference - and I didn't see this happen; Sergeant Bouwman was there and he told me he witnessed this - the mother who had written the letter to the newspaper about the offender's terrible mother went over to her and they hugged. They walked out of that conference, and while we didn't perhaps resolve all the differences between the youths, the families certainly had resolved their differences.

The emotions in the conference are often very strong. We encourage that, and we encourage victims to express their emotions as clearly as possible, so that the offenders understand what they've done.

I'm going to close off very quickly here. I know we're pushing a time limit and that I've gone beyond it.

In terms of speed, the average timeframe from offence date to conclusion of disposition has been 74 days. We do deal with youths under 12 with the consent of their parents, and on the clear understanding that the youths have no obligation to participate and can leave the program at any time and nothing will happen.

On community involvement, when work service cannot be done for a victim because it's inappropriate or the victim doesn't want it, we have various resources in the community - service clubs, the municipality, etc. - that work service is done for. We have one person at the campground, the campground manager, who takes a lot of our youths.

I mention this to give you an idea of how the community is now involved in reintegration.

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This woman is a very wonderful woman who loves kids. We had one girl down there who had many previous convictions for theft under. We dealt with her in the program when an offence arose. There was a significant problem of trust with this young girl.

One day, the campground manager had to go to a neighbouring community for something, leaving the campground unattended. The young girl said to her that she would wait outside of the campground office while the manager went to Fernie. She told the girl, no, she wanted her to take the money, and wanted her to deal with the patrons. She tells me this young girl couldn't believe it. That simple act of trust changed that girl substantially. She has not been known to the police again. This woman at the campground has also found some of our youths jobs while they've been working for her.

The community is involved. Give the community the opportunity to deal with youth crime, and they will. We provide a vehicle. We do very little. The community is doing it.

We have one recommendation. One. We're not asking for money, by the way. We do not believe a program such as this should be funded. Once that occurs, it winds up coming with some sort of direction, I'm sure. We do not want that. Besides, we don't need any money. We operate without funding.

We have only one recommendation. We operate under the common law principle that a police officer has the discretion to lay a charge or not. That view was supported by the Supreme Court of Canada in a 1989 decision.

I've certainly been challenged, by crown prosecutors in particular, that, well, you're underneath the Young Offenders Act, and that this is a section 4 measure not authorized by the Attorney General of the Province of British Columbia. I say, you're right, but paragraph 3(1)(d) does implicitly allow alternative measures programs such as ours. Some crowns have taken the view that it doesn't. I know several judges who have taken the position that it does. One of them is Judge Lilles in the Yukon, and I will take his word on the Young Offenders Act over that of many others.

The only recommendation we have is that the Young Offenders Act be amended to explicitly authorize pre-charge diversion programs such as this. That's it. That's our only recommendation.

We do not believe the Young Offenders Act is fundamentally flawed. The system is fundamentally flawed. To make the system effective - the resources needed, the judged required to be hired, the crowns required to be hired - sees phenomenal expense. To speed up the system.... Well, the Attorney General hires provincial court judges and funds courtrooms, so it's not going to happen. Legislative changes to the Young Offenders Act will not accomplish much for the vast majority of offences. The system needs to be changed. That's an incredible undertaking, and we don't think it needs to be.

We are doing, in essence, an end run around the system. If youth offending rates are level, we are going to continue with our program as long as it appears to us that we are not increasing reoffence rates. Perhaps we've been lucky, but reoffence rates are down to date. Given the satisfaction with the program on the part of the victims and the police, and given the cost savings, those are good reasons to continue. We strongly believe the solution to youth crime is in the community. Give the community the ability to deal with it and they will.

Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you.

Mr. St-Laurent, we have only five minutes each.

[Translation]

Mr. St-Laurent: I will be brief because time flies.

In your system, would you accept the presence of a third party, that is to say of people who have absolutely no link with the matter but who might decide one day: "Today, I will go there instead of watching TV"? Would you accept this type of person in the circle you are talking about?

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[English]

Mr. Purdy: We do not open the conferences to the public. On many occasions we do have observers present, such as correctional services, other people starting up programs such as ours, but we do not have the press present. The reason for that is that we believe if the press is there, the frankness and the emotion that occurs in the conference will not occur.

It's not because we don't want anyone to know what we're doing. In fact, regularly I sit down with the editor of the local paper and say, well, here's a case we've dealt with and here's what we've done with them. We have some fairly frank discussions about it, on essentially an off-the-record basis.

About bringing other resources to the conference, we did try to bring in social services workers on occasion. What happened was those conferences virtually went off the rails. They were not directly affected by the offending behaviour and they did not have a great deal to contribute.

We certainly do utilize community resources subsequently to a conference, such as alcohol and drug counselling, and we have secured a counselling source through a sort of back door method from the Ministry of Health, but bringing in other resources we found actually was not productive. The people affected are the ones to deal with it. Third parties do not seem to be able to contribute a great deal.

We deal with the offending behaviour; we don't try to deal with the entire circumstances of the youth, his background of alcoholism in the family, for example. We deal with the offending behaviour. With that focus, others coming in don't contribute a lot.

[Translation]

Mr. St-Laurent: I may have misunderstood but are you asking victims of crimes against the person and not only victims of property crimes to get involved? If so, are there any crimes against the person, such as rape or murder, which you will not accept to deal with in your conferences? It seems obvious that you would not deal with those cases but how far do you go?

[English]

Mr. Purdy: The victim's involvement in the resolution conference is crucial. They express to the offender how the offence has affected them. Also, they're very active in framing the disposition.

First, we would never attempt to deal with a homicide. The court system is necessary for the more serious crimes, obviously.

I can tell you that on Monday evening we're dealing with our first youth conference for an impaired driver. We have not dealt with an impaired driver before. It will be our first on Monday evening. We will have an insurance adjuster there to explain to the youth the insurance impacts and the costs that would happen if he goes through the court system. We have the fire chief present, who during his long career has cleaned up a lot of very sad road accidents. He will be explaining to the youth some of the carnage that can result. We have an emergency room nurse who is going to be present, and of course the investigating officer.

We do almost have a victim. An off-duty police officer was almost hit by this youth before he was apprehended. He will be there.

What are we going to do for resolution? I don't know. The group will decide on that. That will be a group discussion and group decision, with the youth, his father, the parties present. It may be he'll surrender his driver's licence for a year. It may be he's going to make a donation to a volunteer organization. I don't know. I can tell you I frequently go into a resolution conference thinking, well, what are we going to do with this matter? Always the parties come up with some very unique dispositions I would never have thought of. They wouldn't have happened in court. People always seem to be able to work it out. I'm always amazed.

The Chair: Mr. Ramsay.

Mr. Ramsay: Thank you, Madam Chair. I won't take much time. I just want to thank our witnesses for coming and I want to thank them for having faith in the community members to initiate this kind of a program. I think this is what we've been hearing all across the country - that is, we must re-empower the community to deal with this kind of community problem, and with what we can do at the federal level, we're not really going to solve the problem. It has to come from the people.

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I just want to ask a couple of questions. Then I will listen to your answers. We have heard people say that youths should not be shamed for what they have done, yet that seems to be a component in the successful application of your program. I'd like you to comment on that.

You're dealing with children under the age of 12, but are you able to deal with or do you think that in the future you will be able to deal with children who show signs of having difficulties and problems that do not yet amount to a criminal offence, such as continued disruption in the classroom or whatever? That's dropping one level below what you're dealing with to the very early detection and prevention of aggressive behaviour and so on.

In the area of authority, I'm very concerned that the vested interests in the justice system will create stumbling blocks. You touched on that a little bit when you talked about some of the discussions you've had with crown prosecutors. I'm glad to see you're not asking for money, because I don't think that's the answer, although it might be in some communities that really need it. The only recommendation you've asked us to consider is making what you're doing fall within the legal structure. I'm hoping that the ears of all of our committee members are wide open on that request.

It falls in line with the protection you would need in order to go forward with this program and expand it and maybe put some of the people out of business - our judges and so on - and close some of our courts, if we can do that.

Those are my comments. I'll wait for your responses.

The Chair: Mr. Smith, as you're getting ready to respond, let me point out to Mr. Ramsay that two members of what you call the industry are at present busy putting themselves out of business.

Mr. Ramsay: Right.

The Chair: I just point that out. A crown attorney was here the other day saying the same thing. So not everybody has the motives you ascribe to them.

Mr. Ramsay: Too many do.

The Chair: Sergeant Bouwman.

Sgt Bouwman: I'll deal with the shaming aspect of it.

Believe me, Mr. Ramsay, I don't think we will be out of a job. I think there's enough serious crime out there for all of the judges, juries and court reporters, etc. I don't think there'll be a cut in jobs.

However, I will address this portion of it. I think shame is very important. I can speak to that not only from having seen the conferences first-hand and being involved in them, but from having seen the results of the conferences.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the youths who was one of our first offenders, so to speak, was in my living room. He is now my son's closest friend. In fact, he is probably Sparwood's most ardent supporter in this whole thing, because he realizes very clearly what he has done and what the impact was on the victim.

He and the victim have been able to see each other later and talk about what they have done. He's no hero. He's no hero in anybody's mind, but he himself has realized that from what the victim said to him....

In terms of shaming, I don't believe we should tie him to the city square and throw tomatoes at him. I disagree with that. But the shaming aspect of making him realize what he has done has created a much better citizen for the community than any court system would ever do.

Mr. Ramsay: Thank you.

Mr. Purdy: To address the question of school matters, we met with the school boards over a year ago in our area and attempted to get them to implement conferencing within the school system. In fact, I do have a manual from Australia on how conferencing can be utilized within the school structure.

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Unfortunately, to date, although the administration of the school board supports it and principals of the schools support it, we have great difficulty in getting them to implement it. It can be done. It's being done in Australia right now with great success. The conferencing model can and does work in Australia. There's no reason why it can't work here. Hence, yes, we could get the children at a much younger age through the conferencing process in the schools.

In terms of stumbling blocks, I can tell you that in our area the crown counsel has been very supportive personally, although they officially cannot be. In fact, the administrative crown in our region is a very good crown, a very competent crown. He has put the program together in the city of Cranbrook on his own time. He has put it together outside of his crown duties. I commend him for it. We do have that support.

From the Attorney General's department in this province, the support has been less than lukewarm. Until very recently...and I'm still trying to follow this up. Last Friday I received the minutes of the provincial council meeting of the Canadian Bar Association, which Mr. Ernie Quantz, a senior official in the AG's department, was at.

The minutes indicate that the province appears to be considering implementing a protocol in 1997 based on our model. I've been attempting to contact Mr. Quantz all week to find out what is actually happening. I haven't been able to speak with him. I can tell you that if the province does implement a protocol along these lines, that would not really make me happy. I believe a program like this must be community-based. I think any protocol or formal structure that is imposed from on high has a great chance of killing a program such as this.

Mr. Ramsay: I agree.

The Chair: Thanks. Mr. Maloney.

Mr. Maloney: Sparwood is a small community and probably has a good sense of community. Do you feel this program could work in communities of 25,000, 50,000, 100,000 or in Vancouver?

Mr. Purdy: When we first started the program, I had occasion to speak to a judge from Victoria. He told me it was going to work a lot better in a larger centre. This was in a group discussion, and unfortunately I wasn't able to pursue that point with him. I was sort of taken aback when he said that to me.

What we've come to realize is that when you're dealing with offending behaviour, you have a community. It's a community consisting of the offender's peer group and his parents. You have a community consisting of the victim and those close to him who are affected by the offending behaviour.

That community doesn't change depending upon the size of the geographic region you live in. You can be a pensioner living in Vancouver and have a very small community. I'm a small-town lawyer-practitioner, and my community is very large in terms of who I deal with. If you define community as who you deal with, then it doesn't matter. The community affected is going to be the same in Vancouver as it is in Sparwood.

I suggest that putting together community resources to deal with work service is going to be far easier in Vancouver than it is in Sparwood. You have that many more groups to deal with, but in terms of the process itself, it should be absolutely no different.

We were at a conference in June in Regina with the superintendent from Burnaby. We understand he has been pushing implementation of the program in Burnaby. We don't know if he's been successful in implementing it, but we understand he's pushing it.

Mr. Maloney: You haven't had anyone opt to go to court after being through the system and not liking it. Do you, as a defence counsel, have some concerns with all of the disclosure and acceptance of responsibility as opposed to the adversarial process as opposed to the community healing process? How is that going to work?

Mr. Purdy: If I understand your question correctly, it is about how I view this process versus the court process of a defence lawyer. First, we deal only with the youth who does admit involvement in the offence. Without that, it doesn't happen. In terms of the adversarial process, I have been a defence counsel for more than a dozen years now. I can tell you that insofar as youths are concerned, it's an extremely artificial process in the court system. The youth will not say a thing if I can help it. I will speak on his behalf. We are concerned about conviction.

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This is what the adversarial process is about. Very few resources are put into determining sentence. This is different in the Yukon. But as a general rule, we focus our energy on conviction. The charter is utilized and evidentiary rules are utilized. This is where our focus is.

We're not focusing in the court system on changing behaviour. We're not focusing in the court system on recompense to the victim. We focus on guilt or innocence. If a youth admits involvement in the offence, morally I don't have a problem with dealing with him in this process rather than in the adversarial system.

I can tell you on occasion I've personally screened the matter during a resolution conference to ensure we have all the elements of a criminal offence present and there aren't any obvious non-technical defences to the charge.

On one occasion there was a case of 13 break and enters in a community up the road in Elkford. It turned out in one of the break and enters the requisite intent was not there. I told the officer we're not dealing with this. He concurred. I've had other occasions where I've just about stopped a conference when there seemed to be a valid defence but this defence actually evaporated on further questioning. I've never actually had to stop a conference, but this is my intention. If all requisite elements of an offence are not present, then we will not proceed.

Perhaps the danger of a program such as this is that there can be a net-widening process. Those who are not truly guilty of an offence could be involved in it. I think we do have to trust the RCMP to a great extent - we do anyway - to utilize this tool in a proper and appropriate way.

We deal with other communities that have commenced this process to have a lawyer who is available for consultation on cases to ensure matters do actually constitute offences. But it is one danger of a process such as this.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Maloney.

I want to thank you. We've been hearing about Sparwood for some time now from Judge Lilles in the Yukon and from people here, including a senior crown attorney yesterday. It's been great to hear from you. Thank you so much for the brief you prepared. It's excellent and it's going to be very helpful to us.

We'll just rise for a couple of minutes while our next witness, Noreen Waters, comes to the table.

This meeting is adjourned.

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