[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]
Friday, November 22, 1996
.0919 
[English]
The Chair: I want to call what I think is the largest meeting we've ever had of the House of Commons justice committee to order.
For the record and for those watching at 3 o'clock in the morning, when they can't sleep and turn on CPAC, we are conducting today a national forum on youth crime and justice. It is the last hurrah of the justice committee's review of the Young Offenders Act.
I want to welcome everybody here and thank all of the participants for coming a long way to give us yet another chance, in some cases, to benefit from their wisdom, and also to welcome some people we've not heard from before whom we've asked to join us.
.0920
The reasons for this forum are many. In terms of the different participants, there may be as many reasons to have or not to have this forum as there are people around the table. But one thing we have learned throughout the course of our study and one thing I think we all share is the belief that in many parts of the country there is a remarkable lack of accurate information about the state of the Canadian youth justice system.
This is one format we can use for public education and also for political education, because other members of Parliament ultimately may have to vote on recommendations that come out of this committee.
It's also an opportunity for us to bring together people we've met from across the country who share a common interest in youth and youth justice and who have varying views. It's a real opportunity for us as parliamentarians to do something that, in my view, we should be doing, which is to foster and promote a national dialogue on subjects of interest to Canadians.
Finally, for the members of the committee here, many of us have come to some fairly firm views on some issues and on other issues we haven't. This our last opportunity to see where there might be a national consensus.
In terms of format and procedure today, I would like to make a couple of points.
We have with us, as I said, people from all parts of the youth justice system, including several members of the bench. I just want to point out to those members of the bench that because of their position as adjudicators, if there are questions they are not comfortable with, we won't be requiring that they answer, but it would be important for us to know there is a lack of comfort in answering the question. We'll just carry on.
We really want the benefit of your advice, because you are an important part of the system. Some of you have some incredible expertise that we want to hear about.
I should also say - and I neglected to say this earlier - that another point we are trying to make here in bringing people together is that we realize there's a tremendous cultural and economic variation across the country. It's important for us as parliamentarians and for all Canadians to understand that when legislation is being reviewed or when policy is being made, we have to understand and appreciate these different aspects of our national personality.
Parliamentarians love procedure, and judges and lawyers do too, and perhaps some of the rest of you do as well. I've vetted this with the three political parties represented here. We're not going to follow the normal process of giving equal time to all political parties. Instead we will operate as individuals.
I am going to arbitrarily choose a parliamentarian to kick off each section. Mr. Gallaway is saying ``Not me, not me''. I'm going to use my judgment in doing that, knowing each parliamentarian will bring a particular view to a subject. I'm hoping that will get us all moving.
If you have a comment, please put up your hand and I'll try to recognize you. If you think I'm being unfair, at the break I'd be glad to hear about it and we'll try to adjust for that.
As I indicated, we have three themes, and again for the record, I want to indicate what they are and how we arrived at them.
The theme for the first segment this morning is early interventions to keep children and young people out of the youth justice system.
Paddy Torsney, who's the vice-chair of our committee and the member of Parliament from Burlington, has consistently characterized what she believes should be our goal in looking at the youth justice system, and in a very insightful way. The goal of the system, in her mind and I think in the minds of many of us, is not to deal with young people who are committing crimes but to prevent the occurrence of crime and to make it so there are fewer victims.
One of the things that I think all of us believe and have learned is that early intervention with children works. Children who are at risk to offend can be identified; we've heard that.
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So we want to talk about and we want to hear from you on how we can recognize problems and intervene. When a young person goes astray, what alternatives are there to putting him or her into what is essentially a very expensive system of courts and jails? How can we deal with them, at least at the opening of their criminal activity, in a way that intervenes and tries to keep them out of the system and keep them healthier?
The second theme relates to how we handle and deal with children once they are in the youth justice system. In the first theme we would be talking about early intervention and pre-charge alternative measures. In the second part of the day we'd like to talk about what we do if someone is charged and about the use of alternative measures and community responses in rehabilitation and in dealing with their crime.
Then finally, at the end of the day, we will be talking about an area that is tough for all of us, I know, and that is possible responses to those very small numbers of young people who could be classified as dangerous or repeat offenders.
Those are the three areas we're asking you to look at. Those are the three themes that have emerged. Those are the three areas where we continue to have dialogue, so that's where we're going.
To begin, I'm going to ask that we go around the table and, without necessarily talking about our points of view, just identify ourselves, say who we are and what baggage we bring to the table in terms of whom we represent and what our positions are.
Please take one minute each. I have a stopwatch and I'm vicious. I also have a hammer and I like that.
My name is Shaughnessy Cohen. I'm the member of Parliament from Windsor - St. Clair. I'm a Liberal. I was elected in October 1993. Before that I was a criminal lawyer in Windsor, Ontario, the centre of the universe.
Ms Leena Augimeri (Manager, Under 12 Outreach Project, Earlscourt Child and Family Centre): Hi. My name is Leena Augimeri and I'm representing Earlscourt Child and Family Centre in Toronto. I operate the under-12 outreach project, which is an innovative and dynamic program for children under the age of 12 who come into contact with the police. Thanks to the Department of Justice, we can now say the program is quite effective, as their research has recently proven that.
Thank you.
[Translation]
His Honour Judge Michel Jasmin (Quebec Youth Court Judge and Chair, Groupe de travail chargé d'étudier l'application de la Loi sur les jeunes contrevenants du Québec): My name is Michel Jasmin. I've been a Youth Court judge in Montreal for 15 years. I had the privilege of chairing a task force responsible for studying the application of the Young Offenders Act. This study was conducted over two years, from 1992 to 1995. We travelled throughout Quebec, and filed a report, a copy of which has been submitted to you.
[English]
The Chair: Thank you, Your Honour.
Madame Toutant.
[Translation]
Ms Cécile Toutant (Criminologist, responsable de l'Unité des adolescents, Pinel Institute): My name is Cécile Toutant and I'm from Montreal. I'm a criminologist by training. For many years now, I've worked in the security section of a psychiatric hospital with teenagers who have committed violent offences. These are the violent teenagers people often talk about and for whom some would like provision to be made in the Young Offenders Act.
Aside from that, I've become very interested in the past two years in prevention, which will certainly be one of the topics discussed here today, through the work of the Fondation Docteur Philippe-Pinel, which emphasizes transmitting knowledge with a view to prevention. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you. Maître Bastien.
Maître Normand Bastien (Lawyer, Director, Youth Division, Centre communautaire juridique de Montréal): My name is Normand Bastien. I've been a lawyer for 23 years. Since 1977, I've worked mainly as the Director of the Youth Division of Montreal Legal Aid. Before that, I was trained as a criminal lawyer.
Since 1977, I've had the opportunity to be involved in nearly all the new ideas, including the Youth Protection Act in Quebec and implementation of the Young Offenders Act in 1982-84.
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I also had the pleasure of being on the task force mentioned earlier by Mr. Chief Justice Jasmin. During 1994 and 1995, I had the pleasure too of co-chairing a Quebec Bar committee examining the question of the legal representation of children. Obviously, I'm involved daily in everything connected with justice for minors.
[English]
The Chair: Mr. St-Laurent.
[Translation]
Mr. St-Laurent (Manicouagan): My name is Bernard St-Laurent. I'm the MP for Manicouagan and I represent the Bloc québécois du Québec, the centre of the other universeMs Cohen was talking about.
Before I was elected, I worked for a few years in a detention centre, and this gives me a rather special point of view within the Standing Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs. It also means I'm more interested in the lot of young people, and in legislation respecting prevention and treatment. I'm interested in how it occurs and how to keep children from getting to that stage.
[English]
The Chair: Thank you. Mr. Henteleff.
Mr. Yude Henteleff (Honorary Solicitor, Learning Disabilities Association of Canada): My name is Yude Henteleff. I'm a practising lawyer in Winnipeg and the past president of and currently the honorary solicitor for the Learning Disabilities Association of Canada.
I should correct something. Winnipeg is not only the geographical centre of Canada but a centre of many other things, as you're well aware.
The Chair: Some of us have fixed ideas, Mr. Henteleff.
Mr. Henteleff: For many years the association has been concerned about the fact that the whole concept of school failure has not been recognized as a significant correlative factor between special needs children and those who come into conflict with the law.
For example, a study in Ontario at several training schools showed that 77% of children were categorized as being exceptional, of whom approximately 12% were learning-disabled. A recent study in the penitentiary system showed that approximately 30% of inmates were profoundly learning-disabled.
We are deeply concerned that a causative factor hasn't been given the attention that it deserves. I've taken advantage of your presence to provide a study we did, along with those statistics and with other studies that I hope you'll have an opportunity to read.
The Chair: Thank you.
Mr. Trudell.
Mr. Bill Trudell (Toronto Chair, Canadian Council of Criminal Defence Lawyers): My name is Bill Trudell. I'm a defence counsel practising in a little place called Toronto. I am vice-president of Ontario's Criminal Lawyers Association and am here today as the Toronto chair of the Canadian Council of Criminal Defence Lawyers, which is a national organization of defence lawyers throughout the country, formed in 1992. I'm here to hopefully lend some help from the defence counsel's point of view in terms of some of the real difficulties in protecting the children.
The Chair: Mr. Trudell has failed to acknowledge that he's a graduate of the University of Windsor.
Voices: Oh, oh!
The Chair: Ms Torsney.
Ms Torsney (Burlington): Both centres of the universe -
My name is Paddy Torsney. I'm the member of Parliament for Burlington. I don't have a legal background, but it seems to me that as the chair has identified, we do need to find a way so that fewer kids get into trouble and fewer victims are created in our community. And for the kids who do get into trouble, we have to find a more effective way of making sure they grow up to be healthy, productive, young Canadians.
It's also important to me to make sure that the myths are removed, that the realities are better identified, and that there's sharing of the information so we don't all have to work in our own communities to try to reinvent the wheel and so we can share the best practices. It's been quite terrific to travel across the country and take that information back to my community so we can all have a better chance.
The Chair: Dr. Keeling.
Dr. Ken Keeling (Chief Psychologist, Syl Apps Centre): My name is Ken Keeling. I'm the chief psychologist at the Syl Apps youth centre in Oakville, which is somewhat to the west of Yonge Street. I don't know if it's the centre of anything. I've been out there for fourteen years working with young offender in one way or another, back to the days when they were juvenile delinquents. In 1968 I had my first opportunity as a summer student to do so.
I've been pondering many questions and I guess my response is still summed up byH.L. Mencken's quote. It's something to this effect: For every complex problem there's a simple solution and it's wrong.
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I've been pondering that. I'm here to learn. After twenty-some years I'm not sure I have that many answers. I just hope we find some of the relevant questions. And whatever direction as a social experiment this committee will be taking, I think it will be an informed one.
Mr. DeVillers (Simcoe North): I'm Paul DeVillers. I'm the member of Parliament for Simcoe North in Ontario. I'm the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs. In real life, I'm a lawyer and a member of the Standing Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs.
The Chair: Staff Sergeant Bouwman.
Staff Sergeant Jake Bouwman (RCMP): I'm Jake Bouwman. I'm a member of the RCMP. I'm in charge of a small detachment on the Alberta-B.C. border near the U.S. border. It's called Sparwood. It's a community of about 5,000.
In January 1995, local defence counsel Glen Purdy and I sat down and initiated what's called the Sparwood youth assistance program, a program that diverts youth from court in a pre-court type of situation where the young person and his support group, along with the victim and his support group, sit down and come to a consensus as to what the resolution should be for the accusations against him.
The Chair: Thank you. Mr. Ramsay.
Mr. Ramsay (Crowfoot): My name is Jack Ramsay. I'm the member of Parliament from Crowfoot. I'm the justice critic for the Reform Party of Canada. I live in Camrose, Alberta with my wife Glenna. We have four children who are young adults. Of course, Camrose has more snow than anywhere else on the earth today.
Voices: Oh, oh!
Mr. Ramsay: I spent fourteen years with the RCMP and I was a business consultant at the time I was elected.
The Chair: Ms Martz.
Ms Liza Martz (Vancouver Family Court Youth Justice Committee): My name is Liza Martz. I'm a lawyer in Vancouver. I spent time working exclusively as a defence counsel for young people who were in the care of our Ministry of Social Services in British Columbia as wards of the state. That ministry has just recently become the Ministry of Children and Families.
I also spent time working with Judge Gove as a member of his staff on an inquiry into the Ministry of Social Services in B.C.
But I'm here today as a citizen member of the Vancouver Family Court Youth Justice Committee. Let me just say that in representing the youths I did, I rarely saw involvement in the youth justice system having a long-term impact on those young people. I say rarely because I want to reserve the right to make hopeful submissions to at least one provincial court judge present. But I always saw glimmers of hope and signs of the sorts of measures that might work and I hope we can move the debate in that direction.
The Chair: Susan Reid-MacNevin.
Ms Susan Reid-MacNevin (Vice-president, Issues, John Howard Society of Canada): First and foremost, I'm a teacher at the University of Guelph in the department of sociology, where I teach students about crime and deviance matters. I've been hammering away at the Young Offenders Act for a very long time in terms of public education.
I'm here today in my capacity as vice-president of issues for the John Howard Society of Canada. We've spent a number of occasions with the standing committee trying to remind them of the importance of ensuring that we educate the public in terms of what the gaps are between the reality of youth crime and what is perceived to be a fearful environment. And we promote as strongly as possible the need to keep young people out of federal penitentiaries, which are seen as very damaging environments for young people.
The Chair: Chuck Cadman.
Mr. Chuck Cadman (The CRY Foundation (Crime Responsibility and Youth)): I represent the organization called Crime Responsibility and Youth, and somehow they have me on the witness list as being from some place called ``Savoy'', B.C. I'm actually from the republic of Surrey, B.C.
Voices: Oh, oh!
Mr. Cadman: The only qualification I bring to this table is being the father of a young man who was murdered four years ago.
Our organization advocates much more stringent sanctions against violent young offenders. I also do as much work as I can in the schools talking to kids about violence and its ramifications, and I work with a diversion program out of Maple Ridge, B.C. for first-time offenders.
The Chair: Janis Page.
Ms Janis Page (Manager, John Howard House): I come from Edmonton and I'm representing Edmonton's John Howard Society, where I'm the manager of the Howard House young offenders' group home and have been for ten years. I come here with the belief that youth crime and youth justice is not only a concern for all of us, it's the responsibility of all of us. I'm very interested in the three themes that we're going to talk about today.
The Chair: Priscilla de Villiers.
Ms Priscilla de Villiers (President, CAVEAT): Good morning. I'm Priscilla de Villiers. I'm the president of an organization named CAVEAT. CAVEAT is a national grassroots, not-for-profit charitable organization. My credentials, if I have any in fact, are that I taught at a boys' high school in South Africa many years ago. I also lectured in education at two universities in South Africa.
.0940
Five years ago, my daughter Nina was murdered by a man who had an 11-year history of violence against women. As I had standing at that inquest, I saw his report cards dating from the time he was 5. I think he went to over 12 schools before he was in grade 6, and in every single report he was clearly identified as having severe anger problems, severe behaviour problems, uncontrollable rages, etc.
He was in the military cadets and sea cadets. He was carefully trained in the use of firearms, and yet every single one of his peers was terrified to work with him and, in fact, refused to. He was in Dofasco and had an unblemished work record, but there was a huge file on him because the men at Dofasco were terrified to work with him.
The point is that in the whole of his 32 years of life, not one person ever intervened. As I saw the carnage he'd created - at least eight women assaulted very seriously, two women killed, one attempted abduction, and finally he shot himself, leaving four little children with a murderer for a father - I had to remember my lessons of many years ago.
Somehow we found ourselves forming a victims' advocacy group, but more than that, it's a public voice for safety. We will be five years old unofficially in January, and officially in June. In those five years I've travelled across this country, usually as president of CAVEAT but, in addition, as a member of the National Crime Prevention Council, and I hasten to say that my views here are my own. Joan Pennell will be presenting the council's consensus.
There are many victims. There are the parents of children who are either not here or who are very seriously hurt. There are the parents of the young offenders. But more than that, youth is the only group that is a homogeneous group, holus bolus, and lumped into one conglomeration. Youths generally mix in that peer group for about 15 years, so the offenders and the victims are interchangeable there. By focusing solely on the people who actually come to the notice of the justice system, we are not only creating a climate that produces more violence for children to protect themselves from, we are failing to give those in the peer group, who often come from the same background with the same problems as the offenders, the tools to deal with violent confrontation that they're going to need in later life. I feel we have failed in every respect to address that.
As I've travelled across this country, I have not heard from one person who's totally satisfied with the way things are going. I've heard individuals say their area is succeeding, but I've yet to hear an agreement.
I feel quite frankly, in a trite sense, that the YOA is DOA. It's dead on arrival. The lack of confidence in the name, Young Offenders Act, is so endemic now at the youth level and at every level that I think it needs to be restructured, really addressed and given a new look and a new name. The best should be taken out of it and the worst discarded.
Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you, Mrs. de Villiers.
Mr. Sharkey.
Mr. Neil Sharkey (Defence Attorney, Iqaluit, Northwest Territories): Thank you. My name is Neil Sharkey and I'm the legal director of a legal aid clinic on Baffin Island, which is just north of the top of Quebec. The name of our office is called Maliiganik Tukisiiniakvik, which, roughly translated from Inuktitut, means a place where people can go for legal help but also for legal understanding.
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I wear two hats. I'm active in the court as a criminal lawyer directing other lawyers and court workers. I also work with a community board of Inuit elders who are very interested in youth and see their own children caught up in everything the children down here in the south are caught up in, and they're losing those children.
I happen to see as a criminal lawyer, and share the traditional prejudices of a lot of criminal lawyers, that there's nothing wrong with the Young Offenders Act. It has everything it needs and it has all the teeth it needs.
In terms of resources and the jurisdiction of this committee, you should put what strings you can on federal transfer money to the provinces to get early intervention. Put more money into one-on-one probation and that type of service.
It's a pleasure for me to be here today in the presence of the people who are here. I'm especially glad to meet Staff Sergeant Bouwman for the first time, who I've heard so much about, from Sparwood. Last month here in Ottawa...the intervention the Sparwood project was one of the more successful projects in this country, and I'd like to take some of those experiences back to where I go.
My board of directors at Maliiganik Tukisiiniakvik is starting to work one on one with young offenders who are given to us from the court system. We take them out on the land, hunting, camping and to outpost camps. It's changing individuals.
Thank you, Madam Chair.
The Chair: Thank you, Neil.
Judge Lilles.
His Honour Judge Heino Lilles (Yukon Territorial Court Judge): My name is Heino Lilles. For the last 10 years, I've been a judge in the Yukon Territory. By definition, that means I sit a lot of the time in small communities. I'm what they call a three-hat judge. I sit in child welfare court, youth court, and adult court.
During the 10 years I've sat as a judge, I've watched children graduate from the child welfare system into the youth court system and then into the adult court system - in some cases with considerable certainty. What I mean by that is that it was often very clear, from the first time I saw a young child in child welfare court, what would happen down the road.
I've learned a number of things from this experience. One of them is that contrary to public expectations, legislation alone, whether it's the Young Offenders Act or the Criminal Code, is not capable of reducing crime in our society in any significant way.
The Chair: Thank you, Your Honour.
Jim Robb.
Mr. Jim Robb (Senior Counsel, Legal Aid Youth Office, Edmonton, Alberta): My name is Jim Robb. I am a member of the faculty of law at the University of Alberta.
About three and a half years ago I was seconded away to set up and run legal aid youth offices in Calgary and Edmonton. The project was set up to provide defence counsel to youths, but because of the way it was designed, it actually goes much further than that.
We take quite an unconventional approach, at least in an Alberta context, where defence counsel hope to never have repeat business. By that I mean there is a heavy emphasis on getting kids into treatment. In the last three years we have put about 1,000 kids into treatment programs from B.C. to Labrador.
Additionally, we take the approach that there is a huge resource gap for youths and it is an ever-widening gap. We work with other community agencies, some of whom are here today at the table, to try to establish very focused programs to address the needs of youths. That goes all the way from preventive programs for youths who are under 12, all the way up to those who are 18.
In our office we do not close a file on a kid. The simple fact that a legal action is over to us is irrelevant. We have kids coming back to us now because they need help, and they are 20. We want to provide a safe place for them to seek help before they get back into trouble.
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I confess to enormous frustration on the subject of the young offenders system, but my frustrations might be different from those of some here. When I was in law school back in the 1970s I heard about the over-representation of aboriginal people. Right now in Alberta 87% of those incarcerated under the age of 15 are aboriginal. Of the total, 65% are aboriginal.
My view is that the Young Offenders Act is more than adequate. What is inadequate is our fulfilment of the promises in the Young Offenders Act that we would start to take healing, treatment, and rehabilitation seriously.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Robb.
Ms Church.
Ms Leslie Church (Member, City of Edmonton Youth Council): Hello, there. I'm a student at the University of Alberta. I plan eventually to get into law, so it's nice to meet Mr. Robb here. But today I'm representing the City of Edmonton Youth Council.
For a bit of background, this is a council established by our former city council under the safer cities initiative. Typically we deal with community-based issues relating to youth, but we also do dabble in some provincial and more national issues.
As far as the Young Offenders Act goes, one of the questions I'm commonly asked is what is the youth perception of the Young Offenders Act, at which point I get all wide-eyed and say we're just as confused...or we have a number of differing opinions on the act, just as adults do. There are a lot of discrepancies between the ideas and the opinions of youth on this issue.
From the council, though, I think one of our main resolutions is that we are there to protect the interests of youth and to focus on the well-being of youth over many of the other societal groups and their interests. So one thing I would like to do while I'm here today is to make sure the focus does stay on the well-being of youth and that the utmost concern is taken to address the problems that cause youth crime rather than problems once the young offender is already in the justice system. I think when you take a look at why youth commit crimes, it has more to do with circumstances before they actually commit a crime: things such as child poverty, youth unemployment, unstable family situations. I think those are the real issues in society that have to be addressed before we can talk about actual legislative reform.
The Chair: Thank you.
Heather Kinnear.
Ms Heather Kinnear (Probation and Parole Officer, Probation Officers Association of Ontario): I'm a member of the Probation Officers Association of Ontario, commonly referred to as POAO because that's a large mouthful. POAO was established in 1954 and represents the professional interests of some 900 probation officers and probation and parole officers in the province of Ontario. It is the only organization of its kind in Canada.
As an association, we have a number of stated objectives. Those include speaking with credibility on issues in criminal justice and providing representative perspectives on legislative issues to various policy-makers. We've prepared a number of policy papers over the years and have had input into such things as the recent amendments to the Young Offenders Act, the review of the Ontario parole system, and more recently input into the strict discipline initiatives in Ontario.
The probation officers and the probation and parole officers represented by POAO are the individuals who are designated as youth workers by the Government of Ontario for the purposes of administering the Young Offenders Act, so I think we're in a position to offer front-line input and an approach, and we would be very interested in taking some of the comments and information from this table back to attempt to implement them, as well as speaking, based on our experiences, about what we see as working and not working on the front-line level.
The Chair: Thank you.
Sandi Gleason.
Ms Sandi Gleason (Council of Yukon First Nations): I represent the Council of Yukon First Nations, in the Yukon. I also sit on the National Crime Prevention Council.
I work in the area of justice in the Yukon. Our main focus in the last few years has been on adults, but in the last year or so we've been trying to start working with youth. We are just at the beginning of doing that within the council I work with.
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The Chair: Thank you. Darren Winegarden.
Mr. Darren W. Winegarden (Director of Justice, Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations): Good morning. I'm the director of justice for the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations. I'm a practising lawyer, and I work very hard to try to create new justice models for the first nations of Saskatchewan and to implement those things. I've been very involved in sentencing circles, working with judges and with first nations to use those circles. I can personally say that I kept enough people out of jail - and I'm thinking just of three individuals - that it saved the system$1.5 million, if you go with its costing the system $150,000 a year to keep them in prison.
I know that this alternative justice concept is one that can save the system money and one that will work well. But I think it has to be funded realistically in order to work.
I'm here to present this paper, which is the submission we made to the commission. It includes 22 recommendations for changes to the Young Offenders Act, and also changes that don't require changes to the Young Offenders Act but that could be reflected by changes in government policy. I am hoping this commission and this meeting today will make some strong recommendations in those regards. Thank you very much.
The Chair: Thank you.
Shannon.
Mr. Shannon Cumming (Counsel, Special Projects Coordinator, Métis Nation, Yellowknife, Northwest Territories): Thank you, Madam Chair. I am a lawyer with the Métis Nation in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. We represent approximately 7,000 people of Métis descent in the western Northwest Territories.
I'm grateful for having had the opportunity to speak for the committee when they visited us in Yellowknife. I believe we made our concerns regarding the Young Offenders Act known at that time.
I believe we are here today to talk about solutions. For us in our community, the problems are all too apparent. One that I want to highlight is the demographic issue. Many of our young people are over-represented in the justice system, but it also needs to be stated that in the aboriginal communities there's a very high number of young people around today. The concern is that unless we deal with these issues as soon as possible, things will only get worse.
I look forward to sharing the knowledge that we have in our community with some of the people around the table here. I'm really impressed by what I've heard to date. I want to highlight perhaps later on one of the early intervention initiatives we have going in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, called Challenge to Change. It's going to deal with about 300 aboriginal youth at risk. It may offer some solutions for keeping our young people out of the justice system. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you.
Michele Peterson-Badali.
Dr. Michele Peterson-Badali (Individual Presentation): I'm here today as an individual, but coming from three different points of view. I'm a developmental psychologist at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. My research over the last ten years has focused primarily on youth justice system issues - students' as well as young offenders' and young adults' understanding of the system, perceptions of the system.
I also am a member of the board of a legal aid clinic in Toronto called Justice for Children and Youth, which represents youths under the age of 18. As well, I'm a member of a national organization called the Youth Justice Education Partnership, which is sponsored by the Department of Justice and which is taking a very broad look at youth justice education issues.
The Chair: Thank you.
Dr. Leschied is next. He is from Windsor.
Dr. Alan Leschied (Assistant Director, London Family Court Clinic): I used to be.
Thanks very much to the chair. I am a psychologist from the London Family Court Clinic and, with considerable pride, am presenting the work of that clinic. The clinic is a partially funded children's mental health centre in London, whose portion is getting reduced almost by the minute by our provincial government.
Over the last two decades we have done a lot of work in all areas of young offender work. Several decades ago we started doing assessments on the Juvenile Delinquents Act. That work quickly led to an emphasis on prevention. Many of you may be aware of the work of my colleagues on family violence and linking the causes of crime, particularly violent crime, to what goes on in a community and within a family.
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Secondly, we recently helped co-author a blueprint for prevention for the National Crime Prevention Council. It was released in June of this year. The conclusion of our prevention work, to no one's surprise, suggests that it really does take a community to raise a healthy child. We try to emphasize that fact time and again.
Our clinic is dedicated, under the Young Offenders Act, to provide section 13 assessments. That section is the section that provides judges' orders for medical and psychological reports.
We also take part in transfer hearings. We've been actively involved in assessments of youths where applications are made under that section for transfer, not only in Ontario but in other parts of the country. I think it's important that in the transfer process.... We may want to discuss this later. The transfer process represents the point at which a community decides the youth justice system no longer has relevance to that young person's fate, not only in terms of their offence but in terms of what ultimately will happen to that young person. I think it's an important juncture in the youth justice system.
Also importantly, the clinic has been involved in research evaluation work, particularly when we get to the point of the minority of youths who do end up in the youth justice system. What can we do to be effective? I guess if there's a mission we have been on in this area, the mission is to ensure whatever we do provide is consistent with the very best knowledge and best practice in the area, so we don't end up doing things that not only don't seem to work very well but can actually add to our problems in maintaining youth social behaviour.
Again, I'm very proud to be representing the clinic's work here at the committee.
The Chair: Thank you, Dr. Leschied.
Mr. Lonar.
Mr. William Lonar (Director, Young Offenders Institutions, Correctional Services Division, Nova Scotia Department of Justice): Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm the acting director of young offender institutions in the province of Nova Scotia and formerly I was superintendent of the Nova Scotia Youth Centre.
Over the past ten years, with the Nova Scotia Youth Centre being a large secure-custody facility, I've seen a lot of young men coming through, young boys, who don't necessarily have to be in the system. There's a percentage who do, but for a lot of these boys interventions at early ages by different government agencies might have prevented incarceration. What I'm hoping for, and what I'm hearing here today, is early prevention. From an institutional and justice perspective I feel it's important.
In Nova Scotia over the past several months we've combined five various government departments to work to share our resources. We find there has been duplication of service. The money is not there, so now we're starting to share our resources and expertise from within the institution with community programs to help deal with kids of all ages.
Another factor I feel is important has been mentioned. When we do get serious offenders who have to go through the system, and once the court's determination of sentence is finished, they go back into the community and nothing is there. There's no after-care. That's also extremely important for that percentage of people. We release a lot of our youth from our facilities in Nova Scotia because their court sanctions have been dealt with, and they're going back into the same environments, the same situations, and the same settings. We're just setting them up for provincial and federal adult institutions.
The Chair: Thanks, Mr. Lonar.
Mr. Discepola.
[Translation]
Mr. Discepola (Vaudreuil): I'm here to listen to the comments made today. I'm an MP for Vaudreuil in Quebec, but perhaps it's more important to point out that I am the Parliamentary Secretary to the Solicitor General of Canada, the Honourable Herb Gray, who, as we know, is from the Windsor area. That's what qualifies me perhaps to sit on this Committee, Madam Chair.
[English]
The Chair: That was very good.
[Translation]
Mr. Discepola: I'm also the father of four children who have led me to believe that today's youth views young offenders more harshly than we do.
[English]
Quite often I sit down with them and discuss young offenders, because in my previous life I was mayor of the town of Kirkland, which is on the western tip of the island of Montreal. As I drive home every night, I'm constantly reminded of the Toope tragedy, because I always have a tendency now, as I turn right to go to my home, to look left to where the 13-year-old murderer lives and lived at the time.
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Our community was shattered by that tragedy. We were all hurt as a community and we've had to come together as a community with the realization that, it being a very affluent area in Canada, the youth criminal justice system knows no boundaries, whether they be cultural, linguistic or otherwise.
I have been affected by it. Our community has been affected by it. I hope to learn from the wealth of information and knowledge around this table so we as legislators can prevent those kinds of tragedies in the future, if we can.
We must discuss alternatives and make sure we make our communities much more safe. So I welcome the input from everybody.
The Chair: Thank you.
Mr. Maloney.
Mr. Maloney (Erie): Thank you, Madam Chair. My name is John Maloney. I'm the member of Parliament for Erie riding, which is on the Niagara Peninsula in southern Ontario.
In my former life I was a lawyer in a small-town practice. My area of expertise, or lack of expertise, comes from parenting five kids between the ages of 10 and 20.
I've had the privilege of travelling across the country and being here in Ottawa with the justice committee. We've heard some parallel themes, we've heard some conflicting themes and we've heard regional differences. I very much look forward today to resolving some of those differences.
The benefactors will obviously be our justice committee but also the citizens of this country, especially our youth. For that, we thank you for your presence here today.
The Chair: Thank you.
Professor Doob.
Professor Anthony Doob (Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto): I'm Tony Doob from the Centre of Criminology at the University of Toronto.
My personal agenda today has two items on it. The first is to urge skepticism about the view that changes in the act will create public support for the Young Offenders Act. I've heard that. I'm old enough to have heard that in 1986, again in 1992 and again in 1995. We've learned that minor cosmetic changes in the act will do nothing to create public support. And secondly, I would suggest that the changes in the act will have little, if any, effect on how secure we are in our communities.
The second item on my agenda is to urge the committee to debate and address the principles of youth justice, really what we want to accomplish with the youth justice system and with the Young Offenders Act. In that context, I think you either have to go beyond or reject the approach suggested by the federal-provincial-territorial task force, which is that what you should really do is make ad hoc, tinkering changes to the act and then derive your principles after that.
The enormous contribution this committee could make would be to address real problems in a principled fashion and not jump on the bandwagon of making cosmetic and ineffective, unprincipled changes to the Young Offenders Act.
Thank you.
The Chair: Thanks.
Professor Bala.
Professor Nicholas Bala (Associate Dean, Faculty of Law, Queen's University): I'm Nick Bala. I'm a law professor at Queen's University and a father of four.
My primary teaching and research interests are in areas related to children and families. Some of the recent research work I've done has been comparative, and it clearly indicates that law is not the most important factor in how one responds to youth crime and levels of youth crime.
We can look at the United States, where they have a very punitive legal regime and a very high crime rate. When one thinks about that, the kinds of cuts we're now seeing to our social service, health and education systems have to be a cause of enormous concern. We may well be living through an experiment in social policy in seeing what the effects of those will be on youth crime.
Law does have some significance, and one has to look at legal regimes. I have done research, for example, about the issue of youth under 12. I personally am a little concerned about not having any criminal law for the 10 to 12 group and have written and advocated for a very limited use of the Young Offenders Act for that group.
I have done work with and am a member of the Frontenac Youth Diversion Program. Diversion alternative measures are very important and if anything should be expanded and used more extensively. Others have written and spoken about that, and I would very much support that work.
I have also done research in the area of transfers. I'm very concerned about the possibility of the committee recommending an increase in the number of transfers. We've just gone through one round of amendments that you have wisely seen fit to put forward. We should see how that works before we immediately change the law.
I don't think we should change the law and just keep on changing it. When we change the law, let's assess how that works.
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The Chair: Thanks.
Mr. Gallaway.
Mr. Gallaway (Sarnia - Lambton): My name is Roger Gallaway, and I represent Sarnia - Lambton, which is in the deep south of Ontario. I've been a member of the justice committee for about two years, and it's a great pleasure to see so many familiar faces here today. Our game initially was to try to figure out where we had seen everyone.
As to my background, I too am a lawyer. I'm a graduate of the University of Windsor, but like Mr. Trudell, my friend across the way, and Dr. Leschied, I'm not so provincial as to think everything happens in the city of Windsor.
I, too, am a parent. I have four children. I must say that I'm married to a lady who is a junior kindergarten teacher and I hear daily about the necessity of early detection and early intervention.
Thank you.
The Chair: Judge King.
Her Honour Judge Lynn King (Family Court Judge, Toronto, Ontario): I am a youth court and family court judge and have been one for over 10 years, and - I don't want any hissing - I'm from Toronto.
I thought about what I could say today in one minute and decided that it would be best to describe to you my feelings after sitting over 10 years in youth court.
Every day I'm struck with the thought that these children are our children. They are literally and metaphorically our children. I happen to be the mother of two boys, one who's an adolescent and not enjoying it. They are also the children of our friends, the children of our neighbours, the children of our community. They are not aliens; they're not strangers.
If they've failed in any way, it's because we've failed them. These children are often hopeless; they're sad. As Mr. Henteleff says, I can't describe how many of them are severely learning disabled, and most of all, they're just not respected. Nobody respects them, and they come in and expect not to be respected.
There are many, many ways, and there are many people here who can describe the things that can be done for these children. Many things are being done for them; many things can be done for them. One of the things that ought not to be done for them is jail. It hasn't worked in the past, and it is really just an unimaginative, hopeless solution.
The Chair: Your Honour - there's a lot of you people here today.
His Honour Judge Thomas Gove (Provincial Court of British Columbia): My name is Tom Gove. I'm a judge from British Columbia. I started practising law in 1974. Throughout my practice, much of my work was in the area of juvenile and youth law. In 1990 I became a judge in British Columbia. I also sit in criminal court, family court, which includes child protection as well as youth.
In 1994, I was appointed by the Province of British Columbia to conduct an inquiry into child welfare. That arose out of the death of a little boy, whose name was Matthew Vaudreuil, whose name became known across the country. The end of the work of that inquiry was recommendations that included radically changing how we approach child welfare in British Columbia.
The result was that two months ago in British Columbia we radically changed the way we address the whole area of child welfare. We have a new ministry now, called the Ministry for Children and Families, which has taken on the responsibility of all child welfare services, including youth correctional services. The message I would have is that youth services to young people who become in trouble with the law is part of a larger child welfare system and has to be viewed in that way.
Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you, Your Honour.
David MacDonald.
Mr. David MacDonald (Director, The Learning Centre, Sydney, Nova Scotia): Thank you. Good morning. My name is David MacDonald and I'm from Sydney Mines, Nova Scotia. I am the director of the Learning Centre, which is officially and technically a school but in effect we deliver a variety of services to youth, wide-ranging services that includes academic, along with the necessary and critical services that our young people need.
I work with youth in crisis, at virtually every level and stage of crisis. Of course, our effort is on early intervention. Nevertheless, the reality is that we do have students and young people that are in crisis at all stages.
We work with young people who are involved with the justice system, and we work with them again at all stages and all levels of their involvement with the justice system, both during and after.
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Recently, we established a satellite school in the local correctional centre so there is consistency for our students who are coming to and leaving the correctional centre, so that their programs can continue whether they be in the correctional centre or at our school.
Essentially, we attempt to coordinate existing community resources and focus them on the needs of the student. We really attempt to treat the source of the difficulties our young people are having. Whether it's a learning disability, whether it's a family or social or emotional situation, we attempt to treat the source. But what we really do is instil a sense of hope in our young people.
If there is a single symptom that is really bringing our young people down, it's a sense of hopelessness. Once a person has given up hope, whether they be young or old, nothing really matters. When we instil hope, we instil a dream that they do matter and that life matters, and away we go from there.
Thank you.
The Chair: Mr. Garber-Conrad.
Mr. Martin Garber-Conrad (Executive Director, Edmonton City Centre Church Corporation): I'm Martin Garber-Conrad, from Edmonton City Centre Church Corporation, which is a medium-sized social service organization that, among other things, does outreach housing and employment programs with young people, especially street youth involved in prostitution. We also coordinate several early intervention programs for at-risk preschool children.
My perspective is that the youth justice system is seriously flawed, but the Young Offenders Act is not the problem and therefore absolutely nothing we do to it will be the solution.
The Chair: Dr. Pennell.
Dr. Joan Pennell (Chair, Youth Crime and Justice Committee, National Crime Prevention Council, Newfoundland): Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm Joan Pennell, from the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. We're not claiming to be the centre of the country but, instead, its start. Back home, I serve as the director at the school of social work at Memorial University.
To continue what a number of us are saying, that we're parents, I'm the mother of three sons, all of whom have hit the teenage years. They and their buddies are certainly a steep learning curve.
I'm here representing the National Crime Prevention Council. Along with Anne Sherman, I chair its youth justice committee. This committee, along with the council, takes the position that if we're going to keep our children and young people safe, if we're going to keep them out of crime, we need to take a social development approach to crime prevention. By that we mean some very simple things. They need to have income security; they need to have adequate learning opportunities; they need to have real opportunities for jobs and for training; and they need to have clear limits set forth.
We take the position, along with a number of others here today, that the problem is not the Young Offenders Act. There are problems with implementation, but what's even more important is trying to build those community processes that make it possible to keep our children and young people safe and out of crime.
Coming from the province with the lowest rate of crime in the country, I'm well aware of the things families and communities can do in a very proactive way and how they can work in partnership with protective services to keep crime rates down. At the council, we take the position that the very last resort should be the court and incarceration and that the real options are the things we do before then.
The Chair: Thank you.
Mr. Jeffers.
Mr. Ken Jeffers (Harriet Tubman Association): I am not a lawyer or a judge. However, I'm a parent of two teenage daughters.
I've been working in the African-Canadian community for over twenty years. I'm one of the principal founders of the Harriet Tubman Association, which is an organization that has worked in the black community, primarily among young people. I was also involved with the four-level government report on the study after the so-called Yonge Street riots and had a great deal of exposure to some of the emotion and passion that young people, particularly black youth, feel about the criminal justice system.
I developed the court workers program in the city of Toronto, in which we trained a number of people to work in the courts, helping young people understand the criminal justice system and the kinds of options they had open to them.
I also designed a heritage counselling program, which is an approach to counselling that recognizes and acknowledges the element of racism in the criminal justice system and the ways in which they can deal and cope with that.
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In my other life I'm also part of the Mayor's Task Force on Drugs and have been for a number of years, and I have also managed a number of pilot programs in areas like Regent Park, St. James Town and Alexandra Park, which are fairly high-crime areas. We've had some really good success with those programs, so I'm quite familiar with that.
I am very concerned with the kind of anger among some of the young people I deal with, and their frustration and hopelessness, which reminds me a little too much of what's happening south of the border. We share a lot of intervention models with people south of the border who are getting a lot of success with them.
Today I am hoping to share some of my experiences and look at some creative ways of dealing with the fact that in ten years the incarceration rate among young black people increased 204%, after the study of the committee on systemic racism by Judge Cole. I am very concerned and I am here to share this with you.
The Chair: Thank you. I thank everyone for that brief introduction to your interests.
It occurred to me after the bells stopped ringing that some of you may not understand that. They may from time to time interrupt us. Those bells call the members to the House and we ignore them unless the whip comes screaming in here.
There are other people in the room who are here to observe but who can also be excellent resources for us. I am pleased that there are several officials here from the Department of Justice. We also have the provincial co-chair of the federal-provincial-territorial task force on the Young Offenders Act, which has recently reported. There will also be representatives of the minister's office and of some other groups.
At noon the Minister of Justice will be hosting a lunch, just so that you know your physical needs will be taken care of, and he will be joining us informally at that time.
So there are lots of resource people here and lots of people that I hope you will have an opportunity to connect with in addition to each other.
I will do this introduction myself. This is Staff Sergeant Neal Jessop of the Windsor police service. It should not surprise you that he's from Windsor, but he's also president of the Canadian Police Association and a member of the National Crime Prevention Council. I'm not going to let you do any other introduction until later, Neal.
I will go now to the first theme of the day we've identified, which is early intervention to keep children and young people out of the youth justice system.
I'm going to ask Mr. Ramsay to introduce this section. His introduction is not something we've all agreed on. He's simply going to...I don't know, either ask questions or make a statement. If you feel moved to respond, then raise your hand and I will recognize you. It's a good idea, if I don't catch your signal, to try to catch the clerk's signal, and I'm sure Patricia will help us as well.
Mr. Ramsay. You have five minutes.
Mr. Ramsay: Thank you, Madam Chair. I will stay well within the five-minute period.
Because I will not be able to stay for the full day - I have to leave before we're done this afternoon - I'd like to touch very briefly on the three themes and then come back to theme number one.
I think we have to address these three areas. First, we need to devise and implement more aggressive policies in the area of crime prevention, which includes early detection and intervention with children who progressively demonstrate aggressive or improper behaviour. Expert testimony has demonstrated that aggressive behaviour that leads to violence emerges as early as kindergarten. Priscilla de Villiers described that fact to us this morning in very clear terms, I think.
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Second, we need to design and implement pre-charge diversion programs similar to the Sparwood program in B.C., where successful resolution is achieved in cases of non-violent youth crime and where full restitution to the victim has been reported in 100% of the cases, which I consider to be a phenomenal statistic.
We also need to advance and utilize much more often diversion programs or alternative measures in all cases of first-time non-violent offences.
Finally, I believe we must ensure and remain dedicated to the protection of society and not shrink from the need to incarcerate all violent young offenders who demonstrate they are a threat to the life or safety of the citizens of this country.
This must be coupled with effective rehabilitation programs. The protection of society must be made the first priority in the YOA's declaration of principles.
I believe if we successfully address these three areas, we will achieve the needed balance between the prevention and rehabilitative requirements of young offenders and the protection of society, with the protection of society maintaining supremacy.
In my opinion, the YOA does not achieve this balance today. I ask all distinguished members present today to assist us in achieving this objective by proposing amendments to the YOA or suggestions outside of the YOA that will strike this balance, so our young offender legislation will not only be effective but will also command the respect and support of Canadian society. The present YOA does not enjoy that status today, in my humble opinion.
Coming back to subsection 15(1), we have seen and heard testimony that aggressive behaviour can be identified as early as eighteen months in children. There is no question we have heard evidence that there is a direct link between illiteracy and youth crime. That's not the only cause or contributing factor to youth crime, but it is something that is extremely important, particularly in this area of cutbacks in provincial and federal budgets. It seems that the educational system is not being given the priority it requires, and we will see the youth crime situation be affected as a result of those cuts.
One of the most effective programs we have seen is in Quebec, which has the Youth Protection Act. When teachers and other members of society see the signs of a child who is in need, there are programs they can refer that child to where the parents' intervention can occur, the child can be helped and the parents assisted. I think the statistics demonstrate very clearly that this program is successful in the area of prevention.
I don't think there's anyone I've talked to or we have heard who does not want to cause the youth justice system to dry up on the vine and blow away. Four excellent programs are the Sydney Mines program, the Sparwood program, the Earlscourt project, and the wilderness camp we visited near Prince George, B.C. I think they are excellent programs to deal with people who have fallen through the cracks, as well as youths who have entered the justice system and not only need to be incarcerated but also need solid, sound and effective rehabilitative programs.
Madam Chair, just cut me off if I go too far.
The Chair: You're there, kiddo.
Mr. Ramsay: I'll just wrap up by thanking you very much and thanking everyone for being here. I'm very interested to hear your comments on all three of these themes.
The Chair: The first person who wanted to respond is Mr. St-Laurent. I'm not going to let MPs monopolize it, but you go right ahead. Then Mr. Trudell can speak.
[Translation]
Mr. St-Laurent: I may not even take five minutes, because I'll have to leave you shortly to attend question period.
It's important to point out to the participants that we, the members of the Committee, toured the country to meet all the participants who are here today. In my opinion, as Madam Chair mentioned, each MP has his or her own opinion, just as you do, of course.
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What seems to be clear is that we are finally heading towards diversion, which will stress looking at the issue and not at punishment; at least, I dare to hope so.
I'd like to hear what the participants think about this. Earlier we heard people giving a broad outline. You know that we're here to put together a report or a document to be submitted to the Minister, who will study it to formulate a new act if need be. So this is the time to speak up and say what we've got to say. It's a bit what people did when we met them on their home ground.
There's a lot of talk about early intervention. This is a very important area, and I think we should invest in it with a view to protecting society, as my colleague from Crowfoot just mentioned. I am in full agreement. I feel that, at present, there is excessive use of prisons and I think that the majority of people around the table are aware of this. By investing in early prevention and detection, we're investing in the long term in the real protection of society, which is not the case when we send people to prison, because prisons are places for parking undesirables. They're put in prison because we don't want to hear about them, not because we want to work things out for them. It's important to know how to make the distinction. This question has to be examined a bit.
We have to set up early detection programs. Tell us if you want early protection and what sort of programs you'd like to see in this area.
The police will have a new role to play, though they've already assumed it to some extent. The example is always given of the young boy who steals a chocolate bar from the corner store. Most of the time, it's not because he's hungry, but more because of some other social problem. You all know, I think, what kind of action we want to take. We suggest that the police officer not open a criminal record, but that he or she go to see the child's parents and forego the role of police officer. I'd like to hear your comments in this connection since there will be people whose role will have to change, including that of the defence lawyers. There are a lot of people around this table. We have to take a good look at this question.
We can already see, and it's a good thing, judges who've looked at this issue and tried some things out. I'm referring to an experiment conducted in the Yukon. Correct me if I'm mistaken. It's interesting and I think something important is going to come out of it. But people have to express themselves clearly. We can take it; we're used to that in the House of Commons. We dish it out to each other every day. We can take it, but we need to know where we're headed and that's why you're here today.
I'll close on that point. Sentencing circles are something I'm particularly interested in, too much maybe, but I like the idea. Shouldn't we take advantage of the context of young offenders to experiment in an environment that is close to us, in the urban centres? Sentencing circles are set up in areas where people know one another better, those areas referred to as remote areas. I come from a remote area, where it could be done. This might be a new approach to consider in other areas. The success rate of sentencing circles is unequivocal. The success rate is estimated at 80 or 85 per cent, while at present the repeat offender rate in the prison system is 80 per cent. I'd like to hear your point of view in this connection. Thank you very much.
[English]
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. St-Laurent. I just point out that on the issue of sentencing circles, I appreciate you're going to have to leave for a while but we'll maybe save that until the second part. We will have a lot of opportunity to talk about sentencing circles at that time.
Mr. Trudell.
Mr. Trudell: Thank you, Madam Chair. I think we live in a pretty sweet country where we are here examining these important issues. The future of this country and any country belongs to the children. How we treat the children is going to determine our future.
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I say to every client who comes into my office that defending a criminal case is like performing an operation. I don't start until I get the X-rays. I think what you're doing here and what you have to do is get the X-rays. I think it's really important.
I don't think there is anyone in this room who would be able to go with me right now to a hospital delivery room and see the new children and point out who is going to be an offender and who is going to be a victim. These children are brought into the world and placed in an environment. As they graduate, they learn discipline. This is about discipline.
Just as I tell the client we have to wait until we get the X-rays, we say to children as they develop that they are not entitled to certain liberties until they are able to show they are disciplined enough to live in the society and accept responsibilities. And I ask you to exercise discipline in what you do here, because this is what we're talking about.
One of the major concerns I would respectfully like to submit to this committee is the lack of information to the public on what criminal justice is all about. We fail to examine and explain the X-rays of criminal justice and young offenders to the public. We react in some cases for immediate gratification, just like children do. We react in response to voters who don't understand the real story; in response to headlines suggesting there are children running amok, taking advantage of the criminal justice system and thumbing their nose at it. If the public was enlightened on the young offenders system and what the legislation is there for, they would understand and we would not have to react, in my respectful submission, in an undisciplined fashion.
There is no question here that we can't accept - someone has to have the courage to say this - that this is the time for cutbacks for children. I understand all political parties here are saying we have to put more emphasis and resources into diversion, early detection and sentencing circles. Take out the sentencing. Let's talk about circles. Let's just get the kids and talk to them.
If this is the solution, then at the federal level we cannot accept that the provincial government, because of cutbacks, doesn't allow it to work. Somebody has to take the responsibility and put children above politics. It is time, in my respectful submission as a defence counsel, we start taking the blinders off and realizing that unless they are financed these things won't work.
I think this is really a problem that has to be addressed here in the early stages. We all want to prevent crime. We all want to help these children grow through society. But if zero tolerance policies are in effect in the schoolyards, kids are being brought into court and eventually jailed because they've breached their bail conditions for things we all did when we were young. If you don't agree with me, I will say for things I did when I was a youth. It is absolutely unbelievable the numbers of kids who are being brought into the criminal justice system because of zero tolerance policies and because somebody has cut back.
The kids in this country will develop if we put in the financial resources and have the courage to move ahead. If the provinces aren't going to do it, then I challenge the federal government to say: ``Give us the kids.''
The Chair: Thank you.
Mr. Henteleff.
Mr. Henteleff: There is no doubt in my mind the Young Offenders Act has been a profound failure. One need only look at the percentage of reoffending youth that occurred under the Juvenile Delinquents Act. It showed a recidivism rate of 27.5%, whereas under the YOA it increased to 56%. Just think of that. With respect to non-special needs youth under the JDA, the percentage of reoffender youth was 20.5%. Under the YOA it was 60.5%. In fact, of course, the London Family Court Clinic carried out these studies under Dr. Leschied. At the same time, there has not been an increase in the amount of crime. All that is happening is we're increasing the number of children we lock up by enormous numbers.
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When you look at the number of children identified while they're in the juvenile justice system as having learning disabilities, it is approximately 12% of the 77% of the exceptionalities I described. It jumps to 30% when you have them graduate to prison, but what is really interesting is that out of 407 recent male admissions to the penitentiary system with an identified learning disability, nearly 50% have previous youth court involvements. Just think of what this means. In other words, what's happening is that more children are being locked up. Fewer children are being attended to in terms of their specific needs, and guess where they graduate to.
I can never understand for one moment why we're so prepared to spend $100,000 a year to lock up children and not quite prepared to spend $44,000 a year to see to it they get appropriate assistance. It just confounds me. Leaving aside the moral and ethical aspect of it, strictly from the commercial and economic point of view it makes such abundant sense, particularly as I'll identify in a moment.
On early intervention and even late intervention, one of the recent studies from penitentiaries showed that out of over 3,000 inmates identified with cognitive deficits, the rate of recidivism was reduced extraordinarily. What was really interesting in one of the subsets they identified of the prison population, those charged with sexual offences of various kinds, was that in this subgroup alone the extent of recidivism was half that in other categories of offences.
I think in order for the Young Offenders Act to achieve an appropriate balance between the needs and rights of young offenders and the right of society to be protected, the principal strategy of the Young Offenders Act should now be stated as being a sensitivity to young offenders as disabled persons first and as offenders second.
I think we keep on forgetting about what the Charter of Rights and Freedoms says. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms is very clear. The fundamental ideal of our system of equality guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is based on certain universal principles applying equally to all Canadians, no matter who they are. Yet, from the statistics I've just indicated, it is clear we discriminate against children to a greater degree than any other members of society. Why? We do it because they're helpless and because they have no votes.
Therefore, it seems to me we have to look at what can be done effectively. As I mentioned, I've taken advantage of your presence to provide you with a brief. If you'll turn to pages 56 to 64, starting at page 54, I'll identify the pages and then mention one program. You'll notice there are very appropriate techniques for identifying children at risk or children who are pre-delinquent before they become delinquents.
From pages 74 to 94 there are various programs. The one I wish to identify very quickly for you is what is called the MAPP program, the multi-agency preventative program, in Brandon, Manitoba. This is on page 75. There, every single agency with responsibility for high-risk children identified those children who were at greatest risk. They began to implement programs for dealing with these children at a high risk at the pre-delinquent and, in some instances, post-delinquent stage.
Their success rate has been phenomenal. The investment is extraordinarily modest compared to what it would cost to have them locked up. But we always forget there is a spillover effect. When you think of children who are young offenders in conflict with the law, don't think of them in isolation. Don't think of them in isolation from their parents and the consequences for their family. Don't think of them in isolation from their siblings and the consequences to them. Don't think in terms only of the consequences for the rest of society. Think of the extraordinary impact on everybody who forms part of not only their individual family unit but their extended family unit.
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So there are things that can be done. However, we must change the emphasis in the Young Offenders Act to recognize that 75% of children who are in custody have special needs requiring special education or requiring sociological or physiological intervention. What do we do with this 75%? We blame them for it and we lock them up for it. This is to their disadvantage and to our total disadvantage.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Henteleff.
Madame Toutant. Then it'll be Mr. Doob and then Ms Augimeri.
[Translation]
Ms Toutant: I'd like to talk to you about the experience of those involved with violent teenagers to try and convince you that the law doesn't change a thing. In the light of what some other witnesses mentioned earlier, a law will not change the difficulties experienced by the young people we're talking about.
When you work with teenagers who have committed violent acts, you notice quite quickly that just about only the media can write things like ``a murder out of the blue'' or ``a violent act that no one could have predicted.'' It's a little as if these teenagers were performing gratuitous acts, that came out of nowhere.
I've been working with teenagers at the Pinel Institute since 1972, or for 24 years. We've taken in over 600 violent teenagers during these years. I've seen some violent offences that seemed to come out of nowhere and that weren't visible, but they had been building up for many years. These years include a teenager's whole background and we often have to go back a very long way to identify the difficulties he experienced.
Why has nothing been done? We often say to ourselves that there are reasons for not acting earlier. We look first at the family. When we meet the parents of these teenagers, we realize that they're not all unthinking and irresponsible, unlike the image that some people like to give of them. Some parents have gradually become accustomed to increasing violence within their family from their children, sometimes saying to themselves that it will pass, that it's part of being a teenager.
It's a bit like spousal abuse. The violence isn't excessive at the beginning. It begins with small acts, with behaviour that becomes increasingly unacceptable, but which one becomes used to. We've seen parents like this who've grown accustomed to violence that was unacceptable in the eyes of anyone else.
Secondly, I think people often bring their children up the way they were brought up. So it's not easy for them to be critical of themselves. Who's going to criticize them? The turning point comes at school. Numerous problems are detected in kindergarten by teachers, who are not irresponsible people or people incapable of seeing the problems. Very often, they see these problems, but don't know what to do. They don't feel authorized to act, except to say they have the feeling that these children are headed for bigger problems.
Today, I'll be wearing a different hat from the one I've always worn during my career as a worker, and state that I am in favour of prevention. I'd like people to be authorized to intervene without laying blame, without pointing fingers and without stigmatizing.
I'll clarify my remarks, Madam Chair, if I still have time. Please stop me because I'm not easy to stop; I still haven't learned this idea of control. The Pinel Institute hasn't managed to cure me. You know that institutions don't cure everyone.
The law tends to want to find guilty parties and lay blame. Prevention often takes place through stigmatization.
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I think we ought to set up, at the kindergarten level, support mechanisms for all families, and those that need them most will take greater advantage of them.
I've always been terribly annoyed by the fact that we stigmatize people by calling them pre-delinquent. This tendency to stigmatize and brand people this way means that those who most need services don't use them because they get the impression they're sort of crawling on their knees in front of so-called normal people.
This morning I don't want to describe the huge number of prevention programs that exist. Numerous super-intelligent prevention programs exist throughout Canada, and some witnesses have already talked about them. When will the day come when we put them all together and share them? For example, in Quebec the Fondation de la visite has matched single-parent families with other families in the same neighbourhood and the same social class who help each other out and support each other. There are programs that work, but nobody talks about them. When there are problems, we say the law's going to fix them.
That's basically what I have to say. I'm in favour of prevention and an approach that doesn't stigmatize and doesn't lay blame.
[English]
The Chair: Professor Doob.
Prof. Doob: From listening to the comments so far this morning I think it would not be difficult to justify early intervention. I have one cautionary note, which is that it worries me as a criminologist that people justify early interventions into problems kids are having solely in terms of crime. The difficulty is that if kids have learning disabilities, if kids have various kinds of emotional difficulties, dealing with those in themselves, it seems to me, is a positive thing. The fact that they also have an impact on crime is well known and is an added benefit to these programs. I just caution that we should not evaluate these programs solely in terms of the prevention of crime.
The issue I think everybody has been talking about is the issue of how to focus our resources in a different way. I'm suggesting the problem is larger than the question of focusing resources.
The difficulty is that whenever I talk about prevention people are looking for a quick fix, as somebody earlier pointed out. The issue is usually put as, well, that's all right for the long term, but what do we do right now? This then gets translated into soft approaches versus hard approaches.
The difficulty is that we're really creating a false dichotomy, that we can do something in the long term or we can do something in the short term, and it's a choice. The problem is that we know full well by now the changes that could be made in the Young Offenders Act, or minor changes even in the operation of the youth justice system, will really have a very minor impact on the amount of crime.
Therefore, what I think we need to do is to shift not from soft to hard or hard to soft or from long term to short term but towards effective approaches. These approaches really do have one important characteristic in common, which is that typically they are outside the youth justice system, or if they are programs that are within the youth justice system they are programs that focus on problems individual young people have.
When I look ahead to the committee's report, it seems to me there are a couple of important things. The first is that the recommendations you'll be making will be interpreted not only in the way in which you view young offenders but in the way in which you view young people generally. This is a broader issue than the issue of young offenders. We shouldn't think of these issues solely in terms of the youth justice system.
Secondly, if this committee is going to make a lasting impact not only in terms of whatever changes it might recommend for the Young Offenders Act, what it needs to do is to create a climate where we can talk about approaching the issues of youth crime and the youth justice system in a sensible way. In doing that the committee really needs to state up front what the limits to the law are and how we can best really deal with problems. If the committee believes the changes to the law will have a minimal impact on crime, then the committee needs to say that. It is not unheard of for committees to make such statements. I think such a statement from this committee could have an important impact.
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The difficulty at the moment is that when people are concerned about crime and when people are concerned about violence, what they do is they look to the law and they look to the courts. What this committee needs to do is break that link between crime, the law and courts, and talk about the link between crime in the communities and the society that we live in. Making such a statement up front might then give legitimacy to those around the table who are trying to lever resources, but also public attention, to the issues of prevention.
Thank you very much.
The Chair: Thank you.
Ms Augimeri, then Mrs. de Villiers and Mr. Winegarden.
Ms Augimeri: I'm going to really just focus on children under 12, because that's where my expertise lies.
For the last 11 years, I've worked with hundreds of children under the age of 12. AsMrs. de Villiers indicated, the thing you need to focus on is early identification. Identifying these young children who, as early as 4 and 5 years of age, are getting into trouble is critical. We start working with the kids at age 6, but we've had a number of children at 4 and 5 - at the kindergarten level - referred for quite aggressive acts.
I think we have to remember, as I heard Judge King and Mr. MacDonald point out, that these are children who need hope. They don't understand the judicial system at all. We take the children to the police station for a police tour because we want to give them an opportunity to meet police officers in a non-problematic context.
When the children first are told that they're going to the police station, they're just so scared. We ask them why, we problem-solve, we talk about why they're scared and about what's important, and we talk about why we're going to the police station. A lot of them are really nervous because the majority of their contact has been quite negative. The interesting factor, though, is that once they come out of the police station, a lot of them want to be police officers because they now see police officers in a different light.
So I believe very strongly that much could be done through the efforts of early identification, and through intervention with children at risk, towards an effective crime prevention solution.
We've heard around the table that there is no single pathway to delinquency, but we do know from the research that there are many factors, such as the early age of onset for aggression - as early as sometimes 4 and 5 years of age, and sometimes you see it as early as toddlers. We also know that poor family management practices.... We don't want to blame the families all the time in these cases, but we do know from the research that there is ineffective parenting, parental monitoring, and an inconsistency provision. There are also academic problems, particularly in reading. The majority of our children have reading difficulties. Peer rejection, parental criminality and psychopathology - there are so many other factors.
There is also a great deal that we know from working with high-risk children and their families. We know that multisystemic programs, such as those Mr. Ramsay has identified today, are effective in terms of reducing the factors that place children at risk for delinquency. As well, we know that the earlier we intervene with these children and provide them with a range of services, the greater our chances of success with these children in hopefully deterring them from getting into the court system.
We also know that services need to be timely. How many times have we heard that children are placed on waiting lists? Or, if they go through the court system, there's such a gap in time between the time they get in there and the time at which they committed the crime.
We also know that with the fact of being multisystemic.... In the under-12 outreach project, we are multisystemic. We try to target all the various areas of the child's life and the family's life. Not only do we provide self-control and problem-solving groups for the children, we also provide parent training groups for the parents, and we do crisis intervention. We do school advocacy and provide the children with reading tutors. And we also do restitution, which is the newest component that we've added because we do feel children need to be accountable for their actions.
As also indicated, there is too little out there for children and their families, and we've also heard about the gaps in services. What we have found through the research just recently - and I would just like to share this really quickly - are factors related to effective service delivery. Programs need to be flexible, multifaceted, sustained and individualized to client needs. We need to maintain consistency in treatment strength and integrity, connect and engage the parents and child in a treatment process as quickly as possible, and target the child's antisocial attitudes and thinking errors that maintain the belief that antisocial behaviour is acceptable. We need to teach the child effective problem-solving and self-control skills. We also need to provide the child with outlets for social and recreation activities. There are so many children who may live right across the road from a structured community centre but do not utilize it for whatever the reason.
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We also need to teach effective parenting skills in either group format or individual counselling sessions, and we also need to address issues concerning sibling rivalry and academic and behavioural school problems. We also need to provide services wherever and whenever, in accordance with the client's needs and preferences. And we need to provide opportunities for continued involvement in the program. Just having the child in a program for three months is not enough. We need to have that open-door policy so that if the child comes back.... If a child was in my program and was to have youth court contact at a later date, I would hope he or she would be able to be referred back so that we could continue working with that child and the child's family.
Last, it's also critical that we continue to be evidenced-based and continue to incorporate empirical findings in order to provide the best possible service, while making the service available to all children and families in Ontario and throughout Canada. Early intervention is the best hope that children on a trajectory of criminal activities can be salvaged for the mutual benefit of themselves and society. And again we need to stress that these are, after all, children in need of help, not children in need of a criminal sentence.
The last point is what Mr. Henteleff was talking about with regard to cost. It costs $100,000 to keep a child in jail or a youth in justice for a year, but if we can keep one of the kids from our programs out of jail, the entire program is paid for. That's where we need to put our resources.
Thank you.
The Vice-Chair (Ms Torsney): Thank you, Ms Augimeri. Your program costs what per year per child?
Ms Augimeri: Per child, it's approximately $2,500.
The Vice-Chair (Ms Torsney): Thank you.
Mrs. de Villiers.
Ms de Villiers: Thank you.
I think the advantage that I have over everybody else is that I really know very little about a number of things. The very first thing that struck me when I started to look into this whole question of youth, justice and the YOA was this: why is this being chaired only by the justice department? Where is Health and Welfare, Community Services or whatever the name is, Education, etc.?
Every single person I can see around this table seems to be talking about, first of all, primary prevention. Well, I hate to say it, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with judges, with defence lawyers and with psychologists. If the primary prevention is put into place, hopefully we never get to you and you're out of work, which would be wonderful.
The second point is that - and I don't mean to demean you, but this is an extraordinary thing to me - I don't see one person here who represents early education. As I understood it, you're dealing with children who need -
Ms Augimeri: We work in the school systems, we work directly with teachers, and we do a lot of connections with all schools in Toronto.
Ms de Villiers: That's right, but you're working with the people who are already identified. Is that correct?
Ms Augimeri: No, they are identified, but we also go into the schools and teach the children in the classrooms. We teach them self-control and problem-solving techniques right at the base, grassroots level, right at the beginning.
Ms de Villiers: But I have to say that in most of the schools I have come across in this country, it is left to the teacher to deal with that. If they're lucky enough, they have a program like yours that has a person going into a classroom, but how many days a week are you there? Teachers across this country have told me that they have to deal with this on the spot. A kindergarten child, a little girl of the age of 5, trashed a classroom and caused $6,000 worth of damage. The whole school was in shock, but the teacher had to deal with the children in that classroom. She had to deal with how they were terrified by the violence, and she had to deal with a violent child. But the funding had been cut even more for any interventions or any school psychologists in the area.
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So what I'm saying is that once we get to somebody who can identify it, that's great, but they are few and far between. Usually the people who are involved in this are the front-line teachers.
Secondly, I've heard across this country that funding is disorganized, it overlaps, it is flavour of the month. You just get a program going and it's axed and another one comes in. Nobody seems to have any handle on how we're going to deal with this primary intervention. Yes, there are programs, but they're scattered and the number of children you access are few. You need this as a universal program, but I'll come back to that.
I really feel that if we are going to tackle not youth justice.... Youth justice comes once there has in fact been an offence and therefore a victim or victims. That's when the YOA and the justice system kick in. We have to distinguish between these two levels; the primary area is prior to justice.
The thing that frustrates me is that I've sat in on so many of these meetings and and have seen waffling between primary intervention, tertiary, violent offenders, and secondary intervention. In fact, each level needs to have an integrated approach, and it needs to lock in so that the one goes to the next one seamlessly. But that is not happening.
Secondly, there are the extreme funding cuts that we're finding across this country. I've not been in one place in this whole country where I haven't heard about this ad nauseam. As a volunteer I don't know about this, but I hear it all the time. I believe we have to start integrating the control of funding. I've even suggested to some provincial governments, at one of the national conferences that we held, that if each of these departments that are involved dedicates 0.05% of their budget to dealing with this in an integrated fashion, we won't need new funding. But it needs to be integrated. We can't hurl it in from COMSOC, with a little bit from Education and something from Justice.
So if there's one plea on that, it is that there needs to be an integrated approach, with people who know what they're talking about at each level.
One thing that has disturbed me intensely is that it seems to be chicken and egg. You have somebody you identify as being in desperate need of assistance, usually when the behaviour is quite pronounced. In effect, however, it's really only once the child enters into the justice system that it can be legislated. Until then, it's question of identification. We have parental refusal, we have young people who don't want to do it. There's no sort of coherent approach.
I must say that the Quebec model, the Youth Protection Act - which I don't know entirely, I've just read a bit about it - seems to be an area in which the justice system could really play a federal role in linking the primary and secondary interventions. Where it is deemed necessary for the child, this in fact has to happen. At the moment, it seems to me to be very hit and miss.
In addition - and this hearkens back to my previous point - we are dealing with youth as a whole, children as a whole. They are 5-, 6- or 7-year-olds, or whatever their age group is, and the targets - the money, the real interventions - are going to those who already have marked problems. We need some universal programs for all children, covering things such as how to deal with violence, mediation techniques, behaviour management, a clear understanding of rules of behaviour, etc. Then, when the group that this is not affecting makes itself obvious, we can start giving them some help.
One of the problems is that so much time and effort and academia is focused on the behavioural problems, very little attention and time is being paid to the children in the class who are also battling many of these problems that we need to reinforce. I feel this is an area that is lost because we're looking at justice. So we're looking at those who are outside of the norm. But we need to provide some of those violence prevention strategies for all the students.
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We have a model that we've been working on. We got a big grant from the public health department in Hamilton-Wentworth. It's in publication right now.
The model is an example of primary prevention. It's actually been tested in six schools. It's now in many other schools and it's being progressively evaluated. It's two years old. The program is geared to the total population, in this case school-age children before the problems really start surfacing.
Schools are identified as the ideal site for a whole cadre of prevention programs, in part because all children attend school. Primary prevention programs advocate creating school environments where children and youth feel welcome and appreciated as valued members of the school and where they are given personal skills and social skills. The secondary prevention program should be geared to the high-risk children. We have all this information and I can give it to you.
The tertiary program is actually the treatment. When we're talking about intervention, I think we have to be quite plain. I have been invited to speak to so many teachers' organizations across this country because the teachers feel totally beleaguered. They are not given these skills. They don't know how to deal with it.
I have to tell you that the problem of disclosure when you least expect it is one most dreadful things a teacher has to face as well. I have reached the point now where I can see right across a room when somebody's going to come and tell me something really dreadful and very intimate. It may have happened 30 years ago and it's devastating. This is what is happening on a daily basis in our schools, and teachers are having to deal with it without this coordinated training. The skills are not being given to the staff. So if we're talking primary prevention, let's talk about it, but right across the board.
The Chair: Thank you.
Ms de Villiers: May I just add one more thing?
As a grassroots organization, we do put our money where our mouth is and we do have a number of supports from the community. I've heard a lot of people throwing the word ``community'' around and I don't know how many are actually working in the community with this. We have finished at least eight quite successful programs where we support other intervention levels, and we are at the moment working on a package for community groups who've approached us from across the country, so that they can, in turn, create that village, which will then nurture the child we've talked about in the National Crime Prevention Council.
In closing, it also seems to me that we talk very glibly about the community and we fail to identify where it is. I can tell you that there is no funding trickling down to the community. We are all volunteers and there is very little support given to ``the community''. I'm not talking about funded community-based programs but the real community, the people who are willing and able to give the support if they're just shown how. So when we are talking about preventive methods, please, just let's bring in how we are going to organize the community, given the fact that is no funding being given to them.
Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you, Mrs. de Villiers.
Mr. Winegarden, then Dr. Peterson-Badali and then Dr. Leschied.
Mr. Winegarden: Thank you. I can appreciate the things Priscilla is saying, particularly with regard to the intervention with young children. I'd like to say something about that, but first I'd like to address some of the concerns that I hear voiced around the table. One is that the Young Offenders Act is a failure, and the other is that it's a success but the system is a failure.
I'd like to take the middle road and say that the Young Offenders Act is a document designed to give our society guidance about how we want to control our behaviour, and it's failing us as a guiding light. It's not giving us the guidance we need.
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In Saskatchewan, Indian youth make up 77% of the youth who go through the youth justice system. That's a staggering figure. Even more staggering, perhaps, is that they only make up 10% of the children who go through youth diversion. It's John Howard who's giving that kind of delivery, and they're swamped with that. So there's really nothing out there to give youth diversion to Indian kids.
As a result, Indian people feel as if they're being jailed by this system, by white society, because Indian kids in Saskatchewan make up I think 67% of the youth who are incarcerated. It appears as if, and it feels as if, we're being jailed by white society, and I think that needs to be addressed. It can be addressed by the inclusion of our values in the expression of our guiding document - because that's what the Young Offenders Act is, our guiding document, and there are no Indian values in there, sadly.
In Saskatoon we're working hard now to try to get a community justice committee developed for Saskatoon. How it's going to operate - just very briefly, for your information - is that an offence will occur, the police then become notified and become involved, and at that point perhaps the young offender is apprehended. At that time they could give a warning or they could decide to take the matter further, at which point they would have the matter brought before what we're going to call the assessment committee. Every single youth who's going to be charged is brought before the assessment committee. The assessment committee is made up of members of the aboriginal community, legal aid, prosecutions, and the police will also be involved. That committee is going to decide what to do with that case: should we charge this person?
I know of a plethora of circumstances when Indian youth have been charged over meaningless things. There was one child who had eaten an Easter egg, and spent seven days in jail before they finally got him back to court. Seven days - that's just ridiculous when you think of it that way. Of course the judge threw it out at that point.
This assessment arm would make those kinds of decisions at that point and say, this doesn't belong in court, this is a $1.50 egg, this kid does not belong in the criminal justice system. At that point they could decide what direction the case would take.
Everybody is going to agree that there are some circumstances where the child must go through the criminal justice system. I was involved in one case where a 13-year-old beat a woman with a hammer and raped her. That's clearly a situation that involves the use of intervention, to protect society. But the example of the egg is the other extreme, and there should be no charge. So for some situations we'd have to go through court, and then you could look at sentencing circles or things like that.
We're going to set up a youth diversion project at that juncture, which youth who maybe shouldn't be charged but need some intervention in their lives could come before it and have a circle held - an alternate circle, rather than a sentencing circle. The circle could make recommendations about what to do with this person and have the family of that person involved.
Some people were mentioning earlier that it's difficult to tailor the sentencing circle for the cities, but I disagree. I think it's a natural fit, because the crime itself defines the community. You have the victim and his community, and you have the offender and his community, and there you are - that's community.
So at that point you have the community involved in what to do with this individual. In some cases the individual wouldn't even be charged, but there could be inventive things done around this person. We heard a statistic here that it cost $100,000 to keep a youth in jail for a year. You could buy some serious hockey equipment for that kid for $100,000. You could get him involved in gymnastics or hockey, spend the money wisely - because this is just ridiculous. We're supplementing the system, we're not supplementing the kids.
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It's asinine to say this, it should be so obvious: a parent's job is to nurture the child. Collectively, the Young Offenders Act should be something that nurtures children instead of running them through the criminal justice system. As we all may or may not know, you don't develop good children by slapping them around, because they just become angry and reticent to do anything in the world. That's what the Young Offenders Act does to kids, to Indian kids - it slaps them around.
What I would suggest is to take that money spent on putting these kids in jail and close down all the beds - you know, where they have these custody beds. Start redirecting that money into hockey teams and gymnastics for these kids. Get these kids doing something that's going to give them some potential for growth.
That's all I have to say. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
Dr. Peterson-Badali, Dr. Leschied and Jim Robb.
Dr. Peterson-Badali: Thanks. I'm going to start by making some general comments and then just a couple of specific plugs. As a psychologist, I can't help trying to figure out sometimes what, for me, the broad themes are of some of the overarching issues.
In terms of the way I've been involved in this process and also in terms of the research I've done over the last 10 years, looking at the tremendous lack of knowledge about the justice system that kids have, that young offenders have, that the public has, and the discontent that we hear, and trying to figure out where it's coming from, one of things that strikes me is that there's an overall sense of alienation. We sense alienation with respect to kids who feel alienated from their parents, from their families, from their communities. We hear alienation in terms of young offenders feeling they are not heard in the system, that they're going through a process that doesn't respect them in any way. I've heard young offenders talking about not ever having been asked by a judge, for example, when they're in a trial, why they did what they did, and wanting to have a chance to have their say and just have some input.
Certainly victims and their families are feeling alienated. They're feeling as if they're not considered in the system, that they're not part of what's going on, and that it doesn't take account of the horrors they've suffered.
Then more broadly, on a number of different community and societal levels, we have schools with zero tolerance policies that are feeling alienated from the kids they're teaching, and who therefore shunt kids into the justice system for all sorts of behaviour. I certainly can relate to whatMr. Winegarden is saying about some of the very, very trivial matters that are ending up in the justice system now, which wouldn't likely have a number of years ago. There's a sense that they just can't tolerate this any more and don't know what to do.
In terms of a framework, that makes me think that what we need to do - and I think we've heard it this morning in many different ways - is to bring people back together. We're talking, for example, about the principle of restorative justice, which can occur at the intervention level as well as for kids who are in the system. When you talk about sentencing circles within the system, you can also have programs of pre-charge diversion that focus on bringing people together - bringing victims and offenders together.
One of the things I think about is a pilot project that Justice for Children and Youth in Toronto has had going for a while now that has been very successful, and that's peer mediation, where students - kids - are trained to be mediators. I believe it is now serving both as diversion and as a post-charge alternative measures program in Toronto - I could be wrong about that - where, when something has happened, the police may be called in, but they may agree that a matter can be brought to peer mediation. Their student mediators bring together the offender and the victim, and try to work out a solution that may involve getting into the system.
The mediation may not work, but the notion is that you're bringing people together who have issues they need to deal with, instead of shoving everything out into the justice system and saying ``this is not ours''. We've heard people talk about how these are our kids. I think the alienation is being expressed by people who.... Certainly there's the media portrayal of a public that doesn't see them as our kids, that sees them as alien.
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I think a program such as premediation can help reconnect kids with one another. It can also obviously teach them some pretty important skills in terms of solving conflicts and problems.
The other thing I just wanted to talk about briefly is that again we're hearing a lot about programs. We're also hearing people say they have programs going that work perhaps in their community, but other communities don't get a chance to hear about what works. One of the things we need is some form of clearing house or central place where information about programs can come to and be shared.
So communities, instead of reinventing the wheel, can use models that work. They can take them, expand them and adapt them to the needs of their community. This is something we've identified in the youth justice education partnership as a need and a priority. This kind of information can be brought together for people to have so that communities, whether they have funding or not, have information that gives them the ability to put some of these things into place, hopefully, at the grassroots level.
Finally, having being involved in the education system and also thinking about what kids know about the system and issues of education, I think there are people out there who believe that if people know about the system, they will feel more content with it. There's still a little piece of me that hopes that's true. I'm actually not sure it's true. I think certainly the act has been a flashpoint for all sorts of strong feelings that run much deeper than what people know and what they don't know.
I think a place in which education can play a role is in bringing kids particularly, but adults as well, a sense that they have membership in the community and in a process. If people know how the system works, if they understand what the system is about and if they have a sense of what the principles and practices are, then they may in fact feel a greater sense of investment.
It's the same way for young offenders. If they have an idea of what the core process is about and why things are done, and if they feel their voices are being heard, then they may have a greater sense of ownership, instead of feeling that sense of alienation and disconnection.
That's just very general stuff, but I had to get it off my chest. Thanks.
The Chair: Thank you. Mr. Leschied.
Dr. Leschied: Let me say first of all that as this time of year represents a season of hope, it is a hopeful sign indeed to hear Mr. Ramsay talk about the importance of rehabilitation.
I often think the discussions and debates have been one of either rehabilitating youth or protecting society. I think it would be no small hurdle for this committee to endorse the importance of those as coincidental goals. We don't either rehabilitate or protect communities. When we do one, we do the other. I think that's an extremely important principle to endorse by this committee.
I think we need to move beyond also the belief that simple incapacitation brings about a sense of safety. I think therein lies a misbelief on the part of the larger community, which is that if you send somebody away for a period of time, something will happen.
Time is not magic in the life of a child, and we need to do something more important than just locking kids up. Yet when I go around the country, while there's funding to provide the space for a child to go to sleep and have three meals a day, there's often not any money set aside to deal with the issues of anger management, social skills and special education needs. So that's important.
But I come from the province of Ontario, where, as I speak, we have a strict discipline program that we'll be starting up next spring. The strict discipline program is reserved for 40 to 50 violent offenders. While it's not a boot camp - in the province of Ontario we don't call it a boot camp - it may indeed mimic many of the conditions that boot camps function under.
There's no question about the funding for that program. It seems ironic, therefore, that while strict discipline programs are being promoted in Ontario and in other provinces, in the province of Ontario funding to provide safety for abused women through women's shelters is being compromised. The first things to go, by the way, in the women's shelter programs are the programs for children who have been exposed to family violence.
As you've been hearing, much of the behaviour around violence for children is a social learning phenomenon. In essence, violence is a learned behaviour that can be unlearned with the appropriate programs in place. Yet those are the first programs to go.
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Second - Mrs. de Villiers talked about this - education needs to play a strong part in the prevention of violence. The clinic has produced the ASAP program, which is a program to stop violence that has been endorsed by a number of boards of education across the country.
Yet to implement that program takes resources. Guess which resources are the first to be reduced by any board of education? These are the resources dedicated to providing safety and security for children, not just within their families and schools, but in the larger community.
So my last point is this. There's great rhetoric when we sit around this table. It's very comforting, by the way, for me to sit around this table and hear the convergence of opinion on the importance of early intervention, prevention and rehabilitation, but it is simply empty rhetoric if we stop there and don't try to do something about it.
This committee is a very influential one. Rather than tinkering with the law, as Tony Doob says, we need to do something more meaningful. Our province of Ontario, for example, can get away with the strict discipline program and then reduce funding to provide prevention programs for violent youth. We need to do something about that. I challenge this committee to take seriously what's being said here and be actively involved in what happens. Whether it's a transfer payment issue or stricter code in the declaration issue, I'm not certain.
We need to do something more as a matter of fact. We've heard the rhetoric. There's a convergence of findings. We know from the literature what's effective. It needs to be represented in what this committee recommends to the provinces.
The Vice-Chair (Ms Torsney): Thank you, Dr. Leschied. The next three speakers are Jim Robb, Dr. Pennell and Mr. Garber-Conrad.
Mr. Robb: I'm certainly not going to be arguing against early intervention. Like a lot of people who work with youths - I prefer that term to ``young offenders'' because I agree with an earlier speaker that one of the things we have to start getting away from is the labelling and stigmatizing of our youths - I'm sure that we all have examples of how work with them can be done quite effectively outside of the justice system.
One very simple example out of my jurisdiction is an anger management counselling group that we helped set up. Youths were referred in. The vast majority of them were referred in for property offences. But it was quite clear when looking at their family histories that there were huge problems with anger.
We tracked the first two groups that went through. Of those who completed the program, 10% then reoffended, and 90% did not. If you did not complete the program, 75% reoffended. Of that group, 67% were involved in crimes of violence.
We all have examples of very simple, common-sense things that can be done. We're seeing the same results if you actually get at alcohol and drug abuse. There is an extremely effective treatment program in Alberta. I think it is no coincidence that it is a native organization, because they're the ones who take healing seriously in this country.
Out of that group, in any age category in the program, we find that 80% are not reoffending. The differences are staggering. It's there in front of everyone who actually works with the system.
But one of the problems I hear is that the changes are always put in the context of the Young Offenders Act. I may sound like a strange lawyer, but let's not legalize evermore younger and younger kids to get at early prevention programs.
I see one of a number of problems with early intervention programs, diversion programs or alternative programs. It may be just my Alberta experience, but I suspect not, however. If you take alternative measures, what you tend to find is that the kids who are taken into those programs tend to be middle-class kids. Criteria set up for the programs exclude others. That's why in Alberta, for example, 8% of the alternative measures program use is native. At the other end, we have 65% of incarcerated youth being aboriginal, 87% if you're below the age of 15.
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What you tend to find are exclusionary criteria set up excluding the tough kids. Nobody wants the tough kids. We all want to dump them into the young offender system, which is massively overcrowded right now. So we have zero-tolerance policies. The schools dump into the young offender system. We have group homes for behaviour-disordered children that dump the worst behaviour-disordered children into the system...zero-tolerance policies. They're all coming in.
I find that typically in alternative measures programs you'll get caught for shoplifting, you'll do some community service hours and write a letter of apology, and the kid never comes back to court. I have to ask the question: isn't it likely they would not have come back in any event? Chances are they're the type of kid who got grounded at home or had other privileges revoked.
We have to start taking a look. I go back to an earlier question: what type of intervention is needed if you really want to get at the kids who are most likely to keep repeating offences all the way up to and including in adult life?
From my standpoint it means things like anger management. It clearly means alcohol and drug abuse treatment. We see about 3,000 kids a year in our offices in Calgary and Edmonton, and about 90% have alcohol/drug problems, all the way from glue sniffing up to major.... We have 12-year-old alcoholics in our office who started drinking at age 6. It's those kids we have to get at in an effective way. A lot of these tie in, I understand, to issues of poverty, but we have to start where we can.
I think a critical one - and I'm going to put a qualifier on it - is confidential counselling services. Interestingly enough, in the anger management group, one of the major groups that did not complete the counselling program was those kids referred in by the court or through probation services. The reason is that in the legal model there is no confidentiality. Kids do not open up and the therapeutic process is not engaged. So confidential psychological services are critical.
My perspective is that the resources are there. What really impedes the progress in this area is firstly an overwhelming dependency on the Young Offenders Act, which should not be there, and secondly an assumption that we're talking about billions more in money that has to be added to the existing system. It doesn't. You have to start directing the money to the proper place, and you have to stop setting up programs that simply say ``look how successful we are'', when probably it would have been successful without the program. You have to start directing the money and the resources to areas of need. You have to start taking a look at a healing model.
In the city of Edmonton in a one-year period, 667 youths were investigated for crimes starting at age 3 - as young as 3 and up to age 12. If I take the group that isn't covered by the Young Offenders Act, I'm down to 400 youths investigated for the commission of crimes.
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Interestingly enough, of that group, 60 were responsible for the majority of the investigated crimes. It isn't even massive numbers. And as a number of other speakers have mentioned, almost every agency knows about those 60 kids.
We take little bits and pieces as opposed to a holistic approach to get at what will pull the kids out of the spiral or what will prevent them from going into the spiral.
The justice model, the legal model, is always going to be reactive. We have to wait for the crime to be committed and then try to react to it. We can be a lot more creative than that, and we don't even need legislation to do it.
Where we need some direction is in the area of the cost-sharing and what the money is to be used for. It frankly shouldn't be used for people like me. I agree with another speaker down the road. It shouldn't be. But it will be. It's almost guaranteed, because of the reliance on the Young Offenders Act. It should be going to the kids who really need the help.
We all know there are things that can be done. In the school system we want the kids with attention deficit disorder out of the schools because we view them as disruptive. With zero tolerance policies, how many of the learning disabled are dumped out of the school system? How many of the kids have attention deficit disorder?
We can really get creative. Take a look at the group in Edmonton. Attempts are starting. We have a program going with an elementary school where the school refers to our office - a defence counsel office, unbelievably - youths who are showing the signs of alcohol and anger, and they're not even close to being 12. We don't care what their age is. The idea is to get them help before they start to commit the crimes we're all concerned about.
The work is effective. If we don't address it, what eventually pours out is the anger within youths today, and there is a lot of anger. That's when it starts to get frightening.
The Chair: Thank you.
I'm just going to ask you to be mindful of the time. We have about 20 minutes before we take our first break. I really admire some of you who have not moved. I'm a fidgeter; I have to find reasons to get up and move around, so I do admire you.
We have 10 people left on the list, so try to be mindful of the fact that other people want to participate. Perhaps I could just stop talking about that and get on with it.
Dr. Pennell.
Dr. Pennell: Being a voice of the National Crime Prevention Council, I want to briefly mention that we are setting up a home page on youth justice, and that is a way to get information across the country. I know not everyone has computer access, so we do have a lot of hard copies of different successful programs.
The FPT group, the federal-provincial-territorial task group, has also developed an excellent book on successful programs. I just wanted to mention that first, because the question came up about information.
Madam Chair, with all due respect, I want to make a suggestion. I've heard people are very concerned about principles or guiding lights in how to approach youth crime, and I'm wondering if there's a way that today we could particularly focus on developing what I would call a statement of philosophy in regard to this.
Some of the things we've already talked about include what is our image of a young person. I know one person here - I think it was Bill - confessed to committing crimes as a young person. I think all of us could be confessing to such things. We need to have an image of young people that takes into account that they're not just bad, they're not just disabled, but they're real people. That would be one principle.
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Another principle I've heard is around the notions of justice. There have been arguments as to whether this is the wrong context to be even speaking about all this. Should we be talking about health, social services, education and so on? I think Priscilla was particularly highlighting that point.
Also, I think what others have been stressing is that if we have a narrow focus in terms of what we mean by justice, we're going to be limited. I myself think it is very hopeful that the justice and legal affairs committee is looking at justice in a much broader way, ways that people might refer to as healing justice or as transformative justice. I cannot use the term ``restorative'', because I think it's kind of an image that you can go back to something that never existed.
I also want to say I think it is a positive approach to look at these issues in terms of justice, because it taps right into people's self-interest. By that I mean if you just talk about some poor kids out there or some battered woman out there, you get some sympathy, but you don't get it in terms of thinking ``This is my life.'' But when you start talking about crime, people start identifying that it's something important to them. So I think the term ``justice'' is an important way to mobilize political will.
The third area that came up was notions of community, and we can speak about it in a very abstract way or in terms of very lived experiences we have had. I think community is a topic we've broached on. It's not something that just sits out there, pre-existing, and you can come along and tap into it; it's something that has to be created, nurtured and brought along.
What we have instead in Canada right now is a great deal of dislocation of people, whether they're coming in from other countries or, in my province, forced resettlement. An example I'm familiar with, because I've been doing a lot of research in Labrador, is the forced resettlement of the Inuit from Hebron into Nain and the incredible impact that has had on that group, but I can speak of a lot of communities around the province of Newfoundland and Labrador in that same way.
What we need, then, if we're going to speak about community, is talking about how it is created and then thinking about strategies that will help create it.
One I'm very familiar with is family group conferencing, having done a demonstration project in that area. What I saw there is that you can be working with families you'd call dysfunctional, or families with intergenerational sexual abuse, families where multiple people have been convicted of various crimes; nevertheless you can bring them together with their extended family, with their other close supports, and create community that keeps people safe.
I want to mention one other thing - and I'm mindful of time. Lately I've been on a fair number of talk shows. They're always an educational experience, and I always get a somewhat different impact wherever I am in the country. Usually the talk shows - and I'm there talking about youth crime and youth justice - start off with very much a punishment approach to young people, recommendations of Singapore-style whippings, of publishing their names over every radio or television station and every newspaper, or of punishing their parents. What I find, though, if I stay with the people who are on the line, is that what's underneath that is a real sense of loss for community. They'll talk about how their families used to be and how neighbours used to stop kids from acting out, but that they're scared to do that nowadays.
So what I see is if we're developing principles - and I think legislation is helpful here - how can we provide some kind of broad directions to foster that community approach? Then how can - and this is legislation again - tax dollars and support for education, health and so on help nurture that process? Then how through policies can we get all these different groups working together?
The Chairman: Thanks, Dr. Pennell.
We'll start with Mr. Garber-Conrad, and then Dr. Bala.
Mr. Garber-Conrad: I appreciate the opportunity to try to get back to the first topic. It's possible that we actually switched to the second or third one while I was out.
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I'm certainly supportive of diversion programs and all that, but I think we haven't spent much time talking about the real front end, in other words, early intervention social development programs with young kids. I think part of the reason for that is some of this ambiguity about whether this is the right forum to be discussing that, and why is justice involved?
I spent five years on the Mayor's Task Force for Safer Cities, working under the banner of crime prevention through social development. The heart of that, though, is the social development. Social development is the good. Crime prevention is like a little bonus on top. Isn't it neat that helping at-risk children and families actually has some pay-offs for us too: our car doesn't get broken into; our communities are safer; we like walking downtown.
When you then get to the practical or marketing level, I think it's absolutely wonderful that the justice committee is interested in this, because that sells. In this climate, if we could make a commitment and show that crime prevention worked, that would be good. That's a lot easier to sell than helping poor children or disadvantaged families. I lament the fact that it's so, but you go with what works.
It's absolutely clear and undeniable that targeted social programs that address real risk factors in individual lives, infant lives, child lives, youth lives and family lives, can and do not only benefit the families and the individuals but they prevent youth and every other kind of crime. Therefore they also benefit the whole community.
When I talk about early intervention, I'm talking about at least preschool stuff, head start, preschool programs, quality child care, parent support programs, prenatal or infant feeding programs, children's mental health care, things that go under the banner of Success by 6, or 1, 2,3 GO!, abuse prevention, dealing with kids who have to witness their parents being abused. I think these are where you really get the benefit of the early intervention of the prevention philosophy or methodology working.
On the one hand, they are targeted rather than universal, but I agree with the very first thing that was said here, about avoiding stigmatizing people. The labelling and the stigmatizing of people with problems is not the way to go. The way to avoid that is to take the community approach.
Many at-risk kids, youths and families live in at-risk communities, dysfunctional communities, high-need communities, so you don't have to be able to go into the hospital and look at the newborn baby and identify criminal or not criminal; you do it statistically. You work with communities. You deal with high-need communities and provide the targeted social programs that will help the children grow, the families heal and the community develop. As a bonus, it happens to work for all the rest of us in that it prevents crime.
Finally, the community action program for children, one of the incredibly wonderful initiatives of the federal government under Health Canada, does precisely that. It focuses on age zero to six, at this very primary or early secondary prevention/early intervention. That program has been cut back by 54%, and those are the kinds of things we ought not to do if we really believe in this stuff. While we're finding things that work even better, we ought to do the things that work pretty well. Thank you.
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The Chair: Thank you.
Professor Bala. We're being mindful of time.
Prof. Bala: I strongly support all of the comments about the value of early intervention and voluntary and educational efforts. I would like to readdress briefly what is a small but important symbolic part, at least, of how we deal with young offenders, and that is the issue of minimum age.
There is a small number of young children under the age of 12 who are committing violent, repeat offences, including sexual offences. I think the case in Toronto was not unique. There is a lot of research that there is a disturbing incidence of sexual offending by children under 12. Those committing the most serious and repeat offences are at very high risk of committing offences after the age of 12.
Our present response is a child-welfare-oriented response. There is a lot of value to that and it shouldn't in any way be ignored, but we've had 12 years of experience with it and it is in some ways problematic. Inevitably, as child welfare agencies are facing cutbacks, cases involving offending are falling to the bottom of priority lists as workers look to child abuse cases as a higher priority. Voluntary intervention certainly has an important role, but those who most need it will tend not to engage in voluntary intervention. We've heard of the issue of resources. I think the reality in Canada now is that youth justice issues may receive funding that preventive programs may not.
There is an issue of deterrence for children under the age of 12. I don't think that deterrence in the sense of longer sentences or more transfers to adult court has any impact on offending behaviour. I think some children under the age of 12, especially those who are committing repeat offences, are aware that nothing happens. The story you read in the paper is not unique. Giving a message that nothing is going to happen is a bad message.
It's also a very bad message in terms of public confidence in the youth justice system. Like many of you, I've appeared on open-line shows. I find it very hard to say that no matter what you've done, if you're under the age of 12 the sole focus is going to be a child welfare response - particularly, but not exclusively, for victims and indeed for police.
Victims, quite legitimately, have no role in child protection proceedings. If there's a child protection proceeding, we're saying that we don't want to hear from the victims; it isn't their proceeding. I think the public has to know that there is some accountability and some protection for society.
I'm certainly not advocating significant use of a youth justice response for offending under the age of 12. It should very much be a last resort, and there should be restrictions on its use and restrictions on placement. We certainly don't want to send 10-year-olds and 11-year-olds into custody, and indeed we should think about 12-year-olds and 13-year-olds in that regard as well. But saying that we're not going to view these as issues that require accountability is, I think, a mistake, and it's one that is undermining public confidence in the entire youth justice system.
The Chair: Thank you, Professor Bala.
Judge Gove, I'm going to give you the last word in this segment. Just before I do, I have five other names that I won't leave high and dry. We'll get a way to work you in. Go ahead, Judge Gove.
Judge Gove: As a judge, I am a bit reluctant to speak in such a large forum, considering that I do youth cases virtually every day. But sitting here this morning and hearing those of you around the table, I think that in the context of having been a commissioner for the past two years, involved in the very important social issue of child welfare, I can speak with that hat on. So it's not my judging hat, if you will.
I was very pleased to hear a lot of the views that were expressed this morning by some of the earlier speakers. I particularly liked the comments made by Mr. St-Laurent, who I think has left now, his discussion of detection being so important, leading as it does to early prevention - and I like that word as well - which I see as very different, by the way, from intervention. I think that comes much later.
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I also liked the comments made by Madame Toutant, who said the criminal act does not define the problem, and once again, it's often the criminal act that would lead to intervention, early or otherwise; the references by Dr. Doob to the fact that we intervene in the family due to concerns regarding crime; and finally the comment by Mr. Winegarden that we should spend money on helping families nurture their children and put emphasis on that.
The question was raised as to how this committee might help accomplish the prevention process, which seems to be very much a consensus within this group. I agree with the recommendation that you might well consider a statement of principle. Tinkering with the law may be necessary, but a statement of principle, I dare say, may go much further.
If you do decide to make a statement of principle, I would ask that in doing so you consider the concept or principle of including all children and their families in the constituency who may need some help. Ms de Villiers was speaking of that earlier, and I certainly was pleased with the way she put it.
There are models, and I'm not going to list them, because your research has them. In particular there's one in Hawaii that I was very attracted to, called the healthy start program. I recommended that the Government of British Columbia consider it, and I'm told they are considering it.
Also, this morning when I was having coffee, I was reading the most recent issue of a publication put out by Senator Pearson called Children and the Hill. I noted in there an article that's right on point to what we've been talking about this morning. The publication is perhaps not for the justice system, but it deals with the issue at hand. The title of the article is ``Safe Homes, Safe Streets: Preventing Crimes by Investing in Families''. I would commend that article to you, because it deals with what you've been hearing this morning.
As Dr. Pennell said, you need to look at youth justice in a larger social context, and she mentioned health and education. Just as a side point, I'm here in Ottawa to attend today, but I'm also speaking at a conference starting Sunday that has the title Canada's Children... Canada's Future. This could well have been a workshop at that conference.
With that overview, I have a couple of very quick comments. As I said a moment ago, I would ask you to take the approach of assistance to families from early detection as opposed to intervention at a time when there's already a problem. I would suggest that even prior to birth, and certainly from birth on, is when that assistance should be offered.
The assistance should be universal. It should not be restricted to an identified problematic group. Whether we respond or intervene early, in the case perhaps of child abuse, or later, when a youngster is acting out in school or perhaps has stolen a car, it's certainly my conclusion that it's assisting after the problem has become acute. That does not protect the child, it does not protect the community and it is just too expensive.
Early assistance from birth on will go a long way to keeping most children away from the justice system. It will keep the community much safer and will, frankly, save the taxpayers a lot of money.
Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you.
Before we break for lunch - and I do have these other names, and we will give you an opportunity after - we just want to let you know that at the end of the meeting today the clerk will make available to each of you a copy of the recently released federal-provincial-territorial task force report, the executive summary of that report and also a statistical profile of the youth justice system in Canada. This has been quite interesting for us as we've been trying to read it over this past week. There are lots of numbers and raw information that can be really helpful.
Now I would like to invite you to stretch. Those of you who smoke have to leave the building, but if you have your security passes, it shouldn't be a problem. We're going to go across the hall to room 237-C for lunch, and the minister will be joining us. He is also our host. We got him to pay for it. And the other people in the room are welcome.
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I should also tell you that Senator Landon Pearson, who His Honour Judge Gove just mentioned and who's active in the conference Judge Gove will be attending this weekend, has been present in the room. She's left, but she may be back over the lunch hour. You may all find her a very interesting person to talk to as well.
So please join us for lunch now. Thank you.
We'll be back here at 1:30 p.m.