JUST Committee Meeting

STANDING COMMITTEE ON JUSTICE AND HUMAN RIGHTS

COMITÉ PERMANENT DE LA JUSTICE ET DES DROITS DE LA PERSONNE

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Thursday, February 24, 2000

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[English]

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Ivan Grose (Oshawa, Lib.)): I'd ask the witnesses who were patient enough to stay with us to assemble at the table, please. We'll start.

I must apologize to the witnesses who have waited so long, but in case you haven't noticed, you remember that old schoolyard game, ring around the rosy? Well, we play it to the accompaniment of bells and lights flashing, but essentially it comes to about the same purpose. Again I do apologize to the witnesses.

We will add some time onto the end and we'll try to keep enough MPs here, although they have other commitments. But we'll try to keep enough people here to satisfy you with all the questions we can think of.

What we do ordinarily is each of you can give a ten-minute address. I'm a little flexible on that, but don't push me too hard, because we like lots of time for questioning. So if you could each make a ten-minute presentation, we would appreciate it.

Ms. Sowden, would you like to begin?

Ms. Diane Sowden (Executive Director, Children of the Street Society): First of all I'd like to thank you for allowing me to come and present today. My name is Diane Sowden, and I am a parent of a young offender. I'm also the executive director of Children of the Street Society, which is a support group for parents who have lost a child to the sex trade in B.C. or have a child who has become seriously drug-addicted.

What I'd like to do is first of all just give you a quick background of our family and what happened with our daughter. We adopted my daughter at the age of 7. She came from a very abusive background and was a very difficult child to set limits for to keep her safe. Because we are a very loving family, it was a highly structured home so that we could keep her safe. It worked very well until she was the age of 13 years, when she found out that her rights outweighed her safety.

At 13 she went to live on the streets of Vancouver with older friends. The reason was she didn't like having a curfew at home, to be accountable for her time away from home, or to be at home at mealtimes.

As parents, we tried to take her off the streets. We were told by our police that if we did it again and held her against her will, we would be charged. At that point we reached out to social services for help, because we felt our daughter was a child in need of protection. We were told there was nothing they could do. The answer we got was that hopefully she would be charged with a crime, and maybe then we'd get some help.

Within two months she was addicted to crack cocaine and very involved in crime. Within four months of leaving our home she was charged with arson of a school in our community. My husband and I were the ones who turned her in to the police. We felt this was going to be the turning point of maybe getting some help for my child and for our family.

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Her first charge was followed by a thirty-day assessment, and we thought, “Now they're going to meet her needs.” The recommendation after the thirty-day assessment was that should she be found guilty of any criminal offence, it was clear she would benefit most from a highly structured environment where she would be encouraged to pursue her education and have ongoing access to therapists aimed at impulse control and dealing with her history of extreme abuse. She would also benefit from participating in a substance abuse program that would probably and most likely be a success if it occurred in a custody setting. If she were to receive a period of probation, it was most likely that she would be non-compliant, and her ongoing substance abuse and association with antisocial peers would undermine any efforts to change her behaviour. That was the recommendation.

After several court appearances, she was put on probation for six months. She was returned to a foster home she had left repeatedly, with no curfew, no order to attend school, no order to reside with a caregiver, and no drug program—all against the wishes of her parents and also the recommendation of the assessment. Within hours she left the foster home and was back on the streets.

Over the next eighteen months our daughter was in and out of court and in custody, and many of the times it was on breach of probation. The probation officer became very frustrated and recommended that the probation order be removed, because it wasn't being followed anyway. Removing the probation order also removed the ability for us to have our daughter picked up in crack houses and in trick paths. It also undermined the values we were teaching her, that she had to face the consequences of breaking the law.

As a young offender our daughter was given a lawyer through legal aid. This was done automatically, no matter our financial status as parents or the seriousness of the charge. This meant, as parents who wanted to be involved with the process and the lawyers, we were not included, because the lawyer's obligation was to our daughter, not to the parents.

Most of the information presented in court by the lawyer was not true, due to the fact that the information came from our daughter, who was trying to get out of custody. Since our daughter told my husband and me she was guilty, we told her she must plead guilty. But then my daughter's lawyer explained to her that a guilty plea is not always in her best interest. But the fact was she was guilty. The system was working against the values we had taught our daughter. What it did was teach her how to work the system.

Over the next couple of years our daughter was placed in several group homes and foster homes. She stayed at none of them, because they also had rules. At the time she was totally controlled by a drug addiction and an adult pimp turning her also into a predator. Since the information about her recruiting other children into the sex trade was not shared with the proper people in our community in order to keep other children safe, I took on this duty. I went to all the schools in our community, giving them a picture of our daughter....

I'm sorry.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Ivan Grose): Would you like a moment?

Ms. Diane Sowden: I'm okay. I just find this part very difficult.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Ivan Grose): I can understand that.

Ms. Diane Sowden: We gave them a picture of our daughter and warned them that she was recruiting other children into prostitution. If her pimp, who was an adult, had been active in the community, that information would have been shared, but because our daughter was a young offender, it didn't happen. This put the other children in our community at high risk. It also had the pimp exercise more control and demands on our daughter. At the time she was 14 years of age.

Over the next five years our daughter continued to be in and out of custody, her whole teen years. Charges ranged from arson to theft under $5,000, theft over $5,000, breach of probation, solicitation, and breaking and entering. But at no time was the real problem addressed: her drug addiction. The reason was she refused drug treatment, and there was no way of ordering her into treatment.

She did get probation orders that said she had to go to drug treatment. The problem was most of the drug treatment facilities would not take a child ordered under a probation order. Also, if we did get her into a drug treatment facility, she was able to leave whenever she wanted. There was no way of securing her there.

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As a result, she ended up with a $300-a-day heroin addiction, living on the streets of the downtown east side. The addiction was supported through crime, prostitution, and recruiting new girls to the sex trade. During that period she gave birth to two drug-affected babies, so the cycle is going to continue.

We needed the ability to get our daughter into the treatment she needed. We need to have a court-ordered exception to provide for the capability to hold a child or youth as needed while he or she goes through detoxification or other stabilization. The time could be used to complete a comprehensive assessment and a plan of care and to engage the child or youth to the extent that they would not immediately run back to high-risk situations afterwards.

Through our society, we have done a survey of other parents who have gone through very similar things to what we as a family have gone through. In our research we found that 1,484 parents called the Ministry of Children and Families' addiction service help-line in 1999, asking for services for their child. Those are the parents who were able to call that number, so the picture is much larger.

We were able to interview 134 parents who had drug-affected children. Out of those 134, 57% were using heroin, and 51% crack cocaine. We're talking about teens here. Further, 20% had been or were then involved in the sex trade, 78% had been or were then involved in criminal activities, and 38% had been or were then in the care of the Ministry of Children and Families.

What people don't understand until this affects their home is, just because a child is put into the Ministry of Children and Families, doesn't mean the family has given up. Our family signed a volunteer care agreement with the ministry thirteen times in five years, the reason being that for a lot of the programs, the only way my daughter could be accepted to the program was if she was in the care of the ministry.

Of these youth, 58% had been or were then in jail. I also found it very interesting that 50% of the youth we were talking about were still living at home, so these were not parents who were giving up on their children. They were parents who were frustrated through a system of not being able to access the help their children needed.

Of the parents who did find programs, 54% said the program lasted less than two months. If you're working with a drug-addicted child, you know you need at least twelve months to work through the issues. The drug addiction is usually a result of abuse or other emotional impacts that have to be dealt with. Only 6% said the program lasted more than six months. Only 38% of the youth completed the programs, because they were able to walk away, and only 10% of the parents considered the program very successful. When we spoke to the parents who were looking for drug treatments today, they said only 19% of the children, if they were able to find the program, would volunteer to enter. The rest were refusing treatment.

As a parent of a drug-addicted child, I'm very frustrated that I haven't been able to keep my child safe. And as a parent, I have been trying to be very responsible and to teach my child right from wrong. But what has happened is she has been taught that she doesn't have to be accountable for her actions. She's also been taught that guidelines her parents have set for her are not the reality of life.

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I've also found that society wants me and my husband to be responsible for the damage she's done in the community, but we haven't had any of the rights to be able to get the treatment she so badly needs.

Thank you very much.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Ivan Grose): Thank you, Ms. Sowden.

Mr. Oborne, please.

Mr. David Oborne (President, Youth Justice Education Partnership): Thank you, Mr. Grose. Thank you for the invitation today to meet with the committee.

My name is David Oborne. I'm president of the Youth Justice Education Partnership. In my other life I'm also an assistant superintendent in Coquitlam, British Columbia, the community in which Mrs. Sowden resides. So I would like to speak to the committee with two hats in mind. I will keep my comments brief from both perspectives.

First, as the president of the Youth Justice Education Partnership, I would like to bring our perspective and have submitted a brief for this committee's consideration, which I'm sure you'll receive copies of in due course.

The Youth Justice Education Partnership was actually spawned by the Department of Justice in 1994, when, feeling there was a need for better education across the country about issues involving the Young Offenders Act, the justice department asked key people in various sectors to come together to help advise the department on what should be done.

It was a group that was multisectoral and multidisciplinary in nature. It was a group that included youth court judges; people from education, like me; people who were involved with young offenders as members of the John Howard Society, and also with youth probations; and people representing every part of the country. This group has met on a number of occasions and has constituted itself as a formal organization at this point. We are dedicated, each from our own perspective, to work at the issues around the youth justice system.

It's the belief of our group that in large measure the dissatisfaction with the Young Offenders Act and the move to the new Bill C-3 has been due to a lack of information about the proceedings of the justice system in general as it affects young people. We would urge this committee to take into account that while the bill itself will be moved and passed for harsher penalties, it will not satisfy nor have any direct relationship with the rate of youth involvement in the justice system. That in our estimation is a tragedy.

We really, as a collective society, need to address the root causes, those things that predate young people offending. We have not been successful at doing that.

The notion of zero tolerance is a notion that has emerged in each one of our systems. I'm sure you're all aware of zero tolerance as it has affected and impacted on the education system. Those pieces of action, on the basis of either law or policy in boards, really speak to a frustration and a lack of understanding, not an inquiry into the antecedents of behaviour that have rendered our youth in the predicament they are in.

From our perspective as the Youth Justice Education Partnership, we would recommend to this committee that youth justice legislation should reflect the types of goals we've endorsed, as found in our brief. This can be done through a statement of principles and through the substantive law and the administration of the act. We'd ask the committee to look at those areas as well.

There must be a national program to educate Canadians about our youth justice legislation and its administration, to ensure it is understood, to facilitate the democratic processes, and to promote positive social values and behaviours among our youth. The national program of youth justice education must ensure that all Canadians, including new Canadians and aboriginal youth, have access to knowledge about the law and about its antecedents—the roots and causes for us to enact law as we do.

The national program of youth justice education should draw on the expertise and resources of national networks of public legal education organizations that have already been set up, and agencies such as those belonging to the Youth Justice Education Partnership. We would ask the standing committee to encourage and support a meeting between YJEP and various justice and education ministries; national organizations, such as the Council of Ministers of Education; and public legal education agencies to pursue the need for a comprehensive law-related education in our schools.

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It is the contention of our organization that if we look at it in a piecemeal fashion, we will never end with a justice system that actually does provide justice. We would ask the standing committee to recommend that more resources be made available to support education and the youth justice system itself.

Finally, we would ask the standing committee to endorse additional support for projects that explore effective ways of dealing with youth who are involved in or at risk of becoming involved in the youth justice system.

The goals of our group include the following. The Youth Justice Education Partnership is a network for building partnerships to provide education about youth justice in Canada. YJEP links youth, communities, organizations, and governments to promote equitable, appropriate and effective treatment of youth; contribute to the prevention of youth crime; promote social responsibility; enhance the capacity of communities, organizations, and justice services to address youth issues and ensure Canadians have accurate information about youth justice systems; and enhance the understanding of youth justice by all in Canada.

I'd like to change hats, if I may, to my experiences as a school administrator. I have had experiences as an administrator in Brossard, Quebec; in Winnipeg, Manitoba; and in Coquitlam, British Columbia, for thirty years. I have worked with youth who are at risk. I have worked with youth who have been in care.

We in YJEP have seen many research results, many studies, and many piecemeal projects that have been funded and that have actually demonstrated results. We feel there is a need to work with youth in general, as all students need to become educated citizens in this country. There needs to be support of that.

There also needs to be support of those youth who have become involved in youth justice. I've left, for the information of the committee, an example of such a project, which we were involved in in Winnipeg, Manitoba. We were involved with fifteen Asian gang members, all between the ages of 15 and 19, all out of school for more than three months, all with no visible means of support, and all with criminal records as youth offenders.

Our experience with those children was that there is indeed hope for those kids who have been committed and who have participated in criminal activity. Of the fifteen students who entered the program, fifteen remained at the end of the program. Of the fifteen who were in the program at its inception, one, five years later, was re-incarcerated. The balance of these youth have all moved on to productive, healthy adult lives.

So we saw from our project that it is indeed possible to help students and youth who have become involved. We've had some remarkable success stories, which I would like to share with the committee, two in particular.

One of the students who went on from our program and returned to school rather than going ahead into the work field ended up graduating from the University of Manitoba with honours in engineering. This is a student who, left to his own devices, would probably have been one of the statistics we would have seen in our adult criminal system.

A second youth with not so stellar a career was well known to the local Canadian Tire establishment for doing his shopping without paying at the local Canadian Tire before the program was started. In his job placement, we returned him to Canadian Tire, where he started working in the stock department. At the end of the program, Canadian Tire hired him, because he was the best stock manager they had had. He knew the stock better than most other people, and he knew how to prevent other people from shoplifting.

So there are ways to deal with youth who have had difficulties in life. I believe all of us want our kids to succeed. That should be the premise of any youth justice system we have.

In our YJEP organization we've also addressed the issue of youth who are at risk. I would like to share with the committee a project I personally have been involved in, with two other colleagues, one from child psychiatry and one from child psychology, working with the Government of Hong Kong, specifically the education department and the social work department. In that study we have actually been able to develop a risk-screening measure so that students in their school career would be able to be screened for the potential of being adolescents at risk. If we can work with students at that level, we will be able to save an enormous amount of grief.

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I don't want to go into it too far, because of time, but there is a one-page document for your perusal that explains the results. The results were so important to the Hong Kong government that it actually formed a policy decision to employ one further social worker in each of their secondary schools—a policy decision of 400 people. That is a fair policy decision on their part.

It actually augers well for us, because if we can find our youth in Canada before they get involved in the youth justice system and offer them programs, we will be much better off.

Dr. Dan Offer from the Chedoake Medical Centre in Hamilton, who is well known for his work in epidemiological research, has estimated that we can be between nine and twelve times as cost-effective if we treat youth before crisis ensues. In our program in Coquitlam, we have actually at this point implemented, with the support of Justice Canada, a program for at-risk youth at the middle school level.

With these comments in mind, I would like to close. It is important for us to signal to the committee that our youth are at risk. They are at risk of the predators such as Diane Sowden has talked about, those who would use them for their own gains in prostitution. We in our communities see that on a daily basis. We see our police departments frustrated with not being able to deal with these predators. We also see youth and teenagers now as an important economic source for those who would sell drugs. That is an area we would encourage your committee to also make recommendations towards.

Mr. Chairman, thank you for your time.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Ivan Grose): Thank you, Mr. Oborne.

As you can see, we're back into our bells-and-lights game. It's a half-hour bell, so we have about twenty minutes before we have to leave.

Mr. Hackler.

Mr. James C. Hackler (University of Victoria): I'm going to talk about the system rather than individual cases.

In the 1960s there was some concern about the Juvenile Delinquents Act. From the liberal side there was concern about the protections; from the conservative side there was concern about whether juveniles were taking responsibility for their actions. This culminated in the Young Offenders Act in 1984.

I felt, however, in the 1970s, when I'd been watching juvenile courts for the past thirty years or so, that the weaknesses in the Juvenile Delinquents Act were in fact taken into account by the practices of the court. It introduced things such as having juveniles testifying against themselves, but those patterns seemed to be corrected with practices. So as to whether or not the Young Offenders Act was necessary, I don't really think so, now that I look back on it. At the time we thought so.

However, there's no clear evidence that the Young Offenders Act has been an improvement in terms of reducing delinquency compared to the past. In fact it seems to have been just the opposite: we seem to have almost negative effects from, you might say, introducing a failed criminal justice model into the juvenile system, unlike most of the world.

Incidentally, trying to plug all the holes with legislation seems impractical. We have possibly the largest young offenders act in the world. The Hong Kong act, by the way, from 1984, the same year, is about fourteen pages long.

Dealing with a few principles and assuming the people in the system are intelligent would make a lot more sense. But unfortunately that's not the way we're going.

The past fifteen years have been characterized by simply increased punitiveness, with the notion that this somehow is going to reduce crime. We know that's not true, but at the same time we seem to proceed as if that's what the public wants. I don't think that makes an awful lot of sense. There's always an initial reaction: Let's be tougher. But it doesn't take very long to point out to people that it doesn't work. So I think we're over-responding to a mis-impression on the part of the public.

Let me use two features of the act that illustrate why this is poor legislation.

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Holding parents responsible when their children misbehave sounds reasonable. Many people would recommend that. Many judges I interview say when they first start in this business, “I am going to hold those parents responsible”, especially judges who come into the system without being very familiar with the juvenile system, which is the majority in many cases. As time passes, however, the judges realize that parents are more in need of support than they are of being punished. If you want to punish parents, then they are more inclined to simply abandon their kids. So it doesn't take very long for judges to realize this is a poor strategy; it just doesn't make sense.

The support for these parents, when provided at an early stage, tends to have a payoff. There is evidence from almost all the European systems that support for parents at an early stage does give a positive return. We don't use it very much.

When I speak to Rotary Clubs and other service clubs, the question of punishing parents almost always arises. It takes me about ten or fifteen minutes to explain the obvious, and they say, “I see what you mean, yes.” It doesn't take that long to educate the public a little bit. Judges, like most people, learn on the job, and they understand this after a few months. It doesn't take them that long to get to this conclusion.

There's a second feature of the proposed Youth Criminal Justice Act that I don't really understand. It talks about adult sentences. I don't know whether it talks about adult courts. It just is a very muddy portion of the act. I don't have a clue what it really means.

There's a notion that if we throw kids into adult courts, that will somehow solve problems. It won't. It doesn't. The evidence is fairly clear. In North America, if you put kids in adult courts, they get lighter sentences than if they stay in youth courts. But I don't know what this legislation really means on that score.

Again, talk to the Rotary Club people and they grasp, after ten or fifteen minutes, that there's nothing about adult court that gives them any advantage over youth court. Youth court judges are well trained. The people surrounding the system are also more knowledgeable of what's going on with youth than adult court judges are. So essentially what we're doing is window-dressing, and the public can figure it out if you spend ten minutes with them.

The act talks about various alternative measures and what have you. That's available now. If you want to do something, it's available now. None of these measures that are in the new act help at all, even though they sound as if they're going to be helpful. It's all available now if you have the will.

Sharon Moyer did an excellent review about twenty years ago on diversion programs. We like to use the phrase “alternative measures”. The weaknesses in those programs, which are many, were spelled out in her report twenty years ago. They're the same ones that are there now. We haven't paid much attention to the work that's been done by people here in Ottawa on this particular topic.

If the local jurisdictions want to, they can. There are many illustrations. The Sparwood program in British Columbia is an illustration of where the police have enacted measures that seem to work, with the support of the community. So essentially what you're doing here is providing window-dressing.

But the real damage of this legislation is the credibility of the government. Those of us who work in juvenile justice understand that the government is not serious about delinquency. You discount the ideas from the people in Quebec, who are the leaders in Canada in juvenile justice. They've created a juvenile justice system that is not as good as the Europeans', by and large, but better than the rest of Canada's. We can spend some time on what they seem to do. I think Jean Trépanier, who's sitting behind me here, could do a better job on that than I would.

What I'm saying is you don't pay attention to the research that's been done here in Canada, and some of the best work has been done by the people in Quebec.

In addition, the work by Richard Tremblay at the University of Montreal is some of the most promising in North America. It's quite clear: spend the resources on very young children and you get a much better return. The resources you're putting into the juvenile justice system at the later levels don't give you any return. In fact it seems we're getting a negative return right now.

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I admit that constructive legislation can be constrained by political reality, but that doesn't mean you can't make an effort to have good legislation and make intelligent changes. About 25 years ago, for example, we became aware of domestic violence. It looks as if government actions in North America over the last 25 years in that area have had a payoff. Homicide rates in domestic situations are down significantly after 25 years. Government legislation may have helped. So you can do something constructively in some areas.

Or you can go the other way. The second way is illustrated by the Safe and Drug-Free Schools program in the United States. After $6 billion spent, it's a political boondoggle with no results, but no one has guts enough to say, “This is a lousy program.” Instead they just keep pouring money into something because it sounds good. That's exactly what this legislation is. It's supposed to convince people it's doing something. It is not, so you lose credibility.

When Anne McLellan came into the justice portfolio a little while ago, she was making intelligent comments in the press that showed insight, and some of us in the business said, “Ah! Maybe there's a chance she'll get something intelligent done in this area.” That credibility is gone. We now know this is window-dressing, and that's what really hurts.

Is there anything that can be done? Well, the whole notion of throwing money at these tasks I think is stupid. Look at some inexpensive systems. Fiji is the illustration I give in my little report here. Fiji, just getting over a decade or so of dictatorship, has very few resources, but they seem to have done an intelligent job using some imagination. In other words, we have models in this world that show intelligent strategies.

We also have some flexibility in different parts of the country where you see imaginative judges, prosecutors, and defence people, and letting an occasional social worker and probation officer back into the system. They have been practically excluded from the system for the last twenty years. They used to play a more important role, and the system was better for it.

What's happened is we have tried to develop a whole set of rules to guide systems, when there's tremendous variety across Canada, and that variety probably has positive effects. Once these people learn how to cope with all this legislation, they can get down to the nitty-gritty.

This will slow the process down. This will delay effective work being done. Essentially you lose credibility in the minds of the public when you keep thinking you have to pander to people who want tougher laws.

I was giving a talk out at Simon Fraser one time, and a poster went up that said, “How many kids should we lock up?” When I dropped by the police, they had the poster up there, and they had written, “All of them.” That's a normal reaction. You talk with the police, however, and individually they're very cooperative. They have to talk tough, but in fact they are very helpful.

I dropped by the probation office. They had the same poster up, and somebody had written, “All of them.” But when you talk to the probation officers, they're a little bit more understanding than that.

So you have a perception that everybody out there wants to lock up all the kids. That's the first knee-jerk reaction. But when you sit down and try to talk with them, they are much more sensible.

What you're doing with this legislation is losing public confidence that you're serious about doing something about juvenile delinquency. There are things that can be done. There are education programs that can be done.

In France, for example, Mrs. Sowden's daughter would have been involved with a French judge very, very early, and the judge would have been working with the family very, very early. It would probably never have gone to court. They would probably never have used punitive measures, but would have been working very hard, with services from five different departments, trying to prevent what was happening. We create a system where we do not develop that sort of rapport, that cooperation, with the services that are available.

I think I'd better shut up.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Ivan Grose): Thank you, Mr. Hackler.

Mr. Cadman, I'd like to get one question each from you and Mr. MacKay, so if you could confine yourself to one question, I'd appreciate it.

Mr. Chuck Cadman (Surrey North, Ref.): How long do you want, Peter?

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Ivan Grose): Just juggle.

Mr. Chuck Cadman: I'd like to thank the witnesses for coming today.

Just for the record, I've worked with Diane for a number of years on a lot of these issues, and I'd like to ask her something.

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We've certainly heard your concerns with the involvement of parents in the system. What has been your daughter's attitude towards the way the system dealt with her?

Ms. Diane Sowden: My daughter now claims she's been off the street for nine months, and her feeling is that the system allowed her to do this, and that as parents, we should have had the right to intervene. She really puts a lot of blame on child protection and on the police for the fact that she was not protected. She believes what we were fighting for all along, drug treatment, is exactly what she needed.

Mr. Chuck Cadman: To what extent do you yourself feel you should have been involved more? Is there any place in the legislation before us or in the current YOA where you feel there is room for involving the parents more? Is there some way it can be mandated through legislation? Do you have any suggestions for that?

Ms. Diane Sowden: We should have been involved right at the very beginning, when they did the thirty-day assessment. The recommendations for what we felt our family needed were put in the report, but they were never respected or taken into consideration by the judge.

We should have been also, as I mentioned, involved with being able to get a lawyer for our daughter and be represented as well, as part of the family, which didn't happen. In fact we were undermined. When I did phone my daughter's lawyer, he did not return the calls, and he gave the message to my daughter, “I'm not talking to your parents.” When I did see him in court, he said, “I've seen you in action. I don't want to talk to you.” The action was that I wanted accountability and I wanted the resources my daughter needed.

There were several times in the five years that we could have been involved in the system to protect our daughter. One thought comes to mind. When she was in Wellington, we asked them to put her under 24-hour suicide watch, because she had attempted suicide a month previous. We were told they would look after it. Three days later she was taken to emergency for slitting her wrists while in detention. When I asked about why the 24-hour suicide watch wasn't done, they said they had spoken to her and they felt she wasn't at risk. They never informed us of that. I asked, “How did she get a razor?”, and they said they had given it to her at her request to shave her legs and left her unsupervised, because that was her right.

We could have lost our daughter, and the reason is nobody respected our opinion. We knew our daughter better than anyone else, and they didn't bother to let us know they had made the decision that she was not at risk.

Many times when she went to court, we were not notified. And I find it very interesting that my daughter phoned, every time, the night before she went to court, to tell us she was going to court, even though she was living on the streets. She knew my husband and I would show up at court and that we'd be asking for her to be held in custody, because there weren't any other resources and there wasn't anywhere else to put her. But she still made sure we were there, every single time. To me, that was a child asking for help, and the system just kept letting her down.

Mr. Chuck Cadman: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Ivan Grose): Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Sowden.

Mr. MacKay, you have three minutes.

Mr. Peter MacKay (Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough, PC): Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you all for being here and sharing your personal experiences and your insights into this dilemma that's before us, in trying to craft a piece of legislation that will be responsive.

Ms. Sowden, you're aware that this new legislation in many ways puts greater emphasis on non-custodial measures, particularly for non-violent offences. It puts greater emphasis on the front-end prevention, or this is what the legislation would have us believe: that restorative justice models and diversionary programs are the answer—community involvement. This is a nice philosophy in theory, but without the resources and without the personnel, it occurs to me this is leading down the path your daughter experienced.

There are occasions when there should be discretion in the system for a child like your daughter, who's crying out almost for the system to envelop them and take them away and allow them some time to come to grips with whatever their personal demons are.

• 1310

This “petting zoo” approach—that's my term—doesn't appear to have that discretion. The philosophy seems to be moving towards greater leniency at the front end. It occurs to me this experience is what has really failed your daughter. Is that an accurate statement?

Ms. Diane Sowden: What I think happened is we were not dealing with the issue: her drug addiction. What we did was actually work with the system to criminalize her to try to get help, and that was wrong. It didn't work. The result was it discouraged my daughter from even asking for drug treatment, because of the bad experiences of going through detox on a bathroom floor in a youth detention centre. When she did get out, she would never ask to go into drug treatment on her own, because of that experience.

I would have liked to have had a secure treatment facility away from the youth justice detention, where my daughter could have been confined to go through the drug treatment, and not given the right to walk out at any time.

Bill 1 in Alberta has the power to apprehend a child who's involved in the sex trade. A high percentage of those children are addicted to crack cocaine or heroin, and part of the process they have to go through is detox.

The act had good intentions. What I'm concerned about is they can only hold the child for 72 hours. I know that in 72 hours, picking up my daughter and then releasing her to the street, she would be at higher risk of damaging herself, because she would be so desperate for a fix at that point. So it has to be longer-term.

Also, it has to be federal, because what's happening in B.C. right now is we're getting the kids from Calgary and Edmonton on the streets in Vancouver, because they can't be picked up there. The pimps are bringing the kids to B.C. So we need a federal law.

Also, I know child protection is supposed to be done through each province, but when you're going to be asking to be taking away a child's right for any length of time, it has to be done through the Federal Court system. The reason is there have to be the checks to make sure it's not overused or abused, and that it's used for the right reasons.

There also has to be a plan of care, and case management to make sure that plan of care is being followed, and also to make sure the young person has the right to a lawyer and reviews through the process so that it's not abused. There are ways of doing it so that it's not abused and the family is supported and the youth can get the drug treatment they need.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Ivan Grose): We must go. We have to run. If the witnesses would hang with us, it will be fifteen or twenty minutes until we come back. Three of the members have indicated they would like to come back and pursue questions. Is that okay? I know I'm asking an awful lot of you, but I'm sorry; I don't control those things.

• 1313

• 1343

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Ivan Grose): Let's resume. I hope everyone remembers what we were talking about.

Mr. Saada, would you like to go now for about the same time your two colleagues had? Then we'll even things up back and forth.

Mr. Jacques Saada (Brossard—La Prairie, Lib.): Sure.

[Translation]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

[English]

First let me thank you all for your presentations.

Mr. Oborne, should I understand from your presentation that you would have very serious reservations on the issue of programs having to do with zero tolerance in schools?

Mr. David Oborne: Yes, I do have extreme reservations about it, because I feel we don't really deal with the particular needs of the students. A zero tolerance program is simply a reaction to an event, but it does not look into the precedent to that event.

• 1345

There will be in every event a need for remedial action, and I'm not suggesting that those who commit offence should not be held accountable for the offence. But surely for our youth, we are looking towards their development into healthy, productive members of our society, and unless we take time and have the resources to do that, we will generate only more incarceration facilities in our country.

A similar presentation to this committee last week by one of our member organizations from the Youth Justice Education Partnership, the Church Council on Justice and Corrections, indicated that we incarcerate at twice the rate of the United States and have four times the rate of adult offence.

In our schools we need supports. In all our social agencies we need support so that we can actually deal effectively and progressively with youth.

Mr. Jacques Saada: Thank you.

I must say, Mr. Chairman, that Mr. Oborne was the vice-principal of the school where my wife became vice-principal later, though we never really had a chance to see each other. I chaired the school board, by the way. So it's a pleasure to see him.

On my second round I'll come to Mr. Hackler, but my next question is to Ms. Sowden.

Our system has difficulty tackling the problems of offenders. I think everybody in good faith is trying to tackle them, except it may not work as well as we would wish it. Our system has difficulty tackling the problems of victims. Even though I think there is good faith, still a lot of problems remain to be solved. Would you say our system is simply not equipped to deal with someone who is at the same time an offender and a victim?

Ms. Diane Sowden: It's not equipped right now, but I don't think it's something that is not achievable. One of the reasons it is not working right now is we have one pat answer for everyone, and it's not looked at on an individual basis. We need more of an individual basis in looking at the situation of the young offender and the victim. We need more assessments and more treatment facilities in place.

Mr. Jacques Saada: I want to stay very down-to-earth in my questions, but I have to ask you a question and have your impressions on something that is more a matter of politics really than down-to-earth help.

I'm led to understand that in Quebec, for instance, the child welfare system allows for cases of young people—I'm not even talking about cases of children aged 12 and above, but even lower than that—to be helped via the welfare programs that exist in Quebec. These programs are provincial matters. Is it your view that we can legislate at the federal level?

Ms. Diane Sowden: That's what I would like to see. I know Quebec has 170 secure beds for youth. B.C. has nothing. One of the downfalls by doing it provincially is the effect we're having right now in B.C. of the pimps bringing the girls from Alberta, because they do have secure care there as well. They bring them to B.C., where there is no secure care. So we're further disconnecting families.

I'm dealing with two families from Calgary right now who have 14-year-old daughters on the streets of Vancouver, and they cannot get those children back into Alberta to get them into the treatment they need. They have beds waiting for them. That's what's going to happen if it's done on a provincial level instead of a federal level.

I know it's for child welfare to intervene and keep them safe, but when we're taking away a child's liberty for any length of time, it has to go through the court system and it has to be on a federal level. There have to be the checks in place so that it doesn't get abused and overused. That has to be federal.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Ivan Grose): Thank you, Mr. Saada.

I propose going until 2:10, and I think five-minute rounds would be the fairest way to apportion the time remaining.

Mr. Cadman.

Mr. Chuck Cadman: I'll be finished after this one anyway.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Ivan Grose): You will? Fair enough. Then go as long as you want, up to a point.

• 1350

Mr. Chuck Cadman: I just have a question for Mr. Hackler.

Am I to gather from your testimony regarding adult sentences that you do not think an adult sentence is appropriate for anybody under the age of 18 at any time?

Mr. James Hackler: I'm not sure what one means by an adult sentence.

Mr. Chuck Cadman: Well, I would say, if we're going to talk about the most serious crimes, the crime of, say, first- or second-degree murder.

Mr. James Hackler: We might be.

Mr. Chuck Cadman: I just wondered, because you had an opinion about adult sentences being imposed on young offenders.

Mr. James Hackler: What I don't understand from the legislation is what it means, first of all. There is an image that by throwing kids into adult courts, somehow something will be accomplished. I don't know what it means when it says a child will be available for adult sentencing. I just don't know what that means. I don't know what the legislation is talking about there.

For example, say a 12-year-old comes into court. He's murdered his father. He's watched his father abuse his mother for many years, and finally he gets a gun and blows daddy away. That's a terrible crime, and I don't have an answer to it. Fortunately they're very rare. What I'm suggesting, however, is that most of these serious crimes are very messy situations, very complex, and you really can't do much with legislation.

But experienced youth court judges deal with these cases, and they try the best they can. At the present time they don't seem to be using the sentences we have now. In other words, the length of sentence doesn't really help you much. We don't have any particular evidence that the longer sentences will help. So we're doing something that isn't used at the present time, and it gives people the feeling that somehow we can make something better by having longer sentences. That misleads the public into thinking something has been accomplished.

There may be some really bad kids out there. That could be. But I doubt that it will matter whether you use three, five, seven, or ten years. We don't have any evidence that the longer sentences accomplish anything. These are messy, difficult cases. You can't correct it with this sort of thing. You have a much better chance if you spend your time and efforts as early as possible in life on education programs. For example, day care centres reduce crime. We have evidence. We can do that. We can reduce murders by putting resources into day care centres.

I can't speak about the individual kid who does something terrible, but almost all of those are very messy, complex situations, and to use that as a method of somehow dealing with delinquency is.... The research shows you do not gain anything there.

Mr. Chuck Cadman: I don't think you're going to get any argument from anybody, although there are only two of us here right now—plus the chair; excuse me. We are better advised to put the resources up front in the prevention and early intervention aspects of it, but at some point there has to be a tradeoff with such a crime as we're discussing. Yes, they are rare, admittedly, but when they do occur, there has to be a tradeoff. Yes, a longer sentence might not be advantageous as far as rehabilitation or that sort of thing is concerned, but at some point justice has to come in and what society expects to be accountability for an offence.

Mr. James Hackler: You had a terrible experience, I know, personally. What we've found is, in these family group conferences, for example, where they work with very serious cases, usually victims feel very outraged, and that's very understandable, and there is this need for confrontation. But quite often, as a result of this process of a confrontation, even with very serious crimes, things change, and victims who would first of all want this kid to be hung often change. They usually do.

First of all, they do want this person to feel remorse, and most of them do. They start out being really tough guys, but they begin to realize what they have done. Then you start building the process. Is that person salvageable? Maybe some of them aren't. There are a few who aren't, and maybe they have to be put away forever. But the vast majority of juvenile murderers are probably salvageable, and the question is, how do you increase the odds that that will happen?

• 1355

It's a risk. I'm not saying there isn't a risk involved. But I wouldn't say the majority of those are psychopaths. Some are, but probably there are kids.... For example, one kid in Edmonton was stupid enough to go along with another guy on a robbery. During the robbery, there was somebody at home, and the other fellow stabbed this woman. The accomplice is also now an accomplice to the act of murder. But as Judge White said, he's stupid, but he's a good kid.

What we do here is not easy. How does one essentially turn this stupid kid into something of a productive individual? You don't want to have a system that excludes that possibility.

Mr. Chuck Cadman: I agree with that absolutely.

I have just one more question. You quote a lot of literature and a lot of statistics and experiences in other countries. This is no slight, believe me, but I just want to know what your experience is hands-on with kids in the cells and with kids before the courts, actual hands-on experience.

Mr. James Hackler: There are tremendous differences in the way kids—

Mr. Chuck Cadman: No, what has your personal experience been with them, dealing one on one with kids in trouble?

Mr. James Hackler: I don't do much work one on one except when I'm interviewing kids. It's very difficult to interview kids in North America. Research doesn't let you talk with kids very much. In France I was able to do that more, and in Austria and in Fiji I had better opportunities.

What I found is that most of the kids want to tell their story to somebody in authority who can do something. They want to talk directly. Australia was even a better illustration. The kids wanted to talk directly to the judge, if they could, about their problems, sometimes without their parents. That's an opportunity we don't take. We deliberately don't let a juvenile talk to somebody in authority. They have to be represented by a lawyer, parents, or someone else.

That's what I found. Many kids wanted to explain, in a sense. It's not that they were saying they didn't do it, but they wanted to explain what was going on in their lives. That's an option we don't give them very often.

Mr. Chuck Cadman: How do you mesh that with Ms. Sowden's complaints about the parents being able to be involved and lawyers basically overriding the will of the parents?

Mr. James Hackler: Parents differ tremendously. Here is a case where it looks as if the daughter was trying to reach out to her mother or what have you. Had there been a supportive judge....

In France, for example, again, a judge would be responsible for an area of about 140,000 people. He would know every single problem kid in that area. He would know their cases very well. It wouldn't be a matter of being objective when you come into the courtroom. He would be personally involved with them. Probably he wouldn't have many girls ever coming to court. The French judge I worked with would spend two days a month in court. The rest of the time it was working directly with these cases. So there would be a greater chance that the girl could tell her story and the parents could tell their story directly to the judges.

With one judge in Nice, for example, at 5:30 on a Friday afternoon, I was wondering why he was willing to spend so much time with me late in the afternoon, and he said at 6 o'clock the parents were coming in. He said, “I don't want the parents to miss work. It's important to them. So I am going to wait here until 6 o'clock, because then they can be free and we can have a good talk.” That sort of thing you don't hear here. It's being accessible.

In Belgium, the judges spend one Sunday a month working. In other words, you can accommodate your people much better. The idea of having, say, an evening court where the judges would be available might help, or Saturdays or Sundays. We don't even think about those possibilities. Could we work more closely with parents at a very early stage? My feeling is that almost all the European systems see this as praiseworthy, that you should make an attempt to accommodate the parents early on.

In Ms. Sowden's case, she would have been in contact with a judge early on. Maybe no punitive measures would have been used. All the measures might have been where the judge tries to persuade. What I'm amazed at is the French judges persuade much more effectively than we do using coercive measures. Our coercive measures nowhere near match the effectiveness of the judge's persuasion.

• 1400

You can't have an AWOL in most of the facilities in France, because it's not illegal to leave a place. But do they run away? No. And if they ran away, they'd probably go see the judge, saying, “I didn't like it there.” Then the judge would complain: “Well, I worked hard to get you into that place.” It's much different.

In one of the places, the girls had keys to their rooms. The staff did not. I said, “Suppose they're in there slashing their wrists.” “Well, you see, we don't control their lives. They do. We don't want that to happen, but they control their lives.” They don't slash their wrists in these places.

But if the staff says, “We'll buy you pizza if you don't slash your wrists,” the kids in this one institution said, “If you don't buy us pizza, we're going to slash our wrists.” Have we created a system where the kids are learning how to manipulate it? I think that's what we've done.

So I'm sympathetic. Our concern is using some sorts of coercive measures. But most of Europe manages to get kids to do these things by persuasion.

I don't say that I understand exactly how it's done. I'm saying there are other systems that don't use these systems, but they get the services to the kids in a more effective way.

Mr. Chuck Cadman: Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Ivan Grose): Thank you, Mr. Cadman.

Mr. Saada, just keep going. I'll cut you off.

Mr. Jacques Saada: Actually I would like to concentrate on one topic, though there are so many more. It's something I will address to all three of you.

Around this table we have seen some victims appear before us. I've noticed one thing. When the offenders were on the right track, when we saw a 23- or 24-year-old offender who had regained control of her life, I didn't see one media in this room. Yesterday we had a victim and a very, very emotional case, and the room here was full of media. And I must say some politicians also play the game.

On the other hand—and I'm going to talk about publication of course—Ms. Sowden, you decided, in what I feel is such a courageous move, to distribute the picture of your daughter in the schools around. At the same time, if the system takes its own decision to distribute these kinds of pictures and publicize the names of the kids who are offending, there is an impact for the parents, there is an impact for the brothers and sisters, and there is an impact for everybody else around.

What do we achieve with publication of names of young offenders? I don't care what they're sentenced to.

Ms. Diane Sowden: In the situation with my daughter, I don't think it should have been publication in the paper or anything like that, but the proper people in authority definitely needed to be notified. My daughter was recruiting children she happened to go to school with, whose parents we had sat with at hockey games and soccer games. The impact in the community, if I hadn't spoken out, is that we would have lost more children to the sex trade of Vancouver. We were putting those families at risk.

I don't think I did anything negative to my daughter by letting the proper authorities know. When she came to the school to the smoking pits to recruit kids, she was giving out cigarettes laced with heroin to grade 8 girls. They knew who she was. They were able to get her off the school grounds, get her out of the area.

For me, though, as her family, because I had to do it, my daughter knew I did it, so it disconnected our relationship further. If the authorities had done it on behalf of the safety of the children in the community and on behalf of my daughter, to keep the pimp from controlling her, it wouldn't have damaged the relationship between my daughter and me, because I had to do it.

• 1405

Mr. Jacques Saada: Did you have a chance to or did you try to contact or think of contacting the media, not for the specific case of your daughter in terms of her identity and so on, but in terms of seeking their help in crying for help from the authorities?

Ms. Diane Sowden: Yes, I did. I've written several articles.

Mr. Jacques Saada: Did they publish them?

Ms. Diane Sowden: Yes. In fact I have an interview here that was in the Vancouver Sun. They actually interviewed my daughter, and she explained exactly how she recruited kids. She told how she had had a gun held to her, how she'd had a pimp choke her until she was passed out. Still, I couldn't get anyone to go in and apprehend her, because it was considered a lifestyle choice.

As a responsible community, we should have been able to step in and protect this child. We talk about a child's rights. A child's right is the right to have a parent or a person in authority who can keep them safe. That didn't happen for my daughter.

Mr. Jacques Saada: On the issue of publication and the difference that is being made between sharing of information for specific purposes and publication of names....

Mr. James Hackler: In Austria, anybody can come to juvenile court. My feeling is there hasn't been much impact one way or the other.

This is one feature of the legislation that doesn't bother me as much, because I don't think it makes that much difference in the damage that can be done to kids. All their friends know. All the people who are important know who they are. So I don't know that it adds anything. I don't have strong feelings one way or the other on this.

I'm not convinced it's a good idea to put names in the paper, but I can see there are situations where there might be an advantage here. I suspect this is one of the parts of the legislation that wouldn't matter too much. I would disagree with some of my liberal colleagues in this area in that maybe publication of names isn't going to make that much difference.

Again, I realize you're in a practical, political arena, and I don't mind your winning votes using something that doesn't hurt. If publicizing names gives you some votes and it doesn't hurt kids, fine. But what does hurt is when you use lousy legislation to win votes. That does hurt and does deflect efforts to do something constructive.

So the publication of names might be one of those things where politically, a person can say, “This one won't matter, so let's go ahead and give it to the press.”

Mr. Jacques Saada: But you understand my question was not political. It was—

Mr. James Hackler: Well, as far as I know, the evidence doesn't suggest that it matters. Again, we haven't done systematic studies on this, but in the few countries where I know it is available, no one seems to care. That's what it amounts to.

Mr. David Oborne: I refer back to the brief I mentioned before and the actual anecdotal experience of young offenders. In a circle held by the church council in, I believe, Alberta, a young offender indicated that he was well known in his small community as a young offender and that it had affected both him and his family, but that he had actually had a chance, as he and his family moved to another community, not to be known as a young offender. That enabled him to find a part-time job there, which he likely would not have received if they had known. It helped to turn his life around.

So I really look towards the portion of this that asks, what will be constructive in this young person's life? Do we want them forever to be branded as an offender, or do we want them to be able to reconstitute their life so that they can actually grow up in a productive way?

There are times for us in education when we need to know about students, and I have to say with some sadness that the amount of collaboration among organizations is not great. We can have situations where judges have sentenced youth back to school, and we don't know about it. We don't know what the terms of probation are. We very seldom see probation officers. They themselves have huge caseloads. So in fact the system has broken down, not because of the intent of the law, but because of the resources applied in order to help it.

• 1410

There will be cases where other agencies actually name students outside of your act. In British Columbia at this point, the Workers' Compensation Board actually has regulations, and they'd more subscribe to the needs of employee groups that might want us to name a young person as a dangerous occupant in a school, those children who are conduct-disordered. We've actually had situations where the Workers' Compensation Board would demand that someone's name be posted on the school door as being dangerous in that school, when programs were in place.

These are areas where we should be really very cautious before we publish names. I don't think it does the student good. Before we publish the names, we really need to apply the test, is it presenting a danger or a harm to others around?

Mr. Jacques Saada: Thank you very much.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Ivan Grose): Thank you, Mr. Saada.

Anything else, Mr. Cadman?

Mr. Chuck Cadman: No.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Ivan Grose): I ordinarily don't pose questions, but as we're so few, I will.

I'm trying to figure out how we could do what you request—that is, further extend the federal system so that we'd be covering jurisdictions. We're caught in this bind, as you realize, in this country. I wasn't there when the British North America Act was written, but we here in Ottawa make the laws, and the provinces essentially enforce them, sometimes as they see them, and they don't always see them the same way in every province. It's a constant problem for us.

I can appreciate your point, Ms. Sowden, about moving young people from Alberta to British Columbia, but I don't know how you'd cover it with a federal law, because no matter what federal law you enact, it's going to be enforced by the province, with the exception of excise and income tax, and drugs. It's what we're stuck with, and I'm looking for a way to get around it, but what it is I don't know.

I'm from Ontario. I know our neighbours next door in Quebec do a much better job than we do, a much more progressive job, but it doesn't seep across the border into Ontario. I'm not going to mention governments or parties or anything else, but Ontario is going in the other direction. I mean, we're opening up four boot camps, which we're then going to sell to private enterprise. So we're going into the business of boot camps.

How we reconcile that I don't know. It's a constant struggle. It's just something we're stuck with. I'm not making excuses. It's our job to figure a way around it, but I haven't figured one yet. Any suggestions?

Really what we are—someone put it very well the other day—is fourteen principalities pretending to be a country. That about describes it. Our provinces of course have much more power than any other provinces or states. I used to think maybe Swiss cantons had more power. They don't. Our provinces are really separate states. That brings a lot of problems.

Mr. James Hackler: I don't have any quickie answers to this problem.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Ivan Grose): Oh, gee! That's what I was looking for.

Mr. James Hackler: But there are more models around, rather than just North America. In the United States, they don't have any cooperation to speak of from Texas to Massachusetts. Australia has separate states. So it isn't that it's a unique problem. It's a fairly common problem. But there are enough models in other parts of the world that have managed it better that it would be worthwhile looking at them, instead of being so narrow-minded about simply looking at North America.

Looking at basically a failed criminal justice system in the United States and using those measures as the way to improve the system here doesn't make a lot of sense. By looking at the Dutch system, the Norwegian system, and the German system more carefully, would you be able to construct a more intelligent pattern? Would you look at Fiji, for example? Fiji isn't hard to grasp. It has 700,000 people. You can get a picture of it in a relatively short time. New Zealand is not hard to grasp. So there are places where you could look, and they might have worked through these same sorts of problems.

• 1415

South Australia, for example, does a superior job to New South Wales. So what does South Australia do compared to New South Wales? What does Melbourne, Victoria do, where five youth court judges do 3 million people? How many do you have here in Ottawa—seven or eight judges? So there are other parts of the world that have coped with these types of problems. Maybe looking at them more carefully would at least give you some choices. You'd have a bigger cafeteria.

On the whole problem of publicity, your press is always going to be dramatic. A Hawaiian study showed a good illustration. Delinquency has been constant over the last ten years, but the number of articles in the newspaper on delinquency and gang delinquency are going up like mad. When you don't have enough wars around, you turn to things like that. That's something you have to live with, and I realize that's a problem.

Over the years, I've watched one journalist at the Edmonton Journal do a much better job of educating the public. I saw intelligent articles appearing after this lady had worked on it for a couple of years. There are a few journalists who actually do intelligent work here, and it strikes me that you could cultivate those people, and they might be able to actually get the public not to be.... You shouldn't be convinced that they're just going to jump all over you unless you do something that sounds tough.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Ivan Grose): I come from the city with the highest annual wage in Canada, and my constituents overwhelmingly are saying, “Hang 'em high and hang 'em often.” I swim upstream, because I had a life before this and I'll have a life after. But it makes it terribly difficult for us to enact laws, because it's not what our constituents want.

Let's put the cards on the table. The Young Offenders Act is completely in disrepute in Ontario. No one likes it. No one talks it up. Everyone talks it down—the police, the courts, the media.

Mr. James Hackler: That's always the case. That's always the case.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Ivan Grose): That probably is why we're sitting here today. We're tinkering. I hope at the end of the day we're going to be a little bit better off. From your testimony here today, I'm troubled about whether we are going to be or not.

This is the testimony we've been hearing not only from you. That's why we listen to testimony. We're going to have a terrible, terrible time with this act when we get down to regurgitating all the testimony we've heard. The people on the one side tell us it's not tough enough, and the people on the other side tell us it's too tough. You, who are sort of in the middle and have no real axe to grind, tell us it has great inadequacies and we're moving in the wrong direction on some things. So we have to decide what to do with it.

Governments never turn things completely upside down. It just doesn't happen. Well, dictatorships do, but in a democracy, you don't do that. So we go on tinkering, and that in fact is what we're doing now.

Mr. James Hackler: You have a similar situation to the capital punishment argument. If you ask people, “Do you want capital punishment?”, they say, “Yes, let's punish them.” If you give them ten different cases and say, “In this particular situation, here was the development,” in every single case, they say, “Well, in that case, no.” We have the same situation in Canada when we ask if everybody wants capital punishment. When you really think about it and you ask the public, in each individual case they back down.

You have to live with this. This is a chronic pattern. Ever since Aristotle, it's “The kids today are worse than in my generation.” We've seen that quote again and again.

Mr. Jacques Saada: Aristotle told me it was like this before him too.

Mr. James Hackler: Actually there's an Egyptian case that even goes before that.

That's a chronic thing you have to live with. But there's a chance that people will respect leadership, and if you tell people, “Yes, I know most of you want things tough, but I don't think you're right,” I think people will say, “You know, that person is courageous. Maybe we'll vote for him because he's courageous. We want to sound tough, but we still would like leadership.” That's where it would be nice to see real leadership.

We have seen leadership in several areas. About capital punishment, they did show some leadership. People went contrary to what they perceived to be the public vote. Did they kick anybody out because of it?

Leadership every now and then, going against the stream, will not necessarily hurt you, if you make an attempt to educate, and I think you can. If you tell them why you think the punitive approach does not pay off and you point out that we incarcerate more kids than any other developed country and the others are doing a better job, they'll buy that. I think you can sell that argument.

• 1420

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Ivan Grose): We have a problem. The incoming police chief in Toronto—which makes him, I guess, the number one cop in Canada—has said the figures are absolute lies; there is no decrease in crime; there's a vast increase. Last night apparently he was quoted as saying youth crime in this country since 1986 has gone up 160%. He also is in favour of the Singapore system. And a witness the other day told us, “If you put a politician here saying one thing and a cop over here saying something, guess who they're going to believe? Not the politician.” We all lie.

Mr. James Hackler: Some of the leading thinking in Alberta has been in the Edmonton and Calgary police forces. I haven't been there for several years now. I'm in Victoria now. But some of the leading thinking came from the police.

When I ride with the police, first of all they talk about capital punishment. They're extremely reasonable. There are many vocal policemen who would go along with these liberal views. At the same time they will say, “Yes, they only get a slap on the wrist when they go to court.” So I don't think the police—

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Ivan Grose): It's interesting you say that. This afternoon we're listening to the chief of either the Edmonton or the Calgary police force. Which one has the woman chief?

A voice: Calgary.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Ivan Grose): She's going to testify this afternoon. It will be fascinating to hear what she has to say.

Mr. James Hackler: I don't think the police are a barrier. I really think the police quite often are very supportive.

In Quebec, again, the police force seems to play a more active role. They deal with problems. There Jean Trépanier will do a better job this afternoon or whenever he talks. The police in Quebec seem to be able to deal with problems without getting into that formal system, and that seems to have a payoff. The system then has only a smaller number of more serious offenders to deal with. That's what's happened in Quebec. More of the lighter problems are taken care of without the system. That gives you more resources.

One of the best systems I watched operate was in Quebec City, where there was a ten-year public defender. She'd really been around a long time. She said, “I know it's low prestige, but I do something more constructive here than I do defending adult criminals.” There was a five-year prosecutor who knew the system well, a monitoring judge, and a clerk who'd been there for twelve years. They were all women, by the way, and that maybe had something to do with it. They seemed to be able to work together on problems. Rather than creating an adversarial system, they were able to resolve issues, many of them outside.

If the public defender had a case she was working on, she would say to the prosecutor, “Can you sit on this for a while? Instead of just going in and adjourning all the time, can it just wait?” Then she could work on it. I approached the judge and said, “How do you feel when these cases are already resolved by the prosecutor and the defence agreeing, and all you have to do is rubber-stamp them?” She said, “I love it. That's fine, if they can give me a case I can just rubber-stamp. It's the other problems I have to work on.”

If you create the conditions so that these teams can work together, instead of rotating your prosecutors all over the place and having your judges rotate all the time, you can develop a court team. There's a lot of evidence that court teams, whatever the legislation is, will make it work, if you get a group of people together. But we don't do that. We don't create conditions that will develop a court team. Instead we dump an unreadable set of rules on them, which they will have to puzzle over, and this will really set them back.

That's one of the damages here. This will slow things down. These people will have to be studying this badly written piece of legislation. That's going to interfere. You won't have any time to do anything constructive. You have to master this thing. It took a couple of years before the Young Offenders Act was digested, and then they said, “Well, we can work within this,” and you saw some good systems developing here and there. This will set the system back now for a couple of more years.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Ivan Grose): Thank you.

Are there any other ideas here?

Ms. Diane Sowden: I just want to say the Ministry of Children and Families did a working group on secure care in our province in 1994. I was one of the members; there were ten people in the province. It took four months to do the report. The recommendation is, yes, in B.C. we need secure care, and the reason is that a growing number of young people, as young as 10 and 11, who are heroin-addicted in our downtown east side are being sold in the sex trade.

One of the things the minister came back and said is this is something they do want to see in our province. The problem is they don't have the funding for the facilities. There's no point in having a child sent to secure care if we don't have the place to send them.

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You'll be speaking this afternoon to the fellow from Calgary. Alberta has the Alberta Adolescent Recovery Centre, which the police helped to set up. It's a twelve-month-long program, and it's working very well.

What we need to do then on a federal level is financially support more of the programs on a provincial level so that they're able to put these things into place. We can come up with all the ideas, but there's no funding.

We're spending the money anyway. When we look at the statistics of these 134 families, 58% of these youth have been in jail. It's costing money.

When I spoke to the regional supervisor from social services last week in regard to my daughter, he told me the system has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on my daughter in the last six years. She still had the problem: drug addiction. If we had dealt with that at the very beginning, we wouldn't have gone through the last four or five years.

As well, as I mentioned, now my husband and I are raising two drug-affected babies, and they have multiple problems. The youngest is two and a half, and my daughter was shooting heroin into her arm through the whole pregnancy, right up to the delivery. Who knows what's going to happen? And there won't be resources for them either.

So a lot of it has to do with funding on a federal level to support the provincial initiatives. If they are willing to put these in place under child protection, they have to have the funding then.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Ivan Grose): Thank you. I asked a question; you gave me the answer.

Mr. Oborne.

Mr. David Oborne: I have one last piece.

Within the legislation, you're obviously bound by the types of things the legislation is talking about, but your government has actually made a lot of inroads in other areas. Our district, for instance, is participating in an HRDC study on early childhood, which takes the work of Richard Tremblay and others to look at resiliency as it develops in early childhood. There are other areas of justice that look at a number of things that would avoid incarceration for youngsters.

All those programs need to be put together in terms of what you talked about as a children's agenda. It really is an idea that's been circulating for a number of years to develop a ministry for children. Otherwise there is no focus. The focus is dispersed among all your departments.

I've worked with the Canadian School Boards Association on various committees on poverty, and certainly there's an overlap. They work through the Department of Health. We have HRDC working on early childhood agendas. We have Justice looking at young offenders. We have all of these things going on, but they don't know, among the departments, as much as we know who are working in the field.

We are actually a very small country in many respects. It's amazing to me how many of my colleagues in many of these sectors I bump into who are actually doing the same thing. We are working at the grassroots level. We are working in the provinces. We are working in the communities.

It would be very helpful to us if the federal government took this on as a true agenda to really look at youth and children. I think you would improve the lot of our country by quantum leaps if you did something in this area.

This act will be passed in whatever fashion you can frame it, but it itself, in the bigger picture, is only a part of what needs to be done for our kids. We need someone to take that leadership role to provide the resources.

You spend ten times as much on incarceration as we get per year to educate a child. If we put that money up front—and we know it's going to be nine to twelve times as cost-effective—we will reduce the rate of involvement and we will lead to reduction of the rates of mental disorders.

We know adolescents are the most underserved part of our community. We know 15% to 18% of them suffer from depression, somatization, or conduct disorder. Yet what is done? In a typical high school of 2,000 students, we will see five counsellors. How much work can they actually provide for the 20% of 2,000 youngsters—400—who are suffering from some social or emotional disorder?

We need people to really start addressing in a holistic fashion this problem. There are people out there in this country who are ready to and would welcome the chance to do that if we had a children's agenda.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Ivan Grose): Thank you.

Mr. Hackler one more time.

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Mr. James Hackler: Juveniles prostituting and using drugs is one of our very severe problems. Hamburg, Germany will provide services right within the areas where these young people work. In other words, there are safehouses, let's call them. There are some of them where no men are allowed. Even a researcher can't go in there, and no police. These are protected areas for females.

Do they accomplish something? Maybe by giving out needles, they're not doing things we would really like. They don't control them. These girls can come and go. But they can sleep there and they can eat there.

There's also the bus. Everybody knows the number of the bus. You don't get on it. That's where two doctors come regularly with nurses, and they provide treatment. That is known in the neighbourhood. The bus comes there and parks for half a day twice a week.

So there are some places. Hamburg has a thousand-year history of prostitution. What are they doing with juveniles? I'm not saying they're winning the battle completely, buy maybe they're doing less damage than we are. Reducing the damage, harm reduction, may be a better strategy than assuming you can jump in and cure problems. Can you get people through this very difficult stage alive and not HIV-infected?

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Ivan Grose): Thank you very much.

I'd like to thank the witnesses for your patience in putting up with us and our little games we play here. We've now gone well into Question Period, which is sacred around here, so I probably will hear from on high.

At this point in our deliberations, it's very difficult for witnesses to tell us something new. You have ploughed some new ground here for us, and I do appreciate it. Thank you very, very much.

The meeting is adjourned.