1981-05-12

ROUTINE PROCEEDINGS


Mr. Gordon Taylor (Bow River):: Madam Speaker, I rise on a matter of urgent and pressing necessity under the provisions of Standing Order 43. Whereas the Canadian Grain Commission has given notice that grain handling tariffs will be increased from 10 per cent to 50 per cent this summer, and whereas farmers are already seriously feeling the pinch with regard to higher costs for everything they buy, including machinery, unnecessary increases due to metric, along with high interest rates and unprecedented inflation, I move, seconded by the hon. member for Athabasca (Mr. Shields):
That the Government of Canada provide some leadership by finding ways and means of keeping the cost of production down by increasing the returns to producers and by eliminating unnecessary costs, tariffs and taxes before the industry is completely destroyed.


Madam Speaker:: Is there unanimous consent for this motion?


Some hon. Members:: Agreed.


Some hon. Members:: No.


THE ECONOMY
Mr. Stan Darling (Parry Sound-Muskoka):: Madam Speaker, I rise on a matter of extreme urgency under the provisions of Standing Order 43. According to recent figures from Statistics Canada, what a dollar would buy in the way of groceries in 1971 now costs the Canadian consumer $2.85. As well, in light of the fact that food prices have risen astronomically since the government took office, forcing many Canadians to try to subsist on a "dollar diet", which is almost the price of a simple loaf of bread, I move, seconded by the hon. member for Prince Edward-Hastings (Mr. Ellis):
That the heartless, do-nothing Minister of Finance inform this House of the immediate measures he intends to take to assist Canadians who are finding it increasingly difficult to feed their families.


Madam Speaker:: Is there unanimous consent for this motion?


Some hon. Members:: Agreed.


Some hon. Members:: No.


FARM CREDIT CORPORATION
Mr. Vic Althouse (Humboldt-Lake Centre):: Madam Speaker, I rise under the provisions of Standing Order 43 on a matter of urgent and pressing necessity. Whereas interest payments now account for more than 15 per cent of total farm costs, or between $1.5 billion and $2 billion; and whereas farm bankruptcies are increasing at an exponential rate, being up 78 per cent between 1979 and 1980 and continuing up at a rate of over 70 per cent during the first quarter of 1981 compared to the first quarter of 1980, I move, seconded by the hon. member for The Battlefords-Meadow Lake (Mr. Anguish):
That this House instructs the Minister of Agriculture to take action immediately to increase funding available to the Farm Credit Corporation by $150 million and to make possible the reinvestment of funds in the Farm Credit Corporation by retiring farmers.


Madam Speaker:: Is there unanimous consent for this motion?


Some hon. Members:: Agreed.


Some hon. Members:: No.


NATIONAL UNITY
Mr. Marcel Dionne (Chicoutimi):: Madam Speaker, under the provisions of Standing Order 43 I seek the unanimous consent of the House to move a motion concerning an urgent and important question.
Considering that, according to an article signed by Nor-mand Girard and published in the Journal de Montreal last May 6, the Parti quebecois is unofficially committed to achieve separatism, and considering that the people are being told about the deceiving manoeuvres to which the Parti quebe-
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May 12, 1981
cois plans to resort with a view to fulfilling its aims, I move, seconded by the hon. member for Abitibi (Mr. Gingras):
That the Canadian government take the necessary steps to thwart the plans of the Pequistes.


Madam Speaker:: Order, please. The presentation of such a motion requires unanimous consent. Is there unanimous consent?


Some hon. Members:: Agreed.


Some hon. Members:: No.


VETERANS AFFAIRS
Mr. Dan McKenzie (Winnipeg-Assiniboine):: Madam Speaker, I rise to move a motion under the provisions of Standing Order 43. Today, more than ever, veterans deserve better treatment from the government. They are now faced with an inflation rate of 12.4 per cent, an increase in gas prices of 52 cents per gallon, heating oil increases of $1.12 per gallon, food cost hikes of 15.2 per cent, and a do-nothing budget. On top of all this they are being administered by a department which is receiving no leadership and is taking up to two years to process their pension applications. There is also the fact that some veterans are dying before they receive their pensions. Therefore I move, seconded by the hon. member for Red Deer (Mr. Towers):
That this House instruct the Prime Minister to appoint a full-time Minister of Veterans Affairs immediately and that this new minister launch a full-fledged investigation into the totally unacceptable conditions in the Department of Veterans Affairs.


Madam Speaker:: Is there unanimous consent for this motion?


Some hon. Members:: Agreed.


Some hon. Members:: No.


NATIONAL ENERGY PROGRAM
Mr. Jack Shields (Athabasca):: Madam Speaker, I rise to move a motion under the provisions of Standing Order 43. Whereas the absolute disaster and unbending stupidity of the government's National Energy Program have been well demonstrated by the delay in excess of $20 billion of investment in heavy oil and tar sands development in northeastern Alberta which coincides with the loss of thousands of jobs throughout Canada and severe damage to the entire national economy, and whereas approval of these major energy
projects, with a more realistic National Energy Program in place, would improve the investment climate in Canada and relieve the pressure on our dollar, which is currently producing record high interest rates, I move, seconded by the hon. member for Red Deer (Mr. Towers):
That this House condemn the Minister of Finance for his repeated stonewalling of the Canadian public and demand that he produce a new budget and energy program and, if he is not capable of doing so, that he tender his resignation immediately.


Madam Speaker:: Is there unanimous consent for this motion?


Some hon. Members:: Agreed.


Some hon. Members:: No.


HOUSING
Mr. John McDermid (Brampton-Georgetown):: Madam Speaker, when mortgage rates were at 14 per cent a family needed to earn $28,200 in order to carry their $50,000 first mortgage. Today, less than one year later, the same family must earn $32,213 to carry their home at the present soaring mortgage rate of 18 per cent, which puts home ownership out of reach of the vast majority of young Canadians since the average family income is $26,000. I move, seconded by the hon. member for Simcoe North (Mr. Lewis), under Standing Order 43:
That the Prime Minister immediately relieve the minister responsible for housing and CMHC and the Minister of Finance of their present responsibilities and replace them with individuals who are genuinely concerned, if he can find any, about the plight of the home owner who has to renew his or her mortgage and of those who wish to own their homes but now find the dream out of reach.


Madam Speaker:: Is there unanimous consent for this motion?


Some hon. Members:: Agreed.


Some hon. Members:: No.


SMALL BUSINESS
Mr. J. R. Ellis (Prince Edward-Hastings):: Madam Speaker, I rise under the provisions of Standing Order 43. These past few years have seen the closing of seven canning factories in Prince Edward county, leaving only three small canners, plus one large operation. With the exorbitant interest rates now being charged there is a real possibility of further closures, leaving the farm community completely unprotected. I
May 12, 1981

therefore move, seconded by the hon. member for Northumberland (Mr. Hees):
That the Minister of Finance take heed of the remarks of the Minister of Agriculture and immediately institute reasonable rates for small businesses, and particularly those in the agricultural business.


Madam Speaker:: Is there unanimous consent for this motion?


Some hon. Members:: Agreed.


Some hon. Members:: No.


NATIONAL MENTAL RETARDATION WEEK
Mr. Jesse P. Flis (Parkdale-High Park):: Madam Speaker,
I seek the attention of all hon. members of this House on a matter of urgent and pressing necessity, under the terms of Standing Order 43. Whereas this week of May 11 to 17 is officially proclaimed National Mental Retardation Week and whereas this same week has been proclaimed "Mental Retardation Awareness Week" in many municipalities across Canada, I move, seconded by the hon. member for Brandon-Souris (Mr. Dinsdale):
That this House urge all Canadians to offer their understanding to mentally retarded individuals and to become aware of their potential and capabilities so that the mentally retarded can enjoy as full a life as possible and share in the work and recreational experiences of our society.


Madam Speaker:: I am sure the House shares the sentiments expressed in this motion and will do whatever is possible, but I do not think it can be taken under Standing Order 43.


MUNICIPAL AFFAIRS
Mr. Cyril Keeper (Winnipeg-St. James):: Madam Speaker, interest rates which affect the cost of capital borrowing by municipalities across this country are a matter of urgent and pressing necessity because they increase the property taxes of every Canadian. In the Ottawa-Carleton regional area, for example, only one and a half months ago the executive committee was talking about a borrowing rate of 14'/2 per cent for their capital necessities. Today the rate is over 16 per cent. Therefore it will cost three and a half times as much by the time they pay back the debt. Winnipeg is another example. Under present interest rates, the average householder will have to pay $30 to carry the capital costs of local public works. I therefore move, seconded by the hon. member for Winnipeg North Centre (Mr. Knowles):
That the government immediately implement a program of low-cost loans for capital purposes to municipalities.


Madam Speaker:: Is there unanimous consent for this motion?
Oral Questions


Some hon. Members:: Agreed.


Some hon. Members:: No.



ORAL QUESTION PERIOD


Hon. Flora MacDonald (Kingston and the Islands):: Madam Speaker, my question is to the Minister of Finance. It concerns the government's interest rate policy and the highest interest rates in Canada's history. No one needs to be told that these interest rates are causing untold hardship, but the minister considers the hardship in cold statistical terms rather than in human terms.


Some hon. Members:: Question.


Flora Isabel MacDonald: I want to ask him whether he is aware of the anguish among the many small businessmen who are being forced into bankruptcy by the high interest rate policy, and in fact who are lying awake worrying at night because they must tell their employees in the morning they will have to lay them off because they cannot pay them? Is he aware of the distress among hundreds of farmers who are being forced to sell their farms which have been in their families for generations, because of the high interest rates? The minister seems to be interested in taking his pound of flesh in human terms-


Madam Speaker:: Order.


Flora Isabel MacDonald: I would like to ask the minister-


Madam Speaker:: Order. Order, please. I do have to ask the hon. member to ask a question.


Flora Isabel MacDonald: I should like to ask the Minister of Finance what he proposes to do in the face of these disastrous events which are hurting so many people, and will he please not tell us that it is beyond his control?


Hon. Allan J. MacEachen (Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance):: Madam Speaker, I am quite conscious of the effect of high interest rates on various members of the community, including the groups which the hon. member has mentioned. I am also aware of the even greater danger which will fall upon the over-all Canadian economy and all the people in the country unless we persist in our efforts to reduce over-all inflationary pressures. That is the chief enemy on which the hon. member ought to be focusing. High interest rates are symptoms of this high inflation and, unless we succeed in reducing inflation, much more difficult situations will occur.

May 12, 1981
Oral Questions
But I must say I was surprised when the hon. member referred to lay-offs which she alleges are occurring in the Canadian economy. I would remind her that in the month of April we had the lowest unemployment rate in this country we have had in five years.


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Allan Joseph MacEachen: We have, in addition, created more jobs. We have at the same time created about 330,000 jobs year to year in Canada, an increase in employment of 3.3 per cent. No other industrialized country in the world can compete with that job-creation record in the last year.


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


EFFECT ON PEOPLE WITH FIXED INCOMES
Flora Isabel MacDonald: Madam Speaker, 1 can tell from the minister's response that he has not been talking to any of the people who have been hurt all across this country by his high interest rates. This does not just apply to the small businessmen and the farmers I mentioned; the interest rates are hurting all the people in this country he spoke about because they are fuelling inflation and causing the prices of everything we buy to go up. I would like to ask the minister if he has looked at even the most basic, essential goods which people have to buy, including food? Is he aware of the fact that milk has gone up 73 cents for a three-quart bag since interest rates started spiralling, that potatoes are up $1.30 for a ten-pound bag, that butter is up 40 cents a pound, that sugar is up $1.40 a bag, and that bread is up 18 cents a loaf? On top of that, is he aware that-


Madam Speaker:: Order, order.


Flora Isabel MacDonald: -home heating fuel has risen 36 cents a gallon?


Madam Speaker:: Order, please. Order. I am sure the hon. member is quite conscious of the fact that she is making a speech. The question period is designed to ask questions. If the hon. member requires some information, she now has the opportunity to ask for it.


Flora Isabel MacDonald: I will put my question to the minister, who has said in recent days that these increases will have to be absorbed by the people. 1 would like to ask him quite simply how the people who are trying to live on fixed incomes, the elderly, single parents, and people who are disabled, are supposed to absorb the price increases I mentioned.


Allan Joseph MacEachen: Madam Speaker, the hon. member has misinterpreted what I said in a recent speech when 1 said that I believed that the Canadian economy at the present time must absorb increases in energy prices. I believe that. There is no way by which these energy prices can be transferred to any
other group in the community. I believe that, but I am surprised that the hon. member would stand up in the House of Commons and pretend to take a sympathetic view about increasing prices when recently at her party's national convention she approved an increase in energy prices to 75 per cent of the world level, which would add a much greater burden on the consumer price index than anything we have seen to the present time.


REQUEST FOR AID FOR HOME OWNERS
Flora Isabel MacDonald: Madam Speaker, the minister might talk about people pretending, but he has been pretending to act as the Minister of Finance for some months now. That is all he has been doing, pretending.


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Flora Isabel MacDonald: I would like to ask the minister if he has talked to any of the hundreds and thousands of Canadians who are now being forced out of their homes because of the high mortgage rates. Have any of his backbenchers been talking to these people? A year ago the minister said that the federal government would consider special assistance to home owners if interest rates soared under the floating rate. He said that he would take action, and since he is supposedly an honourable man, I would like to ask him what he is going to do to honour that commitment.


Allan Joseph MacEachen: Madam Speaker, we have been through this particular question before. It is true that when interest rates increased very rapidly a year ago I undertook to take special account of the home owners in Canada who were renegotiating their mortgages. That was done, and we found that in a very high proportion of the cases, first, because of increases in incomes home owners had experienced and, second, because of the appreciation in the value of their homes they had experienced they were able to bear the burden of these increased mortgage payments. That is the fact.
The fact of the matter is that during that very difficult period almost all of those who renegotiated their mortgages were able to meet the problems, and that small percentage which had a higher proportion of debt to income than is normally carried was helped by special arrangements made by the minister responsible for CMHC in order to carry them through that difficulty. So there is no point, as we go through this difficult period, for the hon. member to be creating more false situations and false issues in the country than exist at the present time.


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Some hon. Members:: Oh, oh!
May 12, 1981


REQUEST FOR CHANGE IN POLICY
Hon. John C. Crosbie (St. John's West):: Madam Speaker, the Minister of Finance is crucifying Canadians on the Cross of higher interest rates and, like Pontius Pilate, he washes his hands of it.


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


John Carnell Crosbie: He washes his hands. The Bank of Canada rate was 11.76 per cent before the minister brought down his budget in October. It is now 18.71 per cent, a 7 per cent increase. That is the result of the minister's budget. My question to the minister is this: the Bank of Canada and the minister say our interest rates have to go up, primarily because U.S. interest rates had to go up and the Canadian dollar is weak. Will the minister now change the new energy policy, so-called, which is anti-business, anti-private sector, anti-provinces, and is weakening the Canadian dollar? Would he change that policy and get an agreement now with the oil producing provinces to start us out of this slump and put us in a position where interest rates can be brought down? Will he do that, or will he force the Minister of Energy, Mines and Resources or the Prime Minister to do that?


Allan Joseph MacEachen: Madam Speaker, the hon. member quite correctly related the very high interest rates we are experiencing in Canada to the very remarkable increase in rates that has occurred in the United States in the last week. As was pointed out by the Bank of Canada last Thursday following the auction on treasury bills, short-term interest rates in the United States rose by two percentage points or more in the last week, having risen strongly in April. I might add that since mid-April interest rates in the United States have risen by two percentage points more than they have in Canada. There is no doubt that the pressure of U.S. interest rates on Canada is real and evident, and that the pressure is occurring on the exchange rate and on interest rates themselves. I am glad that the hon. member is aware of that.
In reply to his question, I want to tell him that of course it is the intention of the government to reach an agreement with the province of Alberta as quickly as possible. The Minister of Energy, Mines and Resources has already had meetings. Last week further discussions were held with the province of Alberta. It would be our hope to reach an agreement as quickly as possible, and it is something that we are working toward very energetically.
Oral Questions FINANCE


ACTION TO STRENGTHEN CANADIAN DOLLAR
John Carnell Crosbie: Madam Speaker, the Canadian dollar would not be weak were it not for the actions of the government in the last ten years and neglect of the Canadian economy.


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


John Carnell Crosbie: My question to the minister is this: what action is he taking to strengthen the Canadian dollar so we are not completely dependent on the U.S., which is the position his government has put us in? What action is he taking to do that? His advice to the Canadian people is like the male chauvinist-if you are going to be raped, relax and enjoy it.
We want to know what action the minister is taking to reverse the weakness of the Canadian dollar, and we want to ask the minister this: will he give this House a solemn commitment that he will not permit the Bank of Canada to raise interest rates one jot or tittle further, and that this is as far as they are going no matter what happens to interest rates in the United States? Will he do that?


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Allan Joseph MacEachen: No, Madam Speaker. I, like the hon. members opposite, regret the rise in interest rates in current circumstances which, in my view, are unavoidable. I know that the members of the opposition parties have indicated they intend to debate the economy today, tomorrow and the next day. I will be looking forward to their views as to what they have to recommend in current circumstances. But I ask the hon. member to reflect on his request at the present time, and the effect that his request, if administered by an irresponsible minister of finance, would have on-


John Carnell Crosbie: We have one!


Allan Joseph MacEachen: -would have on the inflation rate in Canada and on the exchange value of the Canadian currency. The hon. member knows perfectly well that his proposal really borders short on complete irresponsibility.


THE ECONOMY
Mr. Edward Broadbent (Oshawa):: Madam Speaker, I have a question for the Prime Minister. The Minister of Finance has just said that the current high interest rate policy is unavoidable. On November 9, 1979, the Prime Minister, then Leader of the Opposition, moved a motion of non-confidence in the Conservative government of the day on the grounds that "its acceptance of record high interest rates" was unacceptable. Interest rates then were at 13 per cent.

May 12, 1981
Oral Questions


Some hon. Members:: Oh, oh!


John Edward Broadbent: Considering that the prime rate is now 19.5 per cent, considering that mortgages are approaching 20 per cent, and considering that the cost of living is now higher by 12.5 per cent, I would like to ask the Prime Minister, instead of continuing with these ruinous high interest rate policies, why does he not deliver on the promise he made in the last election campaign to the people of Canada?


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Right Hon. P. E. Trudeau (Prime Minister):: Madam Speaker, you will recall that in the context of that campaign we indicated that high interest rates and slow growth did not make sense. That is why we campaigned against them.


John Edward Broadbent: And now they do?


Pierre Elliott Trudeau: The Leader of the New Democratic Party is now showing his ignorance. If he had listened to the statistics given by the minister he would have realized that we are now in a period of high growth and high employment.


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Some hon. Members:: Oh, oh!


Madam Speaker:: Order, please. I am afraid hon. members have accumulated too much energy over their break, but so have I and I intend to keep them straight.


Pierre Elliott Trudeau: Madam Speaker, you must be as bewildered as I at the groans when I mention high growth. Surely an 8 per cent real growth rate in the last quarter and a 4 per cent to 6 per cent real growth rate in the present quarter are, indeed, a high growth rate. If they suspect anything different, they are ignorant of the facts.


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


ANNUNCIATION OF GOVERNMENT POLICY
John Edward Broadbent: Madam Speaker, speaking of ignorance, I would point out to the Prime Minister that I asked him a question about interest rates and the cost of living, and nothing to do with job creation. If the promise made sense in November of 1979, when the Prime Minister was Leader of the Opposition, it surely makes sense to implement it now, when he is Prime Minister of Canada.
The government is continuing to mislead the people of Canada. The minister responsible for housing has indicated that he would like a shelter allowance provided to the people of Canada; the Minister of National Health and Welfare has talked about increasing the tax exemption for children and other ministers want to change the Bank Act, especially the Minister of Agriculture who wants to help farmers. With regard to each of these instances the Minister of Finance has said that the idea is ridiculous, or he has done nothing about
them. I would like to ask the Prime Minister: who speaks for the Government of Canada? Is it these ministers who are making promises to the people of Canada, or is it the Minister of Finance who is turning them all down?


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Pierre Elliott Trudeau: Madam Speaker, I cannot understand the attitude taken by the Leader of the New Democratic Party when he says I talk about high employment and high growth. Surely these issues are linked, as he knows. If you want to fight inflation at all costs, you can follow the route followed by other industrialized countries which have brought inflation down very drastically but at a cost of very high rising unemployment and at a cost of zero or negative growth in their economies. Surely as erudite a man as the Leader of the New Democratic Party would understand that there is some linking between these concepts. I say that on balance, which is the position we took in the last campaign, we prefer to see employment growth and economic growth. That is our choice, rather than stagnation. I am surprised that we do not have the support of the New Democratic Party.


John Edward Broadbent: Madam Speaker, we have not decided to join with the conservatives in this country or with those south of the border in terms of implementing the kind of reactionary economic policy that the Liberals are forcing on the people of Canada.


REQUEST FOR IMPLEMENTATION OF LOW INTEREST RATE POLICY
John Edward Broadbent: Considering that the Prime Minister argued in the fall of 1979 that a low interest rate policy made sense then, and considering that we in this party and many economists in the country believe it makes sense now, will the Prime Minister instruct the Minister of Finance to implement what he promised to the people of Canada in the last election campaign and instruct the Governor of the Bank of Canada to bring down interest rates? If the Minister of Finance does not do this, will the Prime Minister fire him?


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Pierre Elliott Trudeau: Madam Speaker, I have indicated in my answers that, in my view, the question is one of over-all management of the economy, not separately attacking interest rates and employment as though they were unrelated.
In answer to the specific question as to the effect of in some way forcing down interest rates, I would point out to the Leader of the New Democratic Party that this would mean exchange controls, and until he is prepared to advocate that I would say that we are not prepared to listen to him.
May 12, 1981


BANKS AND BANKING
Hon. Sinclair Stevens (York-Peel):: Madam Speaker, the Prime Minister speaks about us being in a period of real growth. I would like to direct my question to the Minister of Finance and ask him to comment about the real growth we are seeing in our chartered banks whose profits have risen to a quarter of the total profits of all the public companies in Canada, up 66 per cent compared to the same quarter last year, due to the high interest rate structure favoured by the minister. Would the Minister of Finance explain to the House why he chooses to favour a policy which is obviously so beneficial to our chartered banks at a time when countless numbers of small businesses are going bankrupt as a result of it?


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Allan Joseph MacEachen: Madam Speaker, I think 1 should remind hon. members opposite, who have properly raised the plight of the small business firms, that we have in operation the small business development bond which has been extended by this government and which brings very substantial interest rate benefit to eligible small businesses in the country. So, we have responded in these inflationary times to the requests which were made to us by the small business representatives in continuing the small business development bond.
The hon. member has mentioned the profitability of the banks. It is true that for one quarter, and possibly two quarters, there is a strong improvement in the profitability of the banks, stemming from a rather low base. I have already indicated to members of the House of Commons on previous occasions that it is my intention to monitor the situation very closely, since I do not believe that any particular institution in the country should be permitted to benefit in any unfair or inequitable way from the current high interest rates which are necessary for the welfare of the Canadian economy.


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Sinclair McKnight Stevens: Madam Speaker, my supplementary question is for the Minister of Finance who said that the profitability of the banks stems from a rather low base. In the first quarter of last year the banks earned $288 million-that is what the minister calls a low base. This year they will earn $466 million.


EFFECT OF FLOATING BANK OF CANADA INTEREST RATE
Sinclair McKnight Stevens: It is now 14 months since the Minister of Finance introduced his floating rate concept with regard to interest rates. The inflation level has gone up a full 4 per cent since he introduced this policy and, oddly enough, the prime lending rates have gone up 4.5 per cent. Would the minister explain to the House when we will be entering this promised land he told us he was leading us to-a
Oral Questions
promised land with lower inflation, which would be the fallout of his following a high interest rate policy? We certainly have the high interest rates but, unfortunately, we have even higher inflation. When will we get to the point where there is lower inflation in the country? Does the minister admit that his gradualism is just not working?


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Allan Joseph MacEachen: Madam Speaker, the hon. member referred to the introduction of the floating bank rate which is established on a weekly basis as a result of an auction of treasury bills. Hon. members of the House ought to realize that there are very strong pressures at the present time in this country driving up interest rates. That pressure is not only from the United States. There are very strong demands from business and from all sectors of the economy for credit.


Sinclair McKnight Stevens: What about the federal government?


Allan Joseph MacEachen: I would remind hon. members that in April, last month, the demand for over-all credit increased by about 20 per cent. I would ask the hon. member to read the announcement made by the Governor of the Bank of Canada last Thursday when he explained these high interest rates by saying, "In respect of other economic developments the bank noted that the rate of total spending and the demand for credit in Canada have both remained disturbingly high."


Sinclair McKnight Stevens: Including the federal government.


Allan Joseph MacEachen: What the governor of the bank is saying is that we are running a very strong economy. The demand for credit is very intense, and that is one of the sources of high interest rates in Canada. The hon. member should not fail to remember these very important facts.


HOUSING
Mr. Doug Lewis (Simcoe North):: Madam Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Finance. In answer to an earlier question the minister suggested that appreciation in the value of a home helps when it comes to mortgage payments. I would suggest that when a Canadian home owner sits down with a mortgage officer and tells him that his home has appreciated, the mortgage officer is simply going to say, "So has your mortgage payment". I would ask the minister how the appreciation in the value of a home helps a Canadian home owner who has to make out-of-pocket mortgage payments.


Allan Joseph MacEachen: Madam Speaker, if that is too complicated a concept for the hon. member to understand, I should like to draw his attention to a simpler concept, namely, the
May 12, 1981

Oral Questions
relationship between the total income of the individual and the proportion of that income that goes into home ownership payments. That is a well established principle that has been in operation for a long time.
If my hon. friend examines the situation, he will find that because of rising incomes-quite apart from changes in capital appreciation or net worth-if he examines rising incomes, he will find that a very high proportion of home owners renegotiating their mortgages are in as good or better position to bear that ratio as they were when they initially took out the mortgages. That is a fact.


EFFECT OF GOVERNMENT POLICY ON MORTGAGE MARKET
Douglas Grinslade Lewis: 1 wish to ask a supplementary question, Madam Speaker. There are hundreds of thousands of Canadians who are trying to understand what the Minister of Finance just obfuscated. Since the mid-1960s the standard term for a mortgage has been five years. We now have one and two-year mortgages, and there is some talk even of six-month mortgages. The Liberal party's high interest policy has created this period of instability. I want to ask the Minister of Finance if he is not concerned that the lack of action on the part of his department and the government has created an instability in the mortgage market in Canada?


Allan Joseph MacEachen: Madam Speaker, I have a good many concerns and one of those concerns is obviously the impact of the very high interest rates on home owners and other groups in the community. My overriding concern is the very strong inflation that we are experiencing at the present time in Canada and my corollary that the present interest rates are absolutely essential if we are going to make any possible headway against inflation. That is the simple proposition that has to be admitted.
If hon. members ask me, as they are doing, either to protect every group in the country by new spending, or many groups in the country by new spending, or by taking a deliberate action to lower interest rates in current circumstances, they are asking me to do something that I will not do, namely, to take steps that would add further to inflation in the long term. They are saying, "lower it now," and I am telling them that if 1 did that they would get it in spades in the long term.


FINANCE
Mr. Bob Rae (Broadview-Greenwood):: Madam Speaker, we have had it in clubs from the minister today. Four months ago he was blaming the Americans, something he has done again today, and last week he was blaming the Canadian worker for the kind of inflation we have been suffering. Instead of blaming the Canadian worker whose wages have fallen behind the rise in the cost of living in the past four years, and in view of
the effect this has on people on fixed incomes or pensions, why does the minister continue to reject a cost of living tax credit which is not a blanket subsidy but would be a method of using the tax system to provide the kind of protection and help that those Canadians trying to keep up with increases in the cost of living so desperately need, and which would focus that assistance on people who need it most?


Allan Joseph MacEachen: Madam Speaker, I want to correct the hon. member and tell him that I have not at any time blamed the Canadian worker for the current inflationary circumstances. I attempted to mention, in a speech in Toronto, how inflationary expectations in the current strong inflationary environment have fed through into wage settlements which, in my view, will lead in the long term to no benefit for individual workers, or for the economy. That is what I have been saying. If the hon. member can show how I am wrong on that, I would be glad to hear him.
The hon. member is asking me to provide protection through a tax credit for a special group in the community. That is what he is doing. He is not arguing that it is costless. He is not saying that it will not cost the treasury anything. It is obviously going to cost money. It is is going to add to spending. It is going to add to the deficit or add to higher taxes, both of which, in these circumstances, would be unacceptable as far as I am concerned.


ALTERNATIVE POLICY TO FIGHT INFLATION
Bob Rae: Madam Speaker, the minister's commitment to social Darwinism would be quaint were its effect on the average Canadian not so devastating. If he sticks around tomorrow and Thursday, he will hear from us how the economy can afford to pay for a cost of living tax credit by putting taxes on the banks and taxing our largest corporations at a rate which the average taxpayer also pays. The money is there if the minister is prepared to find it.
My supplementary question to the minister is this, Madam Speaker. When the Bank of Canada started its policy of gradualism in 1975, we had an inflation rate of 10 per cent and an interest rate of 9.75 per cent. Now we have inflation running at an annual rate of nearly 14 per cent and interest rates running at 20 per cent. By what empirical test does the minister have to be convinced that the policy which the bank has been following, on his instructions and on the instructions of the hon. member for St. John's West-under what conditions does the minister have to say that this policy clearly is not working and we have to find an alternative that will have the effect of reducing inflation without killing the Canadian economy and without hurting the average Canadian?


Allan Joseph MacEachen: Madam Speaker, on the first point, the hon. member has talked about his suggestion that we tax the banks and corporate industry in the country more heavily. In my budget I introduced a number of very important taxes on
May 12, 1981

the oil and gas industry. I must say that I have not received very much help from the New Democratic Party in getting those bills through, nor have I had very much support from that party for our taxation. I have wondered why not. Why have they been so silent? Let me tell the hon. member-


Mr. Deans:: Did it ever occur to you that you are wrong?


Some hon. Members:: Oh, oh!


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Madam Speaker:: Order, please.


Allan Joseph MacEachen: Madam Speaker, the hon. member is really-however, I will not be as unkind to him as he is occasionally to me.


John Carnell Crosbie: Attaway, Uriah!


Mr. Nowlan:: You tender soul!


Allan Joseph MacEachen: Is the hon. member serious in suggesting that in a period of five or six months, after having this rather high interest rate experience, we can turn back a deeply embedded inflation, which is not only embedded in our structures in the economy but embedded in expectations? Does he really believe that it can be turned aside in five months, or a year or two years-


An hon. Member:: You created it.


Mr. Nielsen:: It is wrestled to the ground.


Allan Joseph MacEachen: -when it took about ten years to build that disbelief in the minds of the public-


John Patrick (Pat) Nowlan: You built it.


Allan Joseph MacEachen: -about the value of the Canadian currency? Does the hon. member believe that?


John Patrick (Pat) Nowlan: You are an ostrich.


EXTERNAL AFFAIRS
Mr. W. Kenneth Robinson (Etobicoke-Lakeshore):: Madam Speaker, my question is for the Secretary of State for External Affairs. In view of the fact it cost $14 million to search and find the radioactive material resulting from the disintegration of a Soviet satellite over the Northwest Territories on January 24, 1978, will the minister advise why he has accepted only $3 million in damages from the Soviet Union? Is it because the minister feels in some way that Canada has some responsibility for the cleanup, or is it because only a few pieces of the satellite which carried radioactive material were found?
Oral Questions


Hon. Mark MacGuigan (Secretary of State for External Affairs):: Madam Speaker, I know the hon. gentleman, who is a very distinguished lawyer, will understand how negotiations normally proceed. This was a matter of very difficult and prolonged negotiations with the Soviet Union. The figure which he has mentioned represents the compromise on which we were able to agree.


THE ECONOMY
Hon. Walter Baker (Nepean-Carleton):: Madam Speaker, my question is directed to the Minister of Finance.
The Minister of Finance took some umbrage at what a member might say to him. I have to say to the Minister of Finance that the House of Commons and the country are beginning to wonder whether or not the Minister of Finance, his department or the government really knows where they are going, or whether they have any answers. That is the reason for this question period today, and it is also the reason, Madam Speaker, why the next two days of debate will be on economic matters.


Some hon. Members:: Order.


Walter David Baker: I think it is important to the country that the House understands what the government is acting upon when it takes the position it does.
In the interests of clarity and in the interests of allowing the House to understand, would the Minister of Finance now undertake, having had notice of two days of debate, to entertain motions in the name of our party with respect to the economy? Would he also undertake to file, prior to the beginning of the debate, the forecasts and new projections of the department with respect to interest rates, rates of inflation, the Bank of Canada rate, as well as projections with respect to energy prices in Canada so that all of the facts will be on the table, and members of the House of Commons, together with members of the public, can make a judgment as to whether the Minister of Finance and the government really have any economic policies at all?


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Allan Joseph MacEachen: Madam Speaker, I think the hon. member will have to make up his own mind on these matters. I have already provided projections in the budget, not only for this year but for last year and for three years ahead. When the occasion justifies it, I will be very glad to revise the projections, but it is not my intention to provide a new array of projections which in the circumstances, as the hon. member knows, are very uncertain. I do not believe, in these uncertain times, that one ought to lay too much emphasis upon projections years down the road.

May 12, 1981
Oral Questions


Walter David Baker: Madam Speaker, the Minister of Finance this morning said publicly that in economic terms the country was in a crisis with respect to inflation and other things. He said that. I heard him say it this morning. He must have made that judgment on some forecast of projections from figures, certainly not the ones in his old budget because they are hopelessly out of date. Therefore, will the minister table the projections and the figures which put the foundation to his statement today that, in terms of inflation, this country is facing a crisis? Canadians believe the country is facing a crisis but what Canadians want from this ministry is the government's intimations on how to get out of it. Obviously, it must not do nothing. There must be something which the government has in mind. Perhaps the time has come for it to be said, either tomorrow or the next day when we will be engaged in debate.


Allan Joseph MacEachen: Madam Speaker, the hon. member said I used the word "crisis". I am not so sure that I did. I thought I said to the interviewer that I regard the inflationary situation as very, very serious.


Walter David Baker: Catastrophic.


Allan Joseph MacEachen: I have had the view, since the budget, that the main difficulty facing the country is inflation. I have difficulty today, despite the evidence of this inflation, in convincing hon. members that the monetary policy pursued by the Bank of Canada is justified, because nobody on the other side has agreed with the policy. One of the difficulties which hon. members have not yet come to realize is that the policy being followed by the Governor of the Bank of Canada is anti-inflationary and is required in the present circumstances.
If the hon. member wants me to give him some facts on which I base my feeling that the inflation situation is serious-


Erik Nielsen: No speeches.


Allan Joseph MacEachen: -I refer him to the bank rate which was increased to 18.71 per cent last Thursday. I regard that as a very serious development. I refer the hon. member to the last inflation figure which showed year to year inflation of 12.4 per cent. I believe these are very serious indices of the inflationary strength of the economy and the environment in which we live. I am looking forward to the debate for the next two days to get views from hon. members-during which I will also give some views-as to what they believe the next step ought to be, not about an incoherent but a coherent policy.


Flora Isabel MacDonald: Who is the Minister of Finance?


REPORTED STATEMENT BY MINISTER OF AGRICULTURE ON AMENDING BANK ACT
Mr. Jack Murta (Lisgar):: Madam Speaker, one segment of society which is facing a crisis is, of course, the agricultural industry, and therefore my question is for the Minister of Finance. Last Thursday the Minister of Agriculture said in a speech in British Columbia that the government was considering amending the Bank Act to reduce interest rates for unincorporated small businesses and for farmers. Was the Minister of Agriculture stating government policy when he made that statement, or was he just talking through his proverbial green hat, which seems to be the usual case?


Allan Joseph MacEachen: Madam Speaker, I do not think the Minister of Agriculture would have referred to the Bank
Act-


Mr. Epp:: He did.


Allan Joseph MacEachen: -because we have completed our revision of the Bank Act and it is not my intention to reopen the Bank Act at the present time.


Mr. Jarvis:: It was Whelan.


An hon. Member:: Down the drain, Gene.


Allan Joseph MacEachen: But I will say that I have had discussions, as I frequently do, with the Minister of Finance. With respect to the Minister of Agriculture-


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Some hon. Members:: Oh, oh!


Allan Joseph MacEachen: I have had frequent discussions with the Minister of Agriculture on questions in which he is interested. One of the items has to do with possible changes to the Income Tax Act.
I also want to tell you, Madam Speaker, that I do have discussions with the Minister of Finance.


Some hon. Members:: Oh, oh!


Flora Isabel MacDonald: You and Mackenzie King.


Jack Wendele Shields: Does he answer you?


Some hon. Members:: Oh, oh!


Mrs. Mitchell:: You will be walking on water soon.


REQUEST FOR EXTENSION OF SMALL BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT BOND PROGRAM
Jack Burnett Murta: Madam Speaker, my supplementary question is also for the Minister of Finance. An example of what would help when it comes to the agricultural industry would be an extension of the small business development bond to include unincorporated businesses, specifically for farmers and farm businesses. The minister must realize that agriculture operates almost totally on borrowed credit. Certainly the cattle feeding industry operates exclusively on borrowed credit. We have a situation in which farm prices are starting to drop but costs have gone up substantially. Can the minister give any indication to the farm community of whether he is looking at a
May 12, 1981

method such as extending the small business development bond to include farm businesses?


Allan Joseph MacEachen: I think the hon. member's question underlines in a sense the contradictions that I am hearing from members of the opposition. Yesterday I read in the newspaper that the hon. member for York-Peel, a very important economic spokesman for the opposition, was advocating further reductions in expenditures as the way to beat inflation. Today 1 have heard a whole series of suggestions from members opposite asking for increased spending programs.


Some hon. Members:: Oh, oh!


John Carnell Crosbie: Name one.


Allan Joseph MacEachen: Although I must say I would like in the circumstances to respond to all these requests, I would like to know how it would be possible to increase expenditures and add to the deficit and fight inflation all at the same time.


Flora Isabel MacDonald: You are not doing any one of them.



ROUTINE PROCEEDINGS


[Stage Direction]
Final Report of Special Committee on Alternative Energy and Oil Substitution-Mr. Lefebvre.
[Editor's Note: For text of above report see today's Votes and Proceedings.]

Hon. E. F. Whelan (Minister of Agriculture):: Madam Speaker, in accordance with Standing Order 41(2), I wish to table in both official languages copies of a report of inquiry into certain allegations concerning commercial practices of the Canadian Dairy Commission.
Order Paper Questions


MOTION TO ADJOURN UNDER S.O. 26   EFFECT OF HIGH INTEREST RATES
John Edward Broadbent: Madam Speaker, I ask leave, seconded by the hon. member for Broadview-Greenwood (Mr. Rae), to move the adjournment of the House under Standing Order 26 for the purpose of discussing a specific and important matter requiring urgent consideration, namely, the highest interest rates and cost of living ever recorded in Canadian history, which have caused economic ruin for thousands of Canadians, particularly home owners, farmers, small businessmen and fishermen; and the necessity for the government to institute a new made-in-Canada interest rate policy that will stop fuelling inflation and the resulting hardship for the ordinary Canadian.


Madam Speaker:: The hon. member for Oshawa (Mr. Broadbent) gave me notice of his intention to move the adjournment of the House under Standing Order 26 for the purpose of debating certain aspects of the economic conditions of the country, more particularly interest rates.
The hon. member will know that in arriving at a decision on such a motion the Chair must be guided by the provisions of subsection (5) of the Standing Order, which in part reads as follows:
In determining whether a matter should have urgent consideration. Madam Speaker... shall have regard to the probability of the matter being brought before the House within reasonable time by other means.
As early as tomorrow and the day following, opposition motions may be set down for debate in the House under supply proceedings if hon. members so choose.
Members will recall the lengthy debate which was allowed by the Chair under the same Standing Order on December 18 and 19 last dealing with economic conditions in Canada, a subject quite similar to that which the hon. member asks be debated today. It is obvious that the Chair under these conditions and on this matter, which is of a continuing nature, cannot accept the hon. member's request for an emergency debate.




[Stage Direction]
(Questions answered orally are indicated by an asterisk.)
Mr. John Evans (Parliamentary Secretary to Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance):: Madam Speaker, the following questions will be answered today: Nos. 724, 1,491, 1,611, 1,724, 1,879, 1,880, 2,074, 2,099, 2,100, 2,140, 2,143,

May 12, 1981
Order Paper Questions
2,176, 2,190, 2,197, 2,231, 2,253, 2,254, 2,275, 2,283, 2,292, 2,294, 2,301, 2,311, 2,366 and 2,367.


Mr. Cossitt: 1.	To the knowledge of the government, did the Minister of Agriculture state in an interview with The Windsor Star on June 2, 1979, "Pitfield and those guys killed me on that" with reference to cabinet approval of stabilization payments for beef producers who lost money in 1976?
2.	To the knowledge of the government, did the Minister of Agriculture state in an interview with The Windsor Star on June 2, 1979, that every major policy he pushed for agriculture was blocked by bureaucrats and that Michael Pitfield "more than once attempted to block a major piece" of Whelan legislation and, if so, is it the policy of the government to allow public servants to interfere with the making of policy by cabinet?
3.	Are Mr. Whelan's statements accurate in regard to the past and present?


Eugene Whelan: See Beau-chesne's Rules and Forms of the House of Commons of Canada, Citation 359-fifth edition, paragraph (10), and Citation 171-fourth edition, paragraphs (e) and (nn).



HOUSE OF COMMONS STAFF

['Agreed.']
Pierre Elliott Trudeau: Five such appointments have been made since April 20, 1968: Mr. C. B. Koester was appointed Clerk Assistant (Administrative and Procedural) at the SX-I level on July 1, 1975; on September 1, 1979, Mr. Koester was appointed Clerk, initially at the SX-3 level, and later promoted to DM-1 on October 1, 1980. Mr. M. G. Cloutier was appointed Sergeant-at-Arms at the SX-2 level on April 27, 1978. Mr. M. R. Pelletier was appointed Clerk Assistant (Legal) at the SX-1 level, later revised to SX-2, on October 24, 1969. Mr. J. R. J. Maingot was appointed Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel at the SX-1 level, later revised to SX-2 on January 1, 1971.
The appointment of Mr. Koester as Clerk was made under the authority of the Public Service Employment Act, R.S. 1970, Chapter P. 32, S. 38. The other appointments were made by the governor in council on the recommendation of the Prime Minister. This mode of appointment to these positions is a practice of long standing, the first such order in council having been issued on May 12, 1896, when Sir Charles Tupper was prime minister.



Mr. Howie: 1.	What is the status of plans to select a contractor for the Frigate Program for the naval branch of the Canadian Armed Forces?
2.	(a) At what stage is the program and on what date will the selection be made for the design stage (b) is the program on schedule and on what date is it expected to begin construction (c) on what date is the first ship expected to come on line?
3.	Since proposals or tenders were first called, have any changes been made in the selection process in terms of participating parties or time extensions and, if so, what were they and for what reason were changes made?


Hon.   J.-J. Blais@Minister of Supply and Services: 1. On
the date this question was asked the government was evaluating the proposals of the qualified contractors for the performance of contract definition. As at December 8, 1980, the government selected two of the three qualified contractors for the performance of contract definition for the Canadian Patrol Frigate Program. The selected contractors are:
(a)	Saint John Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Co. Ltd., Saint John, New Brunswick; and
(b)	SCAN Marine Inc., Longueuil, Quebec.
The selection of the implementation contractor for the program will be made at the end of contract definition.
2.	(a) The program, with the selection of these two contractors, has entered the design stage.
(b)	The original schedule for the program was announced in 1977, anticipating delivery of the first ship at the end of 1985. This delivery is now scheduled for late 1987. Construction of the first ship is expected to start by the end of 1983.
(c)	The first ship is scheduled to be delivered in late 1987.
3.	Since the proposals were first requested in mid-1978, the government qualified three of the proposers and invited these three to respond to the government's desire to encourage, through the use of procurement, the creation and expansion of independent Canadian-owned enterprises. Organizational changes of the qualified contractors were as follows:
(a)	Saint John Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Co. Ltd. replaced Sperry Inc.;
(b)	SCAN Marine Inc., a subsidiary of Pratt & Whitney Aircraft of Canada Ltd., replaced Pratt & Whitney Aircraft of Canada Ltd.; and
(c)	Vickers Canada Inc. replaced Litton Systems Canada Ltd.


&quot;BUFFALO SHUFFLE&quot;
Mr. Cossitt: 1.	Is there a procedure referred to in the Department of Employment and Immigration, particularly by senior members of the staff, as the "Buffalo Shuffle" and, if so, what is a full description of the term and does it include immigrants entering Canada who have been deported to the United States and who then proceed to re-enter through the Canadian consulate at Buffalo, in many cases by ministerial permits?
2.	(a) How many persons have entered Canada via Buffalo in each of the past three years after being deported or in any way forced to leave Canada (b) how many ministerial permits were involved (c) how many had criminal records either in Canada or elsewhere and for what reason were they readmitted?
3.	What was the total number of persons entering Canada via the Canadian consulate in Buffalo during the past three years combined?


Hon. Lloyd Axworthy (Minister of Employment and Immigration):: 1. Yes. "The Buffalo Shuffle" is a colloquial phrase
May 12, 1981

often applied to a commission procedure, facilitating admission for humanitarian or compassionate reasons of people already in Canada, but who are subject to a deportation, removal, or exclusion order and are required by law to leave the country. The same procedure may also be applied to those whose admission is deemed to be in the national interest, such as some entrepreneurs. Many such people seeking admission by this procedure are from the Toronto area, and are referred for processing to the Canadian consulate in Buffalo because of its proximity to the border; hence the phrase "Buffalo Shuffle." This phrase is sometimes also applied to the same procedure used at other Canadian consulates in the U.S.A. At the consulate's own discretion or at the request of immigration officials at national or regional headquarters, ministerial permits are issued to persons who meet the foregoing requirements, but whose admission to Canada is otherwise prohibited by law. Another large group to whom the term "Buffalo Shuffle" may be applied are individuals legally in Canada in the visitors category who are applying to remain as permanent residents through a Canadian consulate in the U.S.A.
2.	(a) Statistics are not kept on the number of persons
entering Canada via Buffalo after being deported, or in any way forced to leave Canada.
(b)	The Canadian consulate in Buffalo has issued the following ministerial permits to persons seeking admission as residents or visitors:
April to December 1978	55
January to December 1979	61
January to September 1980	28
(c)	Thirty-one ministerial permits were issued by Buffalo from April 1, 1978, to September 30, 1980, to persons prohibited admission due to criminal records, whose admission was deemed appropriate for humanitarian or compassionate reasons.
3.	During the period April 1, 1978, to September 30, 1980, the Canadian consulate in Buffalo issued 2,033 immigrant visas, 19,936 visitor visas, and 144 ministerial permits.


LIQUIDITY OF MORTGAGE INSURANCE FUND
Mr. Lewis: 1.	What is the present liquidity position of the Mortgage Insurance Fund?
2.	What was the total amount borrowed for the fund from the government and what were the terms and conditions?
3.	What is the estimated value of the fund?
4.	Did the Office of the Comptroller General, or any other agency, undertake to complete an actuarial assessment of the fund and, if so (a) on what date was the assessment completed (b) what were the results?


Hon. Paul J. Cosgrove (Minister of Public Works):: I am
advised by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation as follows: 1. As at December 31, 1980, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation had outstanding borrowings on behalf of the Mortgage Insurance Fund, under Section 9(6) of the National Housing Act, totalling $175,000,000.
Order Paper Questions
2. Note No.	Date	Rate1	Decembers, 1979	13-5/82	December 21, 1979	13-5/83	January 17, 1980	13-5/84	February 15, 1980	11-7/85	March 24, 1980	11-7/86	October 29, 1980	13-1/4
Amount

55.000.	000
10.000.	000
97.500.000
45.200.000
14.700.000
Total amount borrowed $227,400,000*
*$52,400,000 of these borrowings were repaid from real estate sales proceeds in 1980.
All of these borrowings were in accordance with the terms and conditions set out in order in council P.C. 1980-396 of February 8, 1980. This order in council superseded and amended those terms and conditions set out in order in council P.C. 1979-3233 of November 29, 1979.
3.	The net assets of the Mortgage Insurance Fund as of December 31, 1980, amounted to $314.4 millions.
4.	An evaluation of the fund was undertaken in mid-1980. At that time, an actuarial deficiency in the order of $80 millions was cited. This deficiency assumed that the then-current market trends, which were the worst experienced in some real estate markets in recent years, would continue. An appraisal of the fund's real estate portfolio in November, 1980, indicated a 14 percent improvement over these trends.


INVENTORY OF MORTGAGE INSURANCE FUND
Mr. Lewis: 1.	What is the present inventory of units held by the Mortgage Insurance Fund?
2.	How many units were sold by the fund in (a) 1979 (b) 1980, and what is a breakdown between the two years?
3.	For the same years, by province, what is the breakdown of units taken over and units sold?
4.	For all of the units sold in 1980, what is the difference between the acquisition cost (amount of mortgage indebtedness) and the eventual sale price?


Paul James Cosgrove: I am
advised by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation as follows: 1. As at December 31, 1980, the portfolio of the Mortgage Insurance Fund was 15,258 units.
2.	(a) MIF units sold in 1979-3,319, (b) MIF units sold in 1980-20,206.
3.	See list below.
4.	Not available. (Net loss on disposal of Mortgage Insurance Fund real estate in 1980 was $231,717,000.)
Acquisition and Sale Statistics Mortgage Insurance Fund by Province (in units)
1979	1980
Province	Acquisitions	Sales	Acquisitions	SalesNewfoundland	97	46	90	77Nova Scotia	93	64	122	115Prince Edward Island	9	7	22	4New Brunswick	196	187	87	209
Order Paper Questions
Acquisition and Sale Statistics Mortgage Insurance Fund by Province (in units)
1979	1980
Province	Acquisitions	Sales	Acquisitions	SalesQuebec	5,283	1,435	4,355	9,292Ontario	6,847	887	8.313	7,765Manitoba	543	19	344	79Saskatchewan	126	42	97	239Alberta	63	45	310	109British Columbia	1,575	586	805	2,317Yukon and Northwest Territories	2	1	3	-Total	14,834	3,319	14,548	20,206PETRO-CANADA'S BUDGET 1980/81


Mr. Towers: 1.	What is Petro-Canada's total current budget for the fiscal year ending March 31, 1981?
2.	What is the total amount of the budget allocated for oil and gas exploration?
3.	What percentage of the total budget is allocated to exploration?
4.	Is Petro-Canada a partner in any current exploration contracts and, if so, how many?
5.	Has Petro-Canada undertaken exclusively any exploration contracts and, if so, how many?
6.	(a) Does Petro-Canada call public tenders for site preparation contracts, drilling and service contracts (b) have any such contracts been awarded without benefit of tender and, if so (i) how many (ii) what was the dollar value in each case?


Hon. Marc Lalonde (Minister of Energy, Mines and Resources):: Petro-Canada reports as follows: 1. 1980-$435 million.
2.	$228.6 million.
3.	52.6 per cent.
4.	Yes. 1980-26 contracts.
5.	Yes. 1980-163 contracts.
6.	(a) Petro-Canada calls for tenders as a matter of policy for purchases over $10,000, construction over $50,000, drilling services over $50,000, geological and geophysical services over $200,000.
(b) 1980
In some cases contracts were awarded by negotiation because the contractor was the only one available in certain remote locations or was the only contractor capable of carrying out the required work. In other cases the contract was for equipment specifically required to meet previously established standards and where only one supplier exists.
(>)	(ii)
3 construction 2 drilling services (1-2 year contract) 2 drilling services (3-5 year contract) 2 geophysical services

May 12, 1981
1 environmental	250,000
10 equipment and supplies	8,900,000


COMMUNITY SERVICES PROGRAM-MR. HARRY SHORTEN
Mr. McGrath: 1.	Has the Community Services Program of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans been fully integrated into regional and district management offices of the Department?
2.	What are the duties and responsibilities of Mr. Harry Shorten of New Brunswick?
3.	Was Mr. Shorten's contract renewed and, if so, for what amount?


Hon. Romeo LeBlanc (Minister of Fisheries and Oceans):: 1.	Yes. The Community Services Program (including officers) falls under the authority of the local area manager, with program co-ordination and evaluation being the responsibility of the regional office.
2 and 3. Mr. Shorten's contract expired in June, 1980.
BILATERAL FISHERIES AGREEMENT-CANADA/EEC


Mr. McGrath: What are the terms of the bilateral fisheries agreement recently concluded between Canada and the European Economic Community?


Roméo LeBlanc: A long-term bilateral fisheries agreement between Canada and the EEC has been negotiated ad referendum but has not yet been ratified by the two governments involved. The draft agreement includes the following elements: (1) co-operation in the conservation of stocks beyond Canada's 200-mile zone; (2) co-operation in scientific research; (3) co-operation in dealing with threats to conservation by vessels of other countries beyond Canada's 200-mile zone; (4) protection for Canada's Atlantic salmon stocks off the coast of Greenland; (5) limited allocations of cod and squid for community vessels; (6) a reduction in EEC import tariffs on fixed quantities of cod, redfish and herring products in various forms.


MR. PETER NICHOLSON
Mr. Crosby: 1.	Is Mr. Peter Nicholson employed or was he employed in the office of the minister responsible for Fitness and Amateur Sport and, if so, in what position?
2.	What salary or remuneration was or is paid to Mr. Nicholson while employed in the office of the minister and were any personal or other expenses paid or reimbursed to him?
3.	What are the qualifications for the position in which Mr. Nicholson was involved and was the position advertised or offered otherwise to any other applicants?
4.	Was Mr. Nicholson appointed or will he be appointed a judge of the county court for the province of Nova Scotia?


Hon. Gerald Regan (Minister of Labour):: 1. Mr. Peter Nicholson, QC, was employed as an independent contractor, under a personal services contract, to provide consultative services to the Minister of Labour responsible for Fitness and Amateur Sport.
May 12, 1981

2.	Mr. Nicholson was paid a total amount of $14,213.59, which includes fees plus travelling and living expenses, in accordance with Treasury Board guidelines, for the period of March 11, 1980, to October 31, 1980.
3.	A knowledge of, and organization skills in the operations of a minister's office.
4.	Mr. Nicholson was appointed as a county court judge for district No. 3 in the province of Nova Scotia on March 2, 1981.


HALIFAX CABLEVISION LIMITED
Mr. Crosby: 1.	To the knowledge of the government, who is the principal shareholder or shareholders of Halifax Cablevision Limited according to the records required to be kept by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC)?
2.	Is Halifax Cablevision Limited required under the rules and regulations of CRTC to carry the proceedings of the House of Commons and, if so, were they carried on February 19, 1981 on or after 3 o'clock p.m., Atlantic Standard time and, if not, for what reason?
3.	If Halifax Cablevision Limited failed to comply with the applicable rules and regulations of CRTC, what is the penalty for the failure to comply and what action, if any, was taken to enforce the penalty?


Mr. Peter Stollery (Parliamentary Secretary to Secretary of State and Minister of Communications):: I am informed by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission as follows:
Shareholder	Common	Preferred	Per cenl VoteA. Irvine Barrow	2,250	2,250	45.0A. Garnet Brown	2,250	2,250	45.0J. Keith Lawton	250	250	5.0Donald D. Anderson	250	250	5.05,000	5,000	100.0
2. There is no CRTC regulation which requires that cable licensees must provide a channel for the distribution of the House of Commons proceedings. Nevertheless, in Decision CRTC 78-441 dated July 6, 1978, the commission approved an application by Halifax Cablevision Ltd. to add a special programming channel for the distribution of the House of Commons proceedings. The licensee was recently authorized by the commission to use this same channel for the carriage of children's programming ("Galaxie") when the House of Commons proceedings are not broadcast (Ref. Decision CRTC 81-120, February 16, 1981). With respect to the services distributed by Halifax Cablevision Ltd. on February 19, 1981, it is our understanding that:
(a)	"Galaxie" programming was distributed between 12.30 AST and 16.30 AST.
(b)	House of Commons proceedings were distributed "live" commencing at 16.30 AST, but were not shown between 15.00 AST and 16.30 AST.
(c)	Question Period was distributed via tape-delay commencing at 19.00 AST.
Order Paper Questions
Further, it is our understanding that, since February 23, 1981. Halifax Cablevision Ltd. has distributed "Galaxie" programming between 11.00 AST and 15.00 AST, and has distributed the House of Commons proceedings live in their entirety commencing at 15.00 AST.
3. A violation of the commission's Cable Television Regulations by a licensee renders that licensee liable to prosecution pursuant to Section 29(1) of the Broadcasting Act. This section states that:
"29(1) Every licensee who violates the provision of any regulation applicable to him made under this part is guilty of an offence and is liable on summary conviction to a Fine not exceeding $25,000 for a first offence and not exceeding $50,000 for each subsequent offence."
A prosecution would be a summary conviction proceedings taken before the court in the province. It has not been ascertained that Halifax Cablevision Ltd. committed an offence and no action has been taken with respect to Section 29(1) of the Broadcasting Act.
OPEN-AIR COMPLEX AT CENTRE VAUDREUIL-SOULANGES Question No. 2,176


Mr. Herbert:: 1.	Does the government intend to provide to the development of an open-air complex at Centre Vaudreuil-Soulanges and, if so (a) what will be the precise location (b) does the government own the land (c) was an agreement signed with the provincial government involving any financial or other participation by the province or local municipalities?
2.	What will be the intended activities at the site and on what date is the work to be completed?


Hon. Pierre De Bane (Minister of Regional Economic Expansion):: The reply for the Department of Regional Economic Expansion is as follows: 1. Yes.
(a)	Les Cedres de Vaudreuil-Soulanges, 1677 Centre du Plein Air Avenue, Les Cedres, Quebec.
(b)	No.
(c)	Yes, DREE participated in this project under the Cana-da-Quebec tourism development subsidiary agreement. The Department's contribution is $132,000., or 60 per cent of the project's total costs.
2. This project will promote outdoor activities such as hiking, bush survival, nature interpretation, archery, crosscountry skiing and speedskating. Work has now been completed.

May 12, 1981
Order Paper Questions RCMP-PERSON-YEARS ALLOCATED


Mr. Herbert: 1.	In each of the past five years, how many person-years have been allocated to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for duties paid in whole or in part by provinces and municipalities?
2.	What was the cost to the government for the provision of this service and what amount was received from the provinces and municipalities who requested and obtained service from the RCMP?


Hon. Bob Kaplan (Solicitor General):: Fiscal Year	Person-Years
1976/77	8,418
1977/78	8,802
1978/79	9,065
1979/80	9,245
1980/81	9,406
Fiscal Year	Total cost	Recovery from
	to Government	Provinces and Municipalities
	$	$
1976/77	209,582,000	118,694,0001977/78	242,567,000	140,866,0001978/79	278,579,000	164,122,0001979/80	308,894,000	186,144,0001980/81	339,641,000	207,321,000


PUBLIC SERVICE-VACATION AND SICK LEAVE
Mr. Herbert: 1.	Is the basis for the calculation of sick leave and vacation entitlement standard throughout the public service and, if not, which group(s) have the (a) lowest (b) highest entitlement of number of days per annum of employment in each case?
2.	Are records maintained on the (a) average (b) total amount of sick leave which has accrued to public servants?
3.	Is there a time limit within which a public servant must use accrued vacation entitlement?


Hon. Donald J. Johnston (President of the Treasury Board):: 1.	(a) Sick Leave Accrual
Printing operations (non-supervisory) group accrues 12 days per year. All other groups accrue 15 days per year.
(b)	Vacation Leave Accrual
Lowest - Ship repair (east and west) groups and printing (non-supervisory) group accrue two weeks vacation on appointment.
Highest - Postal operations (postal clerks and letter carriers) accrue seven weeks after 35 years' service.
2.	Yes.
3.	There is no time limit within which employees must use accrued vacation leave though employees are expected to take
vacation leave in the year that it is earned subject to operational requirements. A few collective agreements provide for the payment in cash of accumulated credits on agreement of the employee and management.


UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE CLAIMS PROCESSING
Mr. Halliday: 1.	Are different forms used for each unemployment insurance claimant in the processing of a claim and, if so, how many?
2.	Is proof of a social insurance number necessary in order to claim unemployment insurance?


Lloyd Axworthy: 1. The forms routinely used in the course of processing of every claim are: (a) the Application for Benefit; (b) the Record of Employment; (c) the Worksheet-for the allocation of insured earnings; (d) the Initial Decision-for preparing the necessary computer input; and (e) the Claimant's Report.
Other forms may be used, depending on the specific requirements of the claim.
2. Yes. A claimant must provide a valid social insurance number to claim unemployment insurance benefit.


PROPOSED PUBLIC HOLIDAY ON THE OCCASION OF THE MARRIAGE OF HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS THE PRINCE OF WALES AND LADY DIANA SPENCER, JULY 29, 1981
Mr. Cossitt: Is the government aware that the wedding day of His Royal Highness Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, July 29, 1981, has been declared a public holiday in the United Kingdom and, if so, is the government considering taking a similar step in Canada?


Peter A. Stollery: The Government is aware that July 29, 1981, has been declared a public holiday in the United Kingdom on the occasion of the marriage of His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer; there are, however, no plans for having the wedding day declared a public holiday in Canada. In 1947 a similar situation arose when Her Royal Highness The Princess Elizabeth married the Duke of Edinburgh, and the wedding day was not declared a public holiday.


CBC-COMPLAINTS ABOUT PROGRAMMING
Mr. Cossitt: 1.	Does the Secretary of State receive complaints about CBC programming and, if so, in what manner are they dealt with?
2.	Are such complaints referred to CBC and, if so, what action is taken?
3.	Does the minister deal with any CBC errors, inadequacies, or shortcomings and, if so, under what authority?


Peter A. Stollery: In so far as the
May 12, 1981

Department of Communications is concerned, the reply to the above question is as follows: 1. Yes. The manner they are dealt with is described in No. 2.
2.	Yes. Letters which complain about programming are acknowledged by the minister's office and transmitted to CBC for investigation and further reply.
3.	The minister, as a matter of established practice, does not intervene in the management decisions which the CBC makes in respect of its programming.


CRIME STATISTICS
Mr. Greenaway: 1.	From January 1, 1979 to date, by year, how many deaths due to unnatural causes were recorded in Canada and how many were listed as (a) suicides (b) murders and involved the use of firearms?
2.	For the same period, by year, how many cases of rape were reported in Canada and how many perpetrators were (a) brought to trial (b) incarcerated (c) set free either with or without bail?


Hon.   J.-J. Blais@Minister of Supply and Services: Statistics Canada reports: 1. Data on deaths due to unnatural causes are collected through two different statistical programs: the vital statistics program which gathers information based on reports from death certificates provided by provincial registrars, and the homicide statistics program which gathers basic information provided by police forces across Canada. The figures from the two programs differ for two reasons: they are collected by two different means and use different definitions. According to the homicide program, homicide is defined such that it includes all suspected cases of criminal homicide (murder, manslaughter and infanticide) occurring in Canada, regardless of whether a suspect has been identified in the killing. The program does not include Canadian residents killed in other countries. The vital statistics program makes no reference to the legal terms murder, manslaughter or infanticide. Rather, deaths are classified as having been caused by injuries inflicted by another person with intent to injure and kill, by any means. The latest data available from the vital statistics program, the 1979 preliminary death statistics, are as follows:
Total deaths by unnatural causes 16,556 (Includes deaths caused by environmental events, circumstances and conditions.)
Total deaths by suicide and self-inflicted injury 3,357
Deaths by suicide and self-inflicted injury resulting from use of firearms 1,085
Total deaths by homicide and injury purposefully inflicted by other persons 583 (Includes injuries inflicted by another person with intent to injure or kill, by any means. Excludes injuries on account of legal intervention and operations of war.)
Deaths by homicide and injury purposely inflicted by other persons resulting from assault by firearms 183 Data from the homicide statistics program are as follows: in Canada in 1979 there were 579 homicide incidents in which
Order Paper Questions
there were 631 victims. Thirty-three percent (207) of the homicides were committed using a firearm. Of these 207 firearm homicides, 44 per cent (91) used a rifle; 22 per cent (45) used a shotgun; 25 per cent (52) involved a handgun; 2 per cent (4) involved a sawed-off rifle/handgun; and in 7 per cent (15) cases the type of firearm was not determined. The equivalent figures for 1980 are not yet available, however preliminary figures for the first nine months of 1980 show that 15 per cent fewer homicide offences were committed than during the same period in 1979. Over the past decade the percentage of homicides committed with firearms has declined from a high of 47 per cent in 1974 to 33 per cent in 1979.
2. During 1979, 3,388 rapes were reported or known to police. Nearly one third of these were adjudged by police to be unfounded (that is to say that no offence was committed), resulting in a count of 2,291 actual rapes. Due to the procedure involved in statistical tabulation of crime in Canada, these are only approximate figures.
(a)	1,110 adults and 42 juveniles were charged with rape in 1979, and the majority of these were brought to trial, but the exact number is not known.
(b)	No national statistics are available on the number of persons incarcerated for a rape conviction, nor on the number of persons charged with rape and freed either with or without bail.


RETROFIT PACKAGE-OIL-HEATING EQUIPMENT
Mr. Herbert: 1.	Was a retrofit package tested in conjunction with the Canadian Standards Association to improve the efficiency of oil-heating equipment?
2.	Was a publicity and promotion campaign put into operation to advise the public on the package and to inform them of the benefits of installing the equipment?


Marc Lalonde: The Department of Energy, Mines and Resources reports as follows: 1. Yes.
2. Information on the package has been prepared and will be made available during May as part of the public information on the Canadian Oil Substitution Program.


LANGUAGE TRAINING
Mr. Herbert: In the past five years, what amount was spent by the Department of Employment and Immigration to provide (a) French language training to English-speaking residents of Quebec (b) English language training to Frenchspeaking residents of all provinces and territories except Quebec (c) official language training to immigrants who are in Quebec and do not speak French or who are outside Quebec and do not speak English?


Lloyd Axworthy: Over the past five years, the commission has purchased (a) $2,436,804 of full-time language training for English-speaking residents of the province of Quebec, (b) $2,115,722 of full-time English language training for Frenchspeaking residents of all provinces, except Quebec, and (c)

May 12, 1981
Order Paper Questions
$34,759,978 to provide official language training to immigrants in Quebec who do not speak French, and $45,363,443 to immigrants of all other provinces and territories who do not speak English.
Note: The expenditures set out above do not include the cost of training allowances and other income support paid to immigrants undertaking language training.


MOVEMENT OF WOOD BISON FROM ALBERTA TO B.C.
Mr. Scott (Hamilton-Wentworth): 1.	Did Parks Canada move 65 wood buffalo from Wood Buffalo National Park in Alberta to a new park on the South Nahanni River, north of Fort Nelson, British Columbia and, if so (a) at what cost (b) for what reason?
2.	Are senior officials of Parks Canada or other departments flown into the park on a regular basis and, if so, for what purpose?


Mr. Roger Simmons (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of State for Science and Technology and Minister of the Environment):: 1. The Canadian Wildlife Service moved 28 wood bison from Elk Island National Park, Alberta, to an area near Nahanni Butte north of Fort Liard, Northwest Territories. The area is near, but outside, Nahanni National Park.
(a)	Approximately $12,000 (funds provided by World Wildlife Fund (Canada)).
(b)	To rehabilitate the endangered wood bison on their historic range.
2. No.


TRAINING PROGRAMS FOR FORESTRY AND LOGGING OCCUPATIONS, N.B.
Mr. Howie: Are there government-funded training programs to train woods workers in New Brunswick and, if so, what are the details?


Lloyd Axworthy: Yes, under the Canada Manpower Industrial Training Program, over the last three years, 106 industrial training contracts have been signed with New Brunswick employers to train 476 woods workers in such courses as: truck drivers, maintenance mechanics, heavy equipment operators, instructor training and supervisory skill development. The cost to Canada for these training programs has amounted to approximately $300,000. Further, under the Canada Manpower Training Program (institutional training), 654 persons were trained in forestry and logging occupations at a cost of $968,391.


MANUAL DEFINING FORMULATION OF EVALUATION POLICY FOR DEPARTMENTS
Mr. Herbert: Did the Program Evaluation Branch of the office of the Comptroller General prepare a manual defining the basis for the formulation of evaluation policy for departments and methods by which the policy was to be implemented and, if so, is it available to the public?


Donald James Johnston: The Program Evaluation Branch of the Office of the Comptroller General is in the final stages of the editing, translation and printing of "A Guide on the Program Evaluation Function in Federal Departments and Agencies". This document will be available shortly and I will be sending a copy to all members as soon as possible. The guide does provide the basis for the formulation of departmental evaluation policies as well as guidelines and suggestions for the implementation of program evaluation.


ART BANK-RENTALS
Mr. Nielsen: 1.	Do cabinet ministers have in their personal living accommodations works of art from the Art Bank such as graphics, paintings and sculptures and, if so, as of April 1, 1981 (a) what are their names (b) what number of works were so located?
2.	Was a cost incurred by the (a) Department of Communications (b) Minister of State (Mines) for such rentals and, if so, what was the cost as of April 1, 1981?


Peter A. Stollery: In so far as the
Department of Communications is concerned, the reply to the above question is as follows: 1. No.
2. Not applicable.


YUKON INDIAN ELDERS
Mr. Nielsen: Do Yukon Indian Elders now receive benefits under the Elders Program and, if so, what number receive the benefits?


Hon. John C. Munro (Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development):: Yes, Yukon Indian Elders are now receiving benefits under an "Agreement with Respect to Providing Interim Benefits to Yukon Indian Elders" between the Government of Canada and the Council for Yukon Indians. The Council for Yukon Indians indicated on April 8, 1981, that there were 355 names on their list of eligible elders.


QUESTIONS PASSED AS ORDERS FOR RETURNS
John Leslie Evans: Madam Speaker, if questions Nos. 1,623 and 2,174 could be made orders for returns, such returns would be tabled immediately.


Madam Speaker:: The questions enumerated by the hon. parliamentary secretary have been answered. Is it the pleasure of the House that questions Nos. 1,623 and 2,174 be deemed to have been made orders for returns?


Some hon. Members:: Agreed.
May 12, 1981


INTERIMCO LIMITED-GOVERNMENT ASSISTANCE
[Stage Direction]
Young Offenders Act
prehensive nature, such as auto mechanics, autobody repair and partsperson training of longer duration.
Mr. Cossitt: 1.	With reference to the answer to question No. 76 in which it is stated, that assistance has been provided to Interimco Limited to bid on specific capital projects abroad and that the "projects are confidential" (a) what type of "assistance to bid" were the large sums of money spent and did this include any pay-offs to foreign agents, representatives, etc?
2.	After a bid is concluded on a specific project, what are all the reasons that the project is not made public when in a number of cases government assistance from public funds run to thousands of dollars?
3.	Will the government adopt a more open policy in the future and, if not, for what reason?
Return tabled.


BIO MEDICAL RESEARCH GRANTS
Mr. Herbert: 1.	During the last year, did the government contribute to bio-medical research and, if so (a) in what amount (b) who received such grants and in what amount in each case?
2.	What amount is the budget for next year?
Return tabled.


STARRED QUESTIONS
John Leslie Evans: Madam Speaker, would you be so kind as to call starred questions Nos. 2,178 and 2,224?
3. (a) New Brunswick Saskatchewan (b) Newfoundland Nova Scotia
Alberta
British Columbia Quebec
Prince Edward Island


*IKO INDUSTRIES LTD.-LETTERS TO BE SHREDDED
Mr. Dinsdale: 1.	Did Miss Suzanne Evans of IKO Industries Ltd. in Brampton, Ontario discover approximately 100 letters about to be shredded in that plant and, if so, were Christmas cards from the Prime Minister among those letters?
2.	Did Debbie McManus, an information officer at the Gateway Postal Plant in Toronto, state "it really is a total mystery how those letters got in that recycling plant"?
3.	Was an investigation of the incident carried out and, if so, what were the results?


Mr. Gary F. McCauley (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Consumer and Corporate Affairs and Postmaster General):: Madam Speaker, in response to starred question No. 2,224, which is a three-part question, the answer to the first part is yes; to the second part, yes; and to the third part, yes, a special investigation was carried out, but investigators were unable to ascertain exactly how this mail arrived at the recycling plant.


John Leslie Evans: Madam Speaker, I ask that the remaining questions be allowed to stand.


'MANPOWER GRANTS TO AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRIES ASSOCIATION OF CANADA
Mr. Dinsdale: 1.	Were delegates from Ontario to the recent Customer Counselling Seminars sponsored by the Automotive Industries Association of Canada given manpower grants and, if so, for what reason?
2.	Were delegates from Manitoba given manpower grants and, if not, for what reason?
3.	Which other provinces were (a) given (b) not given, such grants?


John Leslie Evans: Madam Speaker, the answer to starred question No. 2,178 is as follows. 1. Yes. Financial assistance was provided under the Canada Manpower industrial training program. Most of the participating firms were small and lacked the capacity to develop and operate their own training programs. The association acted as a catalyst in demonstrating to these employers the value of employee training and the assistance provided by the Canada Employment and Immigration Commission enabled them to participate.
2. No. In Manitoba, most of the member companies already receive assistance for higher priority training of a more com-


Madam Speaker:: Shall the remaining questions be allowed to stand?


Some hon. Members:: Agreed.



GOVERNMENT ORDERS


[Stage Direction]
The House resumed from Wednesday, April 15, consideration of the motion of Mr. Kaplan that Bill C-61, respecting young offenders and to repeal the Juvenile Delinquents Act, be read the second time and referred to the Standing Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs.
Hon. Allan Lawrence (Durham-Northumberland):: Mr. Speaker, in speaking on second reading of this important bill, which is the first major social justice bill to come before this House in over three decades, I must say I am sorry the minister in whose name the bill stands and who will have a

May 12, 1981
Young Offenders Act
great deal to do with its administration and negotiations with the provinces, is not present in the House this afternoon. This minister will also have a great deal to do with the bill once it has reached committee. I find his absence not only surprising but quite appalling, particularly as the minister and the government seemed to be in such a rush just prior to the Easter Irecess to pull a fast one, at least in the minds of many of us, by introducing this bill at a time when he knew the justice committee was sitting on other important legislation and, to the minister's knowledge, I was away from Ottawa with some of the minister's own colleagues. As I say, I am terribly surprised he is not here this afternoon in the House to listen to the debate on this very important measure.
In speaking about the debate which took place on April 15 last, I find myself in a little bit of a predicament. There were at least four members who spoke on that afternoon who I thought did an exceptionally good job in describing some of the complex provisions of the bill and some of its implications once it goes through the House. I do not say when this bill goes through the House, or if it goes through; I say once it goes through the House, because our position in this party I am sure is crystal clear as a result of those four speeches on April 15. lam sure it is crystal clear to the government, and I hope it is clear to the people of this country that we are wholeheartedly in support of its concept.
I thought the hon. member for Saskatoon West (Mr. Hnaty-shyn), who led off for this side, did an exceedingly able job of outlining the various parts of the bill. He took a bird's eye view of the legislation; he took an overview of it. I felt, quite frankly, because of such short notice, and especially in view of the rather tricky nature in which the Solicitor General (Mr. Kaplan) introduced the bill, indicating he thought it should go through with one or two speeches-obviously it should not- the hon. member for Saskatoon West did a very admirable job. He did such a good job I am not left with much scope this afternoon.
I thought the speech by the hon. member for Halifax West (Mr. Crosby) was particularly useful to this House from the point of view of a person who has dealt in a very practical way in the courts of this country with the problems emanating from the existing legislation.
I thought the hon. member for Brampton-Georgetown (Mr. McDermid) added a great deal as a non-lawyer. Then my good friend and able lawyer, the hon. member for Perth (Mr. Jarvis), finished up that day's debate in a very admirable way.
I have just a few small points to make and I will not be too long. Firstly, I find it almost inexcusable that the Liberal government of the day has delayed in bringing this legislation forward. I would like to just quote one fatuous and to my mind inexcusable comment by the Solicitor General when he opened the debate on April 15 in this House in my absence. He said this:
Because of the large number of solicitors general of Canada in the last five or six years, possibly none of them has been in a position to review the provisions and bring forward a bill which they would have been prepared to explain, defend and discuss with the provinces in the final sense.
I do not know whether the Solicitor General was speaking of his own party colleagues who had been his predecessors in the office of the solicitor general, and perhaps he was, but I am fair-minded enough to think that all of the solicitors general in this country in the last decade had a fair hand in helping to prepare this legislation. The position we arrive at today is that this legislation is almost exactly the same as the legislation I as the solicitor general put forward to the provinces and tabled in this House in the fall of 1979.
Indeed, as I go through the bill in a detailed way I find it is exactly the same as the Conservative government proposal in the fall of 1979, with only one major exception and a few minor ones. The minor exceptions are really very technical in nature and, I must say, in my mind, increase the efficiency of the bill, representing an improvement. They relate to some very minor technical details and wording in relation to the privacy of proceedings, the review of dispositions and, finally, the availability of the records of juvenile offenders. Those are the only variances with the proposal put forward by the Clark administration in the fall of 1979, with one other major exception which I will come to later.
Therefore, I find it quite exceptional, almost insulting, to have the solicitor general of this day, speaking in his opening statement in this House in respect of this first major piece of social justice legislation in three decades, attempt to take the partisan attitude he did, casting aspersions not only on me as a predecessor in that office but also on his own colleagues on his side of the House who were also his predecessors in that office.
The fact remains that the bill before the House now, Bill C-61, to all intents and purposes is the bill I had prepared in the office of the solicitor general during the summer of 1979 when I was there. I might add that I took great pains to push and give high priority to that bill to make sure the House of Commons of the day was brought up to date with what was happening, and especially to make sure that at every stage in the drafting of the bill the provinces, which are so much involved with the implications arising from this measure, and upon whom a great deal of the burden will inevitably fall, were kept informed. Certainly the bill I had prepared and the bill which has been presented by the present Solicitor General are almost exactly word for word, except for one major point. That one major point is one that to my mind represents a fatal flaw in this bill, as I have described it before.
With the permission of the Chair I hope to do something today which might correct that one fatal flaw. There are two points I want to make, and I will be very brief. The first point is that this bill will require full and complete discussion in the committee by everyone in this House who is involved with, and interested in, criminal justice in this country. But especially there must be a full opportunity in the Standing Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs for provincial representatives to come with their suggestions and criticisms.
I know that one of the excuses of the government may be that negotiations and discussions with the provinces have been
May 12, 1981

going on for almost a decade in relation to this reforming piece of legislation. That is true. Those discussions and negotiations have been going on, but the House should fully appreciate that this bill has implications for the provinces, for the administration of justice in the provinces and for the provincial treasuries far more than it does for the federal government, any federal government agency and, indeed, the federal treasury.
I think it will be essential that the Standing Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs of this House make sure that the provinces have a full and ample opportunity to make their cases, because they do have cases to make. There are differences. There are differing cases to make, but I think this House owes something to the people of this country, to the young people of the future who will come into conflict with the law and especially to the taxpayers of this country for whom this bill will have very great implications. There certainly must be full, ample and open opportunity for the provincial governments to come to that committee as well as-and I say this just as an obvious argument, which I am sure 1 do not have to make-the many semi-public and private agencies which deal with young offenders and young people in the life of this country. I hope they also have a full opportunity to come before that committee.
However, in spite of the negotiations the provincial representatives should be able to come to that committee to make their representations, because the financial implications of this bill are such that 1 am not too sure that the staff of the present minister really knows or understands some of those financial implications for the provinces involved.
What will be the situation, for instance, under the Canada Assistance Plan with respect to payments in relation to youthful offenders, in relation to child welfare or in relation to young people in Canada? Here in Ottawa through the Department of National Health and Welfare we are very easily able to obtain information on the total payments to the provinces for child welfare, which includes youthful offenders, amounting to almost $80 million in 1978-79. I find it very surprising that apparently nowhere in the Department of National Health and Welfare-nowhere in the federal bureaucracy, in any event, that we have been able to discover-can we yet learn just what percentage of that $80 million for 1978-79 was devoted to young people who came into conflict with the criminal law. Yet obviously a good percentage of that money was paid out through provincial administrations and down through the myriad of bureaucratic agencies at the provincial level for child welfare and for young people in Canada who have come into conflict with the criminal law. I stress again that $80 million per year. I suspect that the amount paid in transfer payments by the federal government under the Canada Assistance Plan to the provinces is higher now than $80 million per year.
Those payments will be vitally affected, obviously, by this legislation because the whole concept will be changed, and I hope somewhere along the line, if and when we receive a reply from any meaningful person on the government benches, we will learn these figures and exactly how much has been paid
Young Offenders Act
out, say, in the last ten years in relation to child welfare payments to the provinces under the CAP. I hope we will find out how those payments will be affected by this legislation. If the minister, the parliamentary secretary and their staff have done their homework, then obviously they will have those figures at their fingertips and will be able to give them to us.
There is another area of grave financial concern with respect both to the federal treasury and the provincial treasuries. I am sure Your Honour is aware that currently there are young offenders' special agreements with four of the provinces of this country. Between the federal Department of National Health and Welfare and the provincial governments there have been four agreements worked out over the years dealing with young offenders. There are federal government transfer payments under those agreements to the provinces to assist them in the administration of this important work.
Just in the last three years alone, for instance, New Brunswick has received $1.5 million. In just two years Yukon has received three quarters of a million dollars. In one year Quebec-and this is a partial payment only relating back over a number of years, to 1974-received over $38 million. My own home province of Ontario in just the last three years alone has received over $50 million in payments from the federal government in relation to young offenders. Again I mention these figures only to emphasize some of the financial implications-and only some of the financial implications-for the federal treasury and the provincial treasuries in relation to this particular legislation.
This is no two-bit, picayune piece of legislation. This bill is important from a social justice and social welfare point of view, and it is extremely important as well in relation to administrative and transfer costs between the federal government and the provincial governments.
Another area to which I do not think enough attention has been given by the current minister in respect of provincial cost is the whole question of provincial legal aid, which is paid for and administered by the provinces. This bill has as one of its minor-major-if I can put it in that fashion-provisions the right of young offenders to counsel. This is something which has not been detailed for them before. This is an important section of the bill. The right of young offenders to counsel is not a privilege; they have a right to be represented before the courts by counsel.
Quite frankly, I was surprised that in outlining his position in relation to this bill the minister did not deal with this, but I would like to have some idea of how this will affect the various provincial legal aid funds and the administration of legal aid across the country. Has this section and its implications for the provincial treasuries been outlined to the provinces? Do the provinces know what the federal government is getting them into in relation to this important, but necessary, piece of legislation? I do not know. We do not know because the minister has not seen fit to tell us if he knows or not, and if he knows, just what he does know.
The final point I want to make is with respect to the major fatal flaw in this legislation. As I have said, in all important

May 12, 1981
Young Offenders Act
respects this bill is the same as the bill prepared and made ready for introduction by the Clark administration for the winter of 1980. Indeed, it was going to be introduced, to the knowledge of the provincial governments and this House- because we said so in the fall of 1979-in the winter of 1980, if we had remained in office, except for one section, and that one section is integral to the whole bill.
The concept of this legislation is that it is a reforming piece of legislation which will be the reference piece of legislation for young people when they run afoul of the criminal law. The concept of it has to be built into what the definition of a young offender actually is, and this changes the whole set-up. Instead of varying ages across the country with the patchwork, crazy quilt-like situation that we have at the moment, in my mind I was pushing this particular bill in 1979 because the major reforming essence of the bill had to be that we wanted uniformity in the definition of what a young offender was across this country, whether in Cape Breton Island or Vancouver Island.
It is obviously essential, when you are dealing with criminal justice, that there be uniformity across this country. Otherwise, there is no reason for the federal government to be involved with criminal law, especially when the administration of criminal law is basically a provincial concern. Obviously, criminal law in this country has to be uniform. People have to be equal in the sight and in the eyes of justice when they come before the courts of this land.
One of the major defects in the system at the moment in respect of juvenile delinquents, in respect of young people when they run afoul of the criminal law, is that they are not treated equally across this country. Mr. Speaker, I bring this to your attention because I know that as a member of Parliament from the Ottawa area you have bumped into this in your constituency work. Someone aged 17 who under exactly the same circumstances commits an offence at one end of the Hull-Ottawa bridge will be treated quite differently in the eyes of the law and before the courts of the land from one who commits the same offence at the other end of the Hull-Ottawa bridge, simply because age makes a difference in the various pieces of provincial legislation which exist across this country.
At the moment, for instance, these differences exist; in the provinces of Quebec and Manitoba the maximum age of a juvenile delinquent, a young person who runs afoul of the law, is a person under 18 years. In other words, 18 is the maximum age for a youthful offender in the provinces of Quebec and Manitoba. In the province of British Columbia, the maximum age is under 17 years. In Newfoundland, where the Juvenile Deliquents Act is not applied but they have their own provincial statute, under their legislation the maximum age is 16 and one half years. In all the remaining provinces and territories the age is under 16 years.
Quite frankly, I had some tactical reasons for introducing the provision that I did when I was solicitor general under the Clark administration. Most of the provinces provide that the
maximum age for a youthful offender is a person under 16 years. The majority of the provinces agree that that should be indicated as the uniform age across this country in the new legislation. That was not my doing; that was the doing of my predecessors, and I give them full credit for it. But somebody had to grasp the nettle. Someone had to come up with a uniform age. Otherwise, in my mind, the whole purpose and reason for this reforming legislation would fall to the ground.
I therefore picked 16 years as the maximum age in the legislation that I proposed in 1979. My tactical reasons for doing so were simply that that was the view of the majority of the provinces, and if in the public debate that would take place in this House and in the committee compelling and forthright reasons were put forward by those few provinces that opposed that view in a way in which public opinion and the members of this House could be swayed, then certainly we in the federal government could retreat somewhat by arriving at the compromise of 17 years. If the worst came to the worst, I was even prepared to go to 18 years. But I really did not care whether it was 16, 17 or 18 years.
The age of majority in this country, in any event, is an accident of history. There is no logic or sense behind 21, 35, 18 or 16 years in most of our statutory provisions across this country, in any event. They are usually not based on technical or scientific data. They are just stabs in the dark or grabs out of a hat. I did not care whether it was 16, 17 or 18. I will be honest with you, Mr. Speaker, I do not care to this day. But what I do care about is that all people in this country be equal in the eyes of the law. That is the fundamental principle behind this legislation, and that is why I wanted to see a uniform age.
The present Solicitor General, on his own-


Mr. Hnatyshyn;: Wherever he is!


Allan Frederick Lawrence: -has changed that concept. I think he has fundamentally changed the concept that I was prepared to bring in in 1979, because he says that 18 is the age unless any of the provinces opt out. We have heard quite a bit about what a damaging and deleterious concept it is to permit provincial governments to opt out of important legislation in this country, and yet here we have the government and the Solicitor General doing just exactly that.


John Patrick (Pat) Nowlan: They do it when it suits their needs.


Allan Frederick Lawrence: That is a fatuous, almost inconceivable concept, in my mind, and it destroys the fundamental essence and basis of this reforming legislation, which is to require that people are equal in the eyes of the criminal courts and the criminal law of this country, and this will continue. To my mind, the definition section is a fatal flaw, a fatal error, in this legislation. I cannot speak with any more emotion or passion or, I hope, logic in my arguments to try to convince this House that this is a fatal flaw in the legislation and that it should be changed.
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I know that there are grave problems with introducing amendments on second reading in this House. It has only been accomplished once or twice before in the eight or nine years that I have been here, and one of those times I was able to do it; but it has only been done once or twice, I believe. I think that what the Solicitor General has done is destroy the essence and the main principle of this legislation, which has to be that in criminal law all people are equal in the sight of the law and in the way they are treated by that law.
I think that is a very important principle, Sir, and you do not have to take only my word for it. Very many private agencies which have studied this bill over the last few months are taking the same view. As for the provincial Bar associations, the last item to cross my desk indicated that the Manitoba Bar is taking similar points of view, that this is excellent reforming legislation except that the Solicitor General has chickened out. He has copped out. He has opted out in respect of the maximum age.
1 think this question is important enough to the very essence and principle of this bill that I am now prepared to move what I would like Your Honour to accept as a reasoned amendment with respect to this bill.


An hon. Member:: What page?


Allan Frederick Lawrence: This is the motion in respect of the bill; it is not a section of the bill. We are at the second reading stage now. I move, seconded by the hon. member for Edmonton-Strathcona (Mr. Kilgour):
That all the words after the word "that" be deleted and the following substituted therefor:
"this House declines to give second reading to Bill C-61, an act respecting young offenders and to repeal the Juvenile Delinquents Act, because the bill rejects the fundamental principle of equal treatment of all persons before the law by specifying that the act will apply to different age groups in different provinces."


Mr. Deputy Speaker:: The hon. member has moved an amendment which will be taken under consideration by the Chair.


Bob Rae: Mr. Speaker, I want to say a few words about the Young Offenders Act and the way in which we treat our young people who come into conflict with our criminal justice system. As a preface to my remarks, and as the hon. member for Durham-Northumberland (Mr. Lawrence) will know, our spokesman on this bill, the hon. member for Burnaby (Mr. Robinson), has already indicated the feelings of our party with respect to this legislation.
If the primary thrust of this legislation is to distinguish between someone called a "young offender" and everyone else under the Criminal Code, and if the Young Offenders Act will apply to a specific group of people and the Criminal Code to another, then it is elementary and quite fundamental that the act must contain a consistent definition of "young offender". I applaud the hon. member for Durham-Northumberland for his attack on a patchwork quilt notion of rights in Canada. I
Young Offenders Act
welcome him to our side. In my view, if the Supreme Court rules in a particular way, and if we do have a charter of rights as a result of the resolution of this House, then the failure of the act to define the concept of a young offender and the fact that someone may be subject to the Criminal Code in Ontario and not subject to it in Manitoba is clearly in breach of Section 15 of the charter. The charter makes it very clear that discrimination on the basis of age will not be allowed.
If we accept the fact that the federal government has a responsibility to define the meaning of "young offender" and the difference between someone who will be subject to the Criminal Code and someone who will not be subject to it, then it would seem to me that the making of laws with respect to criminal justice is specifically and explicitly under the jurisdiction of the federal government. I submit that all parties must accept that because it is part of the British North America Act. Even without a charter of rights I think it can well be argued-and I have personally felt this for a long time-that an anomalous definition of "juvenile delinquent" is in itself a problem with respect to our existing Constitution.
I want to spend a few moments attempting to describe for the House, as I understand it, what we are talking about here. Prior to 1908 there was, and there continues to be, a variety of child welfare acts throughout the provinces which deal with the problems of children who are deemed by their communities to be in need of control of some kind, apart from parental or familial control. The general rule is that the provisions of the Criminal Code apply to offences against it which have been committed by people regardless of their age. If one looks back to common law cases in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it will be found that there were very unhappy experiences taking place. At that time the situation existed where children aged ten and 11 were actually hanged for stealing. The history of the criminal justice system is filled with examples of incredible injustices being done to children well below the age of responsibility and maturity. These children were punished in incredibly harsh terms under the full force of the Criminal Code because they had either committed an offence against the Criminal Code or against the common law.
At the beginning of the twentieth century there was a movement of reform which was not unique to Canada but in which Canada took part. That reform professed that we must protect children and provide a unique system of laws and a unique system of justice for them. The reform provided that children should be treated differently because they are children and because they cannot be deemed to be responsible for their actions. The concept of taking responsibility for one's actions is at the very heart of the criminal justice system in our society. The notion of responsibility and punishment only makes sense in the context of one being responsible for one's actions. That is part of the moral fibre of our system of criminal justice.
The Juvenile Delinquents Act was passed in 1908. Amendments subsequent to 1908 had a number of problems associated with them. In substituting a paternal or maternal regime

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for the notion of criminal responsibility, we took away some rights. Obviously rights and responsibilities go together. In a sense we substituted the beneficent state for the responsible child.
In doing so I think we did some good things and some bad things. On the good side we obviously advanced the interests of children. We kept children out of the criminal justice system until it was absolutely unavoidable on account of age. But there are problems associated with having done that, the most important of which being that the Juvenile Delinquents Act provides categories of offences which are called status offences. In other words, it matters not what you have done but who you are.
I think this concept has been expressed by members of all parties. If the juvenile court decides that a child is a juvenile delinquent because of his behaviour, social position, the crowd he hangs around with, or because vandalism has been occurring in an area that he has frequented, the court does not have to be satisfied that the child has, in fact, committed an offence; the court can decide that because the child has been hanging around when he should have been at home, he is a juvenile offender and in need of punishment of some kind or another. The concept of status offences of this kind is clearly offensive to us. It takes away from the rights of children who, after all, are just little people. It takes away from the notion of responsibility which, as I say, is the essence of the criminal justice system as it has been established.
I must say, however, that that was not the only problem which was part and parcel of the Juvenile Delinquency Act. There were many problems associated with the administration of justice and with the responsibility of the provinces which I will not get into. There were problems of detention, problems of the kind of care which you relinquish a subject to, problems of the general decline of respect for the system which all parties to the system began to feel. There were the problems that are inevitably associated with a machinery and a philosophy which was clearly out of date and unable to deal with the explosion of juvenile crime which we are witnessing in our cities today.
There are other technical problems which are of some importance and with which, it seems to me, an act would want to deal. One technical problem is what you do in the instance where someone designated by a province to be a juvenile commits or is alleged to commit an offence together with someone who is not a juvenile. In that instance you have the anomalous situation where a juvenile could be involved in a crime, which could be one of some seriousness, and would be charged and tried on the basis of the juvenile delinquency system, while the partner in the offence would be tried in accordance with the Criminal Code. I know of instances where the partner who was tried in accordance with the Criminal Code was found not guilty because the state was unable to prove its case, but the juvenile was declared to be a juvenile delinquent and was detained because the burden of proof and
the rights of the accused are so different within the juvenile system and the criminal system.
There is, of course, the right granted under the Juvenile Delinquency Act for a judge to order that a case be transferred from the juvenile court to the mainstream of the criminal justice system. Indeed, that is now the general rule rather than the exception. There are many cases of 16 and 17-year-olds being taken out of the juvenile system and put into the mainstream of the criminal system just because the judge- and one could understand the reasoning behind this-said that he did not want to see an anomaly created where one person was convicted for participating in an offence while the other person was let go, even though they had both been involved.
The problem with that is that we are then, in a sense, offending the very purpose for which we established a separate juvenile delinquency system in 1908. We are saying that we accept, for the purposes of this particular act and this particular crime, because it happened to be committed with an older person, that this young person has the prerequisite sense of responsibility and the prerequisite liability to punishment. In my opinion, the problem of transfers is a fundamental one and any new bill should deal with it.
The concerns of our party have been set out very well by the hon. member for Burnaby. I want to reinforce them and to indicate that we will put forward some amendments in committee and will be having discussion there where we will expect the minister to explain the position he has put forward.
Our specific concerns are, first of all, that if we are going to have a separate system, which we all agree we should have, let us not take anything away from the positive thrust of the reforms of 1908. As the hon. member for Burnaby said, let us not go overboard toward simply writing a Criminal Code for young people under the aegis of a fiction that you can ascribe the same degree of responsibility for what are called crimes to a young person as you can to someone who has reached the age of majority. In my view there is a danger that this is, in fact, what has been done.
The declaration of principle set out in clause 3 of the bill reads as follows:
(a) while young persons should not in all instances be held accountable in the same manner or suffer the same consequences for their behaviour as adults, young persons who commit offences should nonetheless bear responsibility for their contraventions and society must be afforded the necessary protection from illegal behaviour-
I am very concerned that in a declaration of principles for the Young Offenders Act, which is a departure for this Parliament and for Canada, we fail to specify very clearly that we are also very much concerned with the welfare of the young person; that the rehabilitation of the young person is the primary object of the exercise. If we want to preserve the rights of young people when they come into conflict with the law-I will have something to say about where the Young Offenders Act falls down in that regard-we should not provide that a ten-year-old or an eight-year-old or a 13-year-old who has committed a crime should be treated as if he were as responsible as a 20-year-old. We should not be silent in the
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declaration of principle on the question of the primary objective of any system dealing with young people. It would be a mistake not to say that the Canadian people are concerned about ensuring that a ten-year-old is not forever held responsible and treated in the same way as a 20 or 30-year-old, or that rehabilitation is the primary objective. I believe that there is in the criminal justice system itself the notion-which is endemic to our whole system of values, our whole concept of freedom, and which we get from our religious backgrounds- that while there is life there is hope and the means of redemption, if you like, speaking in religious terms; or simply that the individual has the means to change or to erase or atone for a mistake. That should be at the very heart of our criminal justice system.
Even more should that same concept or notion be attached to the acts of a 12 or 14-year-old. They should be able to say that they are sorry, that they made a terrible mistake and would like to reform and be rehabilitated. It seems to me a major error that that notion is not in the declaration of principle. In my opinion, the notion that a young person is in all circumstances as responsible as an older person is a fiction, and it should be treated as such. It is an important fiction, because the notion that we are responsible individuals, free to choose whether we will commit wrong, is what makes the punishment system work. It is what makes our concept of rights so important. It is the notion of individuals having responsibility that makes the concept of human rights so important in our protection of that responsibility.
I want to turn next to the question of rights. The bill makes important advances. It does give certain rights. It does provide the right to counsel and the right to bail and it provides some very important rights with respect to sentencing. It does take away from the general paternal discretion which, as I said, was endemic or part and parcel of the do-gooding state notion which was part of the 1908 reform. [DOT]
We have gone back on that in this act because we have something called alternative measures. Alternative measures are what the technocrats in this field call diversion. These are set out in Section 4 of the act. What diversion and what alternative measures really mean is that in certain circumstances, as soon as the kid is caught and charged, it is possible that he or she will never see the inside of a youth court. All of us might say that is a good thing. I say that is a good thing, but I question how one gets to be subject to what are called alternative measures. The idea is that you say to the child, "Look, rather than go through all this system, how would you like to engage in a form of alternative service? How would you like to be subject to a certain kind of parole regime or how would you like to be taken away from your parents"-or whatever alternative arrangement is made-"and placed under the jurisdiction of the youth court?" In other words, we will give the offender that alternative rather than having to plead guilty or not guilty.
Young Offenders Act
As the hon. member for Burnaby has said, the problem is that there must be some kind of screening mechanism which protects the child and allows the child to say that he wants to plead not guilty. This is allowed in this document. It is notionally voluntary and it is notionally restricted. The concept of innocence does not exist in our criminal justice system. We have no such thing as innocence. One is simply guilty or not guilty. If a child wants to exercise his or her right to do that, it seems to me that we have to safeguard that right more than we have done as provided by the alternative measures notion.
This problem of diversion has been discussed at some length by my colleague from Burnaby and I do not want to go into it at any greater length except to say that you cannot grant rights on the one hand, and then provide for the same kind of paternalism and the same kinds of problems that have existed in the juvenile delinquency system up to the present. That seems to me to be a serious mistake.
Another instance, which has not been touched on at any length, is that the law, in giving certain rights to young people, is not in fact doing it well enough. For example, take the problem of the use of evidence. Clause 56 of the bill provides that the law relating to the admissibility of statements made by persons accused of committing offences applies in respect of young persons. Then it goes through the instances where no oral or written statement given by a young person is admissible unless the statement is voluntary; unless the person who took the statement explained in language appropriate to his age and understanding that the young person has no obligation to make a statement and that any statement may be used against him; and that a young person has the right to counsel. As well, that the young person, even before the statement is made, must be given a reasonable opportunity to consult with counsel and so on. Those things are all enumerated.
It is also said that, generally speaking, before a young person makes a statement he or she will be informed of all their rights, that they will be read out and the young person will be able to see his or her counsel before a statement is made, and unless the statement complies with these requirements it will not be admissible in the youth court. Then again, as always, the government is concerned more with administrative convenience than with the hard notion that we must take rights seriously, that if we take rights seriously they are going to be inconvenient to the state. Clause 56(3) states:
The requirements set out in paragraphs (2)(b), (c) and (d) do not apply in respect of oral statements where they are volunteered by the young person to a peace officer or other person in authority before that person has had a reasonable opportunity to comply with those requirements.
If that paragraph is not big enough to drive a truck through, then I do not know what is. All the statements made by young people will be oral statements. All the statements, according to the police officers, will be made voluntarily. The onus clearly will be on the young person to show that the statement was not made voluntarily; that he was not told he had the right to counsel; that he was not instructed about all of those things. At age 14, a child is not going to ask to make a written statement. A child will say all sorts of things out of fear in response to the peculiar atmosphere of a police station. I think

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Young Offenders Act
it is very odd indeed that, on the one hand, the government is pretending it is giving rights to young people, that it is providing them with the kind of protection which should be part and parcel of our legal system, while on the other hand it is doing the kind of thing which we have come to expect of the government, namely, that where obviously there must be exceptions, we let an exception be made for oral statements. As I said before, oral statements will now be the practice, as they have been in the past, as far as young people are concerned. We have really provided no protection to our young people when we pretend that is what we have done.
1 mentioned that there were other problems in association with the Juvenile Delinquents Act, problems associated with the definition of what it means to be a young offender, and problems, if you like, at the age periphery where the juvenile delinquency system blends into the criminal justice system. In my view, we have offered very little guidance to our juvenile courts, our youth courts and the judges who preside over those courts as to under what circumstances we think cases should be transferred. We have provided very little protection to young people from being transferred into the criminal justice system. Not enough has been done in that regard. 1 would have thought this was one of the clear, rough-edged, difficult problems that we have. 1 admit there is no easy answer, but we have not provided anything like sufficient guidance to those people who are being asked to exercise such important discretion over the liberty of a subject of the Crown, which is really what our juvenile judges are being asked to decide.
The hon. member for Burnaby has emphasized the importance of a specified age. The hon. member for Durham-North-umberland has indicated he supports the concept of an age. 1 heard the Solicitor General's (Mr. Kaplan) speech on this bill. 1 cannot understand his reasoning or how he can talk so happily and so casually about allowing provinces to opt in or opt out with respect to certain age groups when this is the fundamental feature of the charter of rights. The notion of rights in Canada is that there are certain fundamental rights from which no province can opt out. You cannot have a country where people are being treated dramatically differently in one part of the country from another. You cannot have one criminal justice system where people in one province are treated so differently from people in another. Being treated as a youthful offender and being tried, convicted and sentenced under the criminal justice system is very different indeed. If the federal government does not have a clear notion of what the juvenile age is and what the rationale is, then 1 cannot understand it.
My basic preference, and this was set out by my colleague for Burnaby, would be for the youth court to have exclusive jurisdiction over dealing with all offenders up to the age of 18. The age of majority is 18. I agree with the hon. member for Durham-Northumberland that all ages such as the age of majority are arbitrary. Some of us can get very old indeed and not achieve a great deal of maturity. Other people are very mature at a young age. There has to be a standard set by Parliament. I suggest the logic clearly is that if the age of
majority is 18, then we categorize people under the age of 18 as not being subject to the rigours and toughness of the Criminal Code.
Those are the essential points I wanted to make. There are some anomalies in this legislation. To put it mildly, it is regrettable that the government has chosen to introduce a new measure for our young people who, because of poverty in Canada, the decline in our sense of community, the collapse of community values and the difficulties so many young people have in finding employment, are increasingly coming into conflict with the law. It is most regrettable that the primary objective of this bill is not rehabilitation but to make children responsible for everything they do. Having said that, the government should have gone out of its way to protect the rights of young people in all circumstances. They have not done that.
The government should have done more to overcome the difficulties we have lived with for over 70 years with respect to the Juvenile Delinquents Act. It appears we are fated to continue to live with it because the government has not seen fit to deal with some of the most difficult issues. It did not say in the definition of a young offender under the age in that jurisdiction that the jurisdiction of the youth court is complete, final and absolute and it will not allow the anomalous situation of some young people being treated as criminals in some parts of Canada and others being treated differently.
I want to make one final comment. I can think of no issue that is of more importance to the people of my constituency than the question of how efficiently, fairly and well our criminal and juvenile justice systems work. Part of the frustration of everyday living is seeing one's children come into conflict with the law for any of the reasons I have mentioned. The frustration that is created is endemic to the federal system, as pointed out by the hon. member for Durham-Northumberland. This is because the federal government is responsible for the setting of the rules and the provincial governments are responsible for administering them and for funding. Frustrations are created if we have a turnstile type of justice, a revolving door in the juvenile courts.
We can understand the problems, frustration and ill-feeling toward the whole of the criminal justice system that is created. If a person's house is broken into time and time again and that person can see no end to the process, clearly the respect that person feels for the criminal justice system is limited. It leads to authoritarian responses to many other problems. On the other hand, if we have a system which deals with youth unfairly, arbitrarily or too harshly, we get into the situation where young people have no respect, not simply for the law, but for the community values which our law is said to represent.
I cannot resist saying that if we had a greater sense of community in Canada, that if we did not regard our communities simply as a place to make money off each other but as places where we treat each other with compassion and dignity, the rate of crime would decrease. Our sense of alienation from
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one another would decrease. The kind of injustices that meet young people would also decrease.


Mr. David Kilgour (Edmonton-Strathcona):: Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak on the second reading of Bill C-61, the Young Offenders Act, the repeal of the 73-year-old Juvenile Delinquents Act, and in favour of the amendment proposed by the hon. member for Durham-Northumberland (Mr. Lawrence), on which you are yet to rule, which would in the interests of equal justice to all Canadians make one age, whether 16, 17 or 18, applied uniformly across Canada, whether in Nanaimo or St. John's, Newfoundland.
Before getting into my main remarks, may I, as did my colleague for Durham-Northumberland, express my concern about the fact that the Solicitor General (Mr. Kaplan) did not even bother to join us this afternoon, nor indeed has his parliamentary secretary. Looking at the government benches, I see no cabinet minister present this afternoon for discussion of a very important bill. Perhaps I might be permitted to quote the Solicitor General who, on April 15, was lecturing the hon. member for Durham-Northumberland for being unavoidably absent from the chamber. I quote:
-the top priority of the members of Parliament should be to attend to the requirements of this chamber.
That is what he said, with servitude. I must confess that my annoyance is doubtless aggravated by the fact that the Solicitor General last month led my office to believe that this bill would not be discussed on April 15 in the absence of the hon. member for Durham-Northumberland and myself. In fact, the bill was called on that day when both of us were absent from the chamber. Five members of my party spoke on second reading on April 15 and today. I will try to avoid repeating what they have said.
First, however, let me agree strongly that the outgoing Juvenile Delinquents Act is anachronistic today for many reasons. For one thing, it is a basic precept of our justice system that proscribed conduct must be clearly stated; but your child or mine, Mr. Speaker, could be found delinquent under the Juvenile Delinquents Act omnibus section for the vaguest type of conduct, such as sexual immorality or even for being uncontrollable, incorrigible or unmanageable. In short, status offences for juveniles and conviction by courts on a whole range of undefined acts were commonplace.
For another, the Juvenile Delinquents Act is replete with legislative foolishness. For example, one provision, which authorizes the waiver of serious charges such as murder against a juvenile, requires, among other things, that it must be first established to the satisfaction of a juvenile court judge that transfer is in the best interests of the juvenile, since in an adult court he or she will face adult sanctions. It has long seemed to me that it can logically never be in the best interests of a child-I am not talking here about the interests of society-to be transferred. The legal contortions necessary for a judge to waive must be enormous in view of the way that important provision in the Juvenile Delinquents Act is worded.
Young Offenders Act
Where is Canadian society just now in terms of crime committed by juveniles? Only last week, in talking with about 30 high school students in an inner city high school in Edmonton, the following points, among others, emerged, and this astounds me. The school I am speaking about, like five others in the city of Edmonton, has a full-time policeman every school day during the year, and has had since last year. Last year in a corridor a teacher was stabbed in the knee. I am told that recently there has been a problem with drugs, including hard drugs, and even some juvenile prostitution in that school. Two students told me of separate incidents in which different children under ten years of age had stolen items from neighbourhood homes. These occurrences took place at one school in one western Canadian city, not in New York or Detroit.
What is happening elsewhere across Canada? I do not quote very often from members of that other place, especially Liberal members, but Senator Florence Bird was quoted in a current issue of Maclean's magazine on this subject. She was speaking of violent crime statistics in Canada and is reported as follows:
What is particularly scary (about violent crime statistics in Canada) is the 60 per cent increase in violent juvenile delinquency from 1974 to 1978. Most shocking of all is the increase of violence by the young against themselves. In the past decade the suicide rate increased 59 per cent for young people aged 15 to 19.
Even more alarming, in my view, is the situation in respect of young people south of the border. I think it is clear that what is happening in the United States has had a bearing on much of what is contained in this bill. What is currently happening there frequently is an indication of what will be happening in Canada in five or ten years.
Let me read a few quotations from a book entitled "Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice" by Charles Silberman, published in 1978. Silberman is a layman who spent six years examining the crime epidemic in his country, and he has produced, in my opinion, an extraordinarily perceptive work, as perhaps only a layman could do. For example, he states at page 34:
-the youth culture emerged (in 1960s) as a major socializing force, taking over a large part of the burden traditionally carried by parents, teachers, clergymen and other adults.
Still on page 34 he states:
Initiation into heroin use is a phenomenon of youth: Two users in three begin using the drug between the ages of 15 and 21, with the great concentration occurring at age 18-
At page 35 he states:
-a teenager's status often depends on the ability to buy the "right" records and wear the "right" clothes. The adolescent need for money, combined with the weakening of adult social controls, has provided a lethal crimogenic force.
At page 311 he states:
The problem is not that juvenile courts are too lenient, but that they are too lenient toward the wrong people-
Mr. Silberman in his chapter on juvenile justice quotes from Judge William White, a juvenile court judge in Chicago speaking on this subject, as follows:

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But looking at the (juvenile justice) record I am reminded of the Peanuts cartoon showing him sadly leaving the ball field with the scoreboard showing "Visitors 99, Home Team 0", "Ugh", he says, "How could it happen when we were so sincere."
Let me quote again from page 354 as follows:
In most states, juvenile court jurisdiction ends at age 18, since 16 and 17-year olds account for more than half of all juvenile arrests for violent crimes and 45 per cent of burglary arrests, that two-year difference in the age of jurisdiction, (between New York State with 16 and states having 18 as the age of majority) has an extraordinary impact on the number of cases that come before a juvenile court and on the way these cases are handled-
Finally, let me come to the more specific aspects of this bill and mention some of my major concerns. First, I would speak on the ages contemplated in Bill C-61. The minimum age for the youth offenders act criminal responsibility is to be 12 years rather than seven as in the old Juvenile Delinquents Act, as I think other speakers have mentioned. Obviously the provinces are expected to enact their own legislation to deal with barred conduct by children between the ages of seven and 12, and to pay all related costs. I was told just a few minutes ago, and I am afraid I must agree, that today there are in fact some children between the ages of seven to 12 who do commit serious crimes. Can all the provinces with their different financial situations be expected to absorb these related costs? Will there be a judicial checkerboard, to use that now familiar phrase, caused by this federal initiative?
The maximum age for liability under the youth offenders act is to be 18 years, subject to reduction at the request of an individual province to 16 or 17. As you know, Mr. Speaker, our government proposed a uniform maximum age of 16 years, subject to accepting a higher age of 17 or 18 only if all provinces agreed. The hon. member for Durham-Northumber-land mentioned this. This is why there is now an amendment before the House, and I am pleased to speak in support of it if you rule it to be in order.
This concept will be a major source of federal-provincial controversy. Obviously that is the case. Alberta and Ontario, which use the age of 16 as a cut-off, obviously want this to remain, in part because of the large cost of the administrative implications, particularly if the juvenile net is widened to include 17 and 18-year-olds. This could result in more of their youth residents going to youth detention centres, those who are now subject to adult sanctions and corrections.
1 wish someone opposite could tell me, through you, Mr. Speaker, whether the federal government is being conciliatory to the provinces only because it wishes to avoid increased costs. Why otherwise is the government now tolerating a checkerboard Canada in the justice field? Different standards of programs in different provinces for youth are certainly going to remain as a result of this measure, and obviously poorer provinces will continue to have inferior programs because of their tax bases.
1 am told that evidently the Solicitor General does not want one age, as we propose, because this would cause a confrontation with the provinces. In view of what the federal government has done recently in terms of confronting the provinces in matters involving, in some cases, their exclusive jurisdiction, I
can only say that this is a laugh. 1 would remind him that his duties or responsibilities under the existing Constitution include criminal law, so nobody can complain that he is invading provincial spheres here by having one age, such as we can and do when he invades areas of exclusive provincial responsibility under the constitutional proposals.
The point mentioned by the hon. member for Broadview-Greenwood (Mr. Rae) was that Section 15 of the charter of rights, if found legal by the Supreme Court, would ban discrimination on the basis of age, among other things. It seems self-evident that any differences in age under this bill would be struck down by the courts. Because of the particular wording chosen in Section 15, I seriously wonder as well if any age chosen would not similarly be struck down as being unconstitutional discrimination against young people on the basis of age. I have a strong feeling that no one on the other side has thought about this point.
In respect of the matter of youth records, this bill requires the destruction of these records after a crime-free qualifying period, presumably on the basis that many young persons would not in practice apply for the same without the automatic feature. In fairness, I must say that in our proposal in 1979 the records would have been sealed, with limited access for research purposes.
Another point is that the right of youths to counsel at all stages of proceedings is proposed in the bill, and I favour that strongly; but will the courts interpret this to mean the right to duty counsel alone or to more? Once again, the various legal aid plans in this area will presumably differ, as now, substantially across the country. Are we giving equal justice to all young people in that sense?
The important matter of diversion is left essentially to provincial choice. Would it not be wiser to lay out some clearer criteria or standard so that the concept carries, hopefully, the same substance throughout the country? Why should diversion be allowed in one province and not in the next, if what we are dealing with here is a matter of exclusive federal responsibility for the criminal law?
At present under the Juvenile Delinquents Act violations of provincial and municipal statutes constitute Juvenile Delinquents Act offences. No more, of course, under this bill. Only breaches of the Criminal Code and other federal statutes and regulations will be the bases for conviction under this legislation. Should there not, therefore, be at least some phasing-in time available for the provinces wishing to enact complementary legislation? It seems to me self-evident that there should be a phasing-in period for such provinces.
I come now to what I consider to be the most controversial part of the bill, and I stress that I am speaking for myself alone on this and not for my party. I have a feeling that a large number of Canadians would share my concerns about the feature in the bill which would completely revoke the concept of vicarious liability of parents or guardians which existed under Section 22 of the Juvenile Delinquents Act in favour of
May 12, 1981

making only youths themselves responsible-including financially-for their acts.
Up until now, if a group of rampaging young people-I will not give them a sex-broke into a school or community hall and reduced the windows or whatever to rubble, a juvenile court had the authority to impose damages on their parents where it found that the parents in effect had contributed to the offence "by neglecting to exercise due care of the child." It strikes me that assuming such a feature is, and was, constitutionally valid as being incidental to Parliament's criminal law power, a great many Canadians will want it to remain for suitable, special circumstances. In fairness, the proposal of my colleague, the solicitor general of the time, the hon. member for Durham-Northumberland, in 1979, would also have eliminated possible parental liability, but personally I am not at all persuaded that such a feature should not be added to this bill, presumably in committee. I see that at least one of my colleagues other than the hon. member for Durham-Northumberland supports that view.


Mr. Robinson (Burnaby):: Split.


David Kilgour: Indeed, on the basis of my limited experience with juvenile crime I think it would be a serious mistake to remove it. I know that some will say that society could always proceed against parents under a "contributing to juvenile delinquency" section, which I gather is to be added to the Criminal Code in the future, but why not leave this string in the legislation's bow as well? I am not saying it has to be used often, but I think this should be available.
Someone said the other day that the cost-sharing aspects- as an economist, Mr. Speaker, you would appreciate this-of the bill are likely to consume at least two weeks of committee time alone on this bill. I agree. This is, of course, because the bill revokes-I think this is important-the transfer of jurisdiction over youths made by the Juvenile Delinquents Act to the provincial sphere, thereby making the provinces no longer eligible in law for the $65 million or so they now receive yearly for shared-cost juvenile services under the Canada Assistance Plan. It is true that clause 69 of the bill authorizes new financial arrangements with the provinces at the discretion of Ottawa, and there may be some naive folk on this side or the other-not that we have any naive folk on this side-who believe that the levels of financial support present since 1965 or 1968 will continue.
I note that a minister is present now. I ask those opposite who have responsibility what incentive rests with the Solicitor General to enter into any such agreements now if this bill is passed. Surely the government-or the minister-should be up front enough to state its intentions publicly in this regard, at least so that perhaps it might have something it could renounce later on.
There are other aspects of the bill which are worthy of comment-I will not take up the time of the House because I know there is a large number of people who want to speak- including its detention and bail features, transfer to adult court provisions, privacy of proceedings, disposition of cases,
Young Offenders Act
release from custody, review of dispositions, appeals, fingerprinting and photographs, but I believe I touched earlier on the major areas of appropriate public concern. Hopefully this debate will serve to have interested Canadians everywhere, including members of Parliament, take a careful look at this very important measure.
In closing, I might say that if any member of the public hearing or seeing me wishes to appear at the committee hearings, I would be grateful if he or she would let any of my party colleagues or myself know as quickly as possible.


Mr. Joe Reid (St. Catharines):: Mr. Speaker, as a lawyer I am interested professionally in this piece of legislation. As a parent-indeed, as a grandparent-I am personally affected by the legislation. It behooves us all as Canadians to be interested in legislation affecting the youth of our country. It is for that reason I am particularly pleased to be able to join in the debate on this bill dealing with the proposed Young Offenders Act.
While I am in large part in support of the bill, I cannot accept the position of the Solicitor General (Mr. Kaplan) that we must rush through the debate at second reading. As the amendment put forward by the hon. member for Durham-Northumberland (Mr. Lawrence) this afternoon shows, there is no legislation which cannot be improved, and this legislation is no exception.
Having said that, I note that this legislation has been long in coming. We have been reminded of that fact several times already. I should not belabour that particular point, but I would like to point out that the Juvenile Delinquents Act as we know it has been in effect for 52 years. We should pay some tribute to those who have been charged with the responsibility of administering that act.
I would be remiss if I did not join my colleagues in this House in stating that we owe a debt to the juvenile justice community. It is a credit to the juvenile court process, juvenile court justices, law enforcement personnel, social workers and, indeed, the provinces that serious and widespread injustices to the youth of this country have not taken place. The potential for abuses and injustices has been there and present over that long period of time, and it is refreshing and encouraging in these troubled and divisive times to see that that justice community has performed and is performing in an exemplary manner.
Although we in the Progressive Conservative party are not examining this bill in a partisan manner, it would be unfair if we did not mention the fact that, in relation to the proposed Young Offenders Act, we in this House owe to the predecessor of the Solicitor General, the hon. member for Durham-Northumberland, some credit for the legislation now being introduced. The Clark government made the Young Offenders Act a priority order of the day, and I cannot help but feel that in so doing it gave much impetus to the Solicitor General to bring forward the legislation now before us.

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I must also add that I am disappointed that the minister responsible for the administration of this act is not present in this House as we debate his bill.
Legislation concerning a large segment of our population, or as large a part of it as this group represents, permits endless tangential discussions that can cause us not only to lose sight of the issue, but to cloud the issue to the extent that the good is lost with the bad. Consequently, I wish to discuss some of the measures specifically and make some general comments with respect to the process.
The Young Offenders Act has much to recommend it, particularly in the strengthening of the alleged offender's rights and the formalizing of a diversion procedure. It is hard to believe that in 1981 we are only just coming into the right of appeal, the right of legal representation, and the right to a sentence review for our young people. It is also surprising that our judges have had to govern their courts without the benefit of formal procedures and the benefit of meaningful sentencing options. Recognizing this fact, and recognizing that in this matter of sentencing options diversion is long overdue for formal sanctioning, I am at a loss to understand why the proposed act is as vague as it is.
Under the Juvenile Delinquents Act, an alleged offender would, so to speak, have his or her day in court. But in many of those instances, that day in court was not necessary, nor was it even desirable, and the judge had to take it upon himself to assume that responsibility of indicating an alternate course of action. Now, under the proposed legislation, alleged offenders would be given the opportunity, if one wants to be optimistic for the moment, to bypass the court by accepting a prescribed punishment. This implies, naturally enough, that guilt is not in question and that the crime is not a serious one. Bill C-61 does not set out definite or specific guidelines to follow for diversion. Hence, a youngster could be coerced into accepting an alternative measure rather than appearing in court, and perhaps, if he had appeared in court, being found not guilty. I recognize the words in Bill C-61, and I trust the committee will take another look at Section 3 of the act.
The number of sentencing options have a similarly vague application. Under Section 20, subsection (1), the judge would be given ten definite sentencing options, or if there was no conflicting combination of each, an added eleventh permitting the court to "impose on the young person such other reasonable and ancillary conditions as it deems advisable and in the best interest of the young person and the public". Now, that is faith, indeed! Further, despite the wide range of sentencing options available, there are no provisions in the act indicating, let alone stating, which offences should receive which degree of sentencing. This quandary may well return us to the current state of affairs, as indicated by one of the earlier speakers, as well as that facing judges in days gone by under the previous Juvenile Delinquents Act.
These two areas, sentencing and diversion, are essentially good ones simply in need of sharper definition. The same
cannot be said for the lack of a uniform maximum age. I want to address this issue as others have done before me.
We have recently concluded, for the moment, a very lengthy and, yes, tiring debate on the Constitution. We heard repeatedly from the government benches that any checkerboard concept was an abomination, something to regard as anathema. Now we are being told by the Solicitor General that there is consensus today that uniformity of standards and law should be extended throughout the country. But what do we find in this proposed legislation? An accommodation of individual provinces which have expressed different positions with respect to the maximum age.
The Solicitor General goes on in his March 14 speech to state that this position reflects the different services and resources of the various provinces for dealing with young offenders. On April 15 he added that it also reflected differing philosophies with respect to the age of maturity. Mr. Speaker, this concern of differing attitudes, resources and services leaves me not just a little concerned and confused. Surely, as Canadians, there should be a uniform application of the Criminal Code right across this land of ours, and just as surely young Canadians wherever they live should be entitled to the same benefits and be subject to the same restrictions and responsibilities that this act provides.
The confusion is augmented when one considers the raising of the minimum age for criminal responsibility from seven to 12 years. I support this change. All of us do. Most if not all the previous speakers have supported it, as have eight of the ten provinces. Two provinces did not support this change, yet the Solicitor General did not allow this to prevent him from introducing a uniform minimum age. Why, may I ask, was there not the same insistence that there be a uniform maximum age?
I do not enter into any partisan approach. My concern with the lack of uniformity on the maximum age does not lie with my constitutional quarrel with this government, but with the rights of our young people. The charter of rights, Section 15, prohibits discrimination on the basis of age. How could the Young Offenders Act fail to violate that section, that clause, this right, when a 17-year-old could be treated differently in one province as opposed to another?
If nothing can be done to implement uniformity, then I think that the committee should consider alternate means of ensuring a youth's equality before the law. Perhaps an "overage" youth in one province could be permitted to apply to a court in another province that treats the youths of his age. I recognize the problems of bureaucracy, the expense; but I urge careful examination of that uniformity clause or alternates to meet the need of equal application of the law in any province of this country.
Of supreme importance is close and meaningful liaison with the provincial authorities. This act will increase the burden of the various child welfare acts of the provinces by adding to them a whole new category of children, those between seven and 12 years of age. As well, the proposed legislation has dropped all provincial and municipal laws, bylaws, and ordi-
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nances from their domain, leaving them within the provincial authorities. Without liaison work, we shall create a judicial morass that could take years to untangle. I trust the committee will be cognizant of that fact when it enters its consideration of these clauses.
Those are primary concerns with the proposed legislation. There are other points of lesser importance, but they are worth mentioning at this stage. The maximum fine of $1,000, for example, strikes me as being high. Remember we are talking of persons under the age of 18. We do not want to encourage another crime to pay off a previous one. The review procedure is potentially bureaucratic in nature. It is a bureaucratic monster with automatic reviews, optional reviews, progress reports and supplementary progress report material. The juvenile courts had to deal with almost 91,000 cases in 1978. Multiply whatever percentage of that number you like as qualifying for a review, or for a review of a review, and you have created tons of paperwork and an abundance of bureaucratic work.
Finally, I think the destruction of the criminal record after a qualifying period of good behaviour is a welcome change. But, as a legal community colleague of mine pointed out to me, employment application forms are slowly switching to the question: "Have you ever been charged with a criminal offence?" This problem would perhaps be best addressed by amendments to the human rights legislation both at the federal and provincial levels. These criticisms and recommendations are all matters that I would like to see the committee discuss seriously.
The proposed Young Offenders Act, as I said earlier, has far more in it to recommend than to criticize. It provides the three basic elements that the Progressive Conservative party believes to be imperative: young offenders have been charged with a greater responsibility for their actions, they have been given stronger rights under the law, and there is greater flexibility in, and therefore greater hope for, rehabilitation options. We also welcome the end of the so-called status offences-the omnibus charge of delinquency. These "offences" smeared our youth with a broad brush and have rendered the words "juvenile delinquent" odious in connotation. Our young people have difficulty enough without having labels applied to them that live long past the age of majority.
I would like to commend the Solicitor General for the submission of this legislation. Subject to the comments I have made today, I support the legislation. I am sure the committee will examine the reservations I have put forward with serious intent. Let us hope that we can better this legislation in the future as it affects our community, not only for today but for tomorrow. Having waited 52 years for change is far too long.
Young Offenders Act



PROCEEDINGS ON ADJOURNMENT MOTION


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Blaker):: Order, please. It is my duty, pursuant to Standing Order 40, to inform the House that the questions to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment are as follows: the hon. member for Medicine Hat (Mr. Hargrave)-Western Development Fund-Improvement of insufficient water supplies; the hon. member for Halton (Mr. Jelinek)-Automotive Industry-1. Results of Canada-United States ministerial discussions-Appeal for restrictions on imports. 2. Future of Canada-United States auto pact; the hon. member for Winnipeg-Birds Hill (Mr. Blaikie)-Health and Safety-Use of Daikon shield intrauterine devices.



GOVERNMENT ORDERS


[Stage Direction]
The House resumed consideration of the motion of Mr. Kaplan that Bill C-61, respecting young offenders and to repeal the Juvenile Delinquents Act, be read the second time and referred to the Standing Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs.
Mr. Donald W. Munro (Esquimalt-Saanich):: Mr. Speaker, my participation in this debate will be confined to one or two aspects of the bill and, principally, to omissions in the bill. I do not know whether these omissions were deliberate or an oversight, but I propose to deal with them when the time comes.
The previous intervener mentioned the odium connected with the title "juvenile delinquent". We welcome the change of that title to "young offender". I think it is a step in the right direction in ensuring that those misguided young people who do have confrontations with the law will not carry with them for all time the obloquy of being designated a delinquent. It has a pejorative meaning. "Young offender" is a better designation.
Under the Juvenile Delinquents Act there were very important provisions, some of which have already been mentioned, with respect to parental involvement in making restitution. 1 think the principle of restitution is a valid one. Perhaps when we get to committee it will be possible to make amendments to the provisions of the Young Offenders Act to ensure that there is adequate parental responsibility assigned.
My principal concern is with the failure to make any reference whatsoever in the Young Offenders Act to provisions which were made in Section 20 of the Juvenille Delinquents Act. That section deals with the options open to the court to deal in a fatherly, parental or guiding fashion, if you like, with

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Young Offenders Act
delinquents who may have been involved, for good reason or bad, or as a result of peer pressure, in activities which brought them before the court. Under the present act the courts are able to deal with the youthful offender either by diverting them to probation officers or by ensuring that they return to their parents, fosters homes or other institutions which will keep them out of the court system. The court can take this action under the existing legislation without having the youthful offender carry with him for all time the stigma of being labelled a delinquent for having had a confrontation with the law, for having gone through what must be a very unsettling process. The process sometimes brings out the very worst in the youth. It causes him to overreact and before you know it he is back in the hands of the law again.
The provisions of the young offenders bill provide for three different groups of individuals who may be dealt with in one form or another. Presumably, there are those who up to the age of 12 will be dealt with under provincial law. I say "presumably" because it is not clear in my mind that there is a consistent method of dealing with youthful offenders right across the country-those under the age of 12. Someone mentioned an offence which could be committed by someone at one end of a bridge spanning the Ottawa River, and another person committing the same kind of offence at the other end of that bridge would be dealt with in a totally different manner. This could occur in other jurisdictions where there are provincial boundaries involved.
There are financial implications of the administration of that law which would be solely and wholly borne by the provinces for offences committed by those under the age of 12. Has that been made absolutely clear to the provincial attorneys general? We are not sure of that and I think we will want to clear that matter up in the committee. We will want to be sure that representatives of the attorneys general departments across the country have an opportunity to go before the committee, to make their cases in law and to make their cases in financial terms as well. That is absolutely essential. At the same time, it may very well be possible to harmonize, if not make common law, across this land for offenders under the age of 12.
It is not generally recognized, and I suppose it is not all that easy to state, that if one looks at crime, disregarding for the moment motor vehicle incidents or confrontations with the law, from 50 per cent to 60 per cent of crime is committed by juveniles. We do not like to face this fact, because our police are expected to be the great sturdy men that they are. I know from experience in my own community that they are community workers. More power to them for that. They are not to be denigrated on that account but should be praised. They deserve all our praise for responding to that community effort in dealing with young offenders.
In one particular municipality in my riding, about 70 per cent to 80 per cent of incidents of breaking the law, disregarding motor vehicle incidents, are committed by persons considered to be juveniles. In another area where 6,800 offences were reported with only 1,100 apprehensions, 55 per cent of those apprehensions were of juveniles. Those were followed by convictions, so that means that out of the 6,800 offences committed, only 500 of the 1,100 apprehensions involved crimes known to have been committed by juveniles. By extrapolating, one could say that of the 6,800, perhaps 3,600 or even 4,000 of the offences committed and reported were committed by juveniles.
Those who are administering the law are concerned on two scores. They are concerned by the absence in the young offenders bill of some means of dealing with them other than through the courts; of not having them committed firmly to a confrontation with the law. There must be some way of dealing with those offenders between the ages of 12 and 17 other than through confrontation with a judge in the solemn dignity of a court procedure. That absence could be rectified in the young offenders bill.
Once this has been discussed with the administrators of the law in the provinces and they agree that this particular lacuna should be closed, that there should be a provision in the new legislation to deal in a more gentle way with those offenders who can be shown to have become involved in their confrontation with the law for reasons that were not long-term criminal but were, rather, usually in response to a challenge, I hope there will be an opportunity to rectify matters. What child will not respond to a challenge, to a dare? These "crimes"-and I put the word in quotation marks-can be eliminated from the system and dealt with under the provisions of Section 20 of the Juvenile Delinquents Act, but there is no method that I can see in the Young Offenders Act to deal with them in a softer manner.
I agree entirely with the hon. member for Durham-North-umberland (Mr. Lawrence) that one of the great failures in the bill before us is its refusal to face the need for an upper limit on that second category of miscreants or offenders above the age of 12 and up to the age of 16, 17 or 18. We must fix that age. That is the second group of individuals dealt with in a special way. Beyond that age they are assumed to be of the age of responsibility and will face the consequences of their acts under the criminal law if they have committed a crime, or under other aspects of our law.
To go back to the statistics that I cited a few minutes ago about the preponderance of crime committed by those who are under age, whatever that means, a good number of these are in the age bracket of ten, 11 and approaching 12. That is a dreadful thing to have to admit. I do not derive any satisfaction whatsoever from stating that young criminal elements are being developed at that age, but it is the case; there is no question about it. I have this on the most firm authority of those who deal with young offenders on a day to day basis and who can see the formation of the chronic criminal prior to the 12-year-old limit set in the new bill. I wonder whether 12 is the correct age to insert in this bill.
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I have said, of course, that the provincial legislations across the country will be dealing with the pre-12-year-old, but since there is no assurance that this aspect will be dealt with in a consistent fashion from one coast to the other, perhaps there is a case to be made, which can be made in committee. We could reduce the requirement of age 12 to, say, that of age ten if the experience of other administrators of the law, parole officers and those who are dealing with the corrective aspects of youthful misbehaviour, can prove that it is a critical age and that it is an age group that might better be dealt with under the provisions of the Young Offenders Act. I would like to see not only representatives of the Attorney General before the committee, but also those who have been dealing with the young offenders in family court and in the parole system and so hear their experience directly. This may enable us to make the necessary amendments to make the act not only a better one but one which will be uniform in application across the country.
One of the criticisms levelled at the act is the media treatment which has been given to it. Not long ago there was a suggestion, whether in a headline or in the text of an article, that the new laws coming into effect for juvenile offenders would be tougher; in other words, more severe. This, of course, raised the expectations of those members of the community who felt the law is not tough enough because there is altogether too much vandalism and vandals are able to get away with their misdeeds. Raising the expectations of the general public in this way is a media abuse. 1 do not know whether it was deliberately done on the part of the government to indicate that it is really out to crack down on juvenile delinquents, or whether it was just the manner in which the statements, publications or documents issued by the Solicitor General (Mr. Kaplan) were considered by the press.
An ancillary comment made through stories in the media was that juveniles would now have the right to appeal. In my province this right exists today. There is no need to suggest that some new provisions will come into effect when those provisions already exist. The right to appeal is certainly one of them. There are provisions in my province also for retaining a lawyer to assist youthful offenders under the legal aid system. This bill before us now provides that youthful offenders will have lawyers. That is not new, nor should it be broadcast as new. Perhaps I am speaking solely about my province. Perhaps the right to legal counsel does not exist in other provinces. But this particular provision, provided that we get the age spread correct under which the offender does have the right to legal counsel, is not all that new, and it is a mistake to characterize it as though it were.
There is a definition in the Juvenile Delinquents Act which defines a child. A child is any boy or girl apparently or actually under the age of 16 years or such other age as may be directed in any province pursuant to subsection (2). The definition of a child in the bill before us means a person who is, or, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, appears to be under the age of 12. The definition of a child is a person under
Young Offenders Act
the age of 16 in the existing law and under the age of 12 in the proposed bill.
Another criticism brought to my attention is that no provision is made within this bill to ascertain the age which determines whether the offender falls within provincial jurisdiction as being under the age when he would fall under this particular bill, or whether he should fall under this bill. There is no provision either for the parent or the guardian to be notified that his child or his ward has been charged with an offence.
In this respect I suppose this bill is intruding into the affairs of the family in a manner which I think is quite unacceptable. When any member of a family under that legal age-yet to be determined either 16'/2, 17 or 18-is charged with an offence, surely it is right and proper that the parent or guardian of that young person should be notified of the offence charged. 1 think it only right and proper also that the parent or guardian should be required to appear in the court to attest to the age of the child by whatever means he has at his disposal. The offender may be 11 years and ten months. This bill refers to a person who is, or, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, appears to be under the age of 12 years. How is evidence of age obtained? There is no requirement that evidence be obtained. There is provision within the existing bill to obtain that evidence. The parent or guardian is required to show that the offender is of the age required to be dealt with under this particular measure. I think that matter ought to be corrected as well.
One final matter worries me somewhat. It is related to the earlier ones and I draw the attention of the House to it. In my opinion, it will be worth examining in greater detail in committee. Specifically, I am speaking of clauses 71, 72 and 73 of the bill which deal with amendments to the Criminal Code. Sections 12 and 13 to the Criminal Code are repealed and Section 12 is replaced by a provision which introduces the 12-year age limit again. Clause 71 removes a provision from the Criminal Code which deserves to remain in some way or other. I would like to read Section 13 of the Criminal Code because of the loss of that particular provision as a result of clause 71.1 read Section 13 of the Criminal Code:
No person shall be convicted of an offence in respect of an act or omission on his part while he was seven years of age or more-
That, of course, is going up to 12.
-but under the age of fourteen years, unless he was competent to know the nature and consequences of his conduct and to appreciate that it was wrong.
It is that final section to which I allude and which has a role to play in any matter where offences are committed against society or against another person. I quote it again so that we will be reminded of it:
-unless he was competent to know the nature and consequences of his conduct and to appreciate that it was wrong.
Are we going to eliminate that notion of rightness and wrongness from our law, the element of moral responsibility which we should be inculcating in our young people? The
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Young Offenders Act
young person will say that because it is not there, there is no need to worry whether it is right or wrong, the judge will decide.
This is a matter of moral responsibility. Like many other things in our society in the past ten or 12 years, the transformation is being brought about in the moral attitudes of people toward one another and to their society by changes such as this. I deplore the loss of that phrase. I feel it must be restored somewhere within the law. Not only I but social workers with whom ! have spoken about this matter are prepared to attest that youthful offenders are competent to know that some of the offences they commit are wrong. They should not be discouraged from judging in their own mind the rightness, wrongness and consequences of what they are planning, are in the course of, or have performed.
Those are the comments I wish to make at this stage. I hope that when the bill goes before the Standing Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs, as those who have spoken before me have mentioned, there will be an opportunity to have brought before us representatives from the attorneys general of the provinces and possibly from the provincial finance departments so that they will be able to judge the fiscal implications of the bill. 1 implore those who will be sitting on this committee to make arrangements so that the administrators of the law, those in a position of responsibility and guidance, such as parole officers and those who have concern for these young people, who see where they are going wrong and how they can be helped, will have an opportunity to appear before the committee and make their case and help improve this bill.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Blaker):: An amendment was proposed earlier by the hon. member for Durham-Northumb-erland, seconded by the hon. member for Edmonton-Strath-cona. The Chair wishes to advise hon. members that the amendment is found to be in order. Consequently I will read it and then debate can proceed. Mr. Lawrence, seconded by Mr. Kilgour, moves:
That all the words after the word "that" be deleted and the following substituted therefor:
"-this House declines to give second reading to Bill C-61, an act respecting young offenders and to repeal the Juvenile Delinquents Act, because the bill rejects the fundamental principle of equal treatment of all persons before the law by specifying that the act will apply to different age groups in different provinces."


Mr. Benno Friesen (Surrey-White Rock-North Delta):: Mr. Speaker, I am happy to hear you rule that the amendment submitted by the hon. member for Durham-Northumberland (Mr. Lawrence) is in order. I know there is general support for this legislation. At the same time I recognize that there are some inherent problems in the provisions and sometimes the language of the bill. Therefore, it would be good if members of the House would support this amendment in order that it might be drafted in a better form and have more acceptable support from hon. members.
Members who have been here for at least the past five years will know that I have had a continuing interest in legislation dealing with the welfare of children and young people, as well
as legislation that would protect the sanctity of the home. Therefore, 1 welcome this legislation, which has some aspects of reality in it. I hope it will provide some measures to deal with some of the problems we face in our society and some of the problems our young people face.
I begin by reiterating what some others have pointed out. There is a shift of emphasis in the title. Rather than speak about juvenile delinquents, we will now speak of young offenders. I see both an up side and a down side to that. There was a time when a young person involved in criminal activity was called a criminal. That is what he was, even though he was young. Society determined that because of the person's youth, it was not wholesome for someone 12, 14 or 16 years of age to be labelled a criminal, so a softer definition was given to his activity. He became a juvenile delinquent. After years of having this term heaped on young people, it is now a term of opprobrium and is no longer acceptable. It is a term of disgrace. We will now redefine what originally was a criminal and call him a young offender rather than a juvenile delinquent. I would point out that the behaviour has not necessarily changed. It is the definition of that behaviour which has changed. We really have not addressed the problem that that young person is facing.
While I welcome the change in title, I see an up side and a down side. Simply changing the definition will not solve the problem. It will not make that young person feel better about himself. That young person will feel rotten inside not because of the term "juvenile delinquent" or "young offender" which is attached to him, but because he has done something wrong. The best favour we can extend to that young person is to help him face the reality that he has done something wrong, not to soften the definition of what he has done or of what kind of person he is.
Maybe some kind of reality therapy is what we ought to prescribe because he is in fact a young criminal. To call that person a young offender may, ironically in terms of the government's legislation, go some distance to meet that need because it is no longer advantageous to call him a delinquent. The term "delinquent" is a pretty soft term. That is why it was written that way. The person is actually an offender if he has offended the law and offended society. Calling such a person a young offender is actually a little closer to reality than calling him a juvenile delinquent. I see some value in redefining the term and calling the legislation young offenders legislation rather than the Juvenile Delinquents Act.
That leads me to a second point by way of introduction. In far too many instances we have tried to soften our criminal statistics by changing the definition of a crime. When I was young, if a young person was caught shoplifting he was stealing, but today he is shoplifting. You cannot change the nature of the offence by redefining it. You may improve the statistics but you do not change the nature of the offence. It seems to me that far too often we are trying to make society
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look better by redefining the crime instead of dealing with the problem. 1 am concerned about that fact.
Let me speak about two particular aspects of this legislation which, I feel, are wanting, and both of which have been touched upon by previous speakers. I simply want to emphasize my concern about a lapse in this legislation which fails to deal with important aspects in the lives of young people if we are to help them face reality. If we continue this lapse through this legislation we will do them a disservice.
One aspect is that area which relieves parents of responsibility for the activities of their children. I know that this legislation, by taking the responsibility from the parents, is shifting it to the broad shoulders of society in general. In some instances that implies it is not the parents but, rather, it is society which is responsible for the behaviour of young people. In some cases that may be true. There may be certain instances where society in general has created the circumstances which have led young people to take part in criminal activity. It seems to me this is an extension of the kind of social engineering under which we have been labouring for the past generation or so. The thinkers in our society have come to believe that by tinkering with the social structure and by shifting responsibility, we address the problems. That is far from the reality. I think it is also an extension of the kind of economic determinism which has been part of the thinking of our society during the past generation, that it is because of economics that people go into a life of crime. Again there may be instances where people have been encouraged because of economics to go into lives of crime. It is fallacious reasoning to conclude that economics make people turn to crime. By relieving parents of their responsibility, we are asking society in general to accept that responsibility.
Let me illustrate the shift that is taking place. I was born at the beginning of the depression. I am not saying I caused it, but somehow the chronology coincided. I grew up during those depression years which, as members know, were some of the most poverty-ridden years of this country. My parents were parents of a large family during those very deprived years. My father used to go from a small town in Saskatchewan where we lived at the time, put his bike on the Grey Goose bus in Saskatchewan and travel to the Fraser Valley in British Columbia in order to find summer employment where there were still jobs during the summer months. He would then come back in time for the harvest in Saskatchewan to get day labour and make enough to put us through the winter.
In that small prairie town of one thousand or two thousand people we had one constable. The hon. member for Prince Albert (Mr. Hovdebo) will know of the town of Rosthern, and he is old enough to remember those years. We had one constable for the entire town, a small city we might call it today. We also had a curfew law. I remember standing on the wrong side of the sidewalk at about two minutes after nine o'clock, after the curfew bell had rung, when the constable, walking by and seeing my parents in the yard, motioned me to come into the yard. The town had a jail in the city hall, but it was usually empty, and this was at the time of our greatest
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depression. If poverty creates crime, that should have been the time when crime was the greatest, at least according to the economic determinism theory. Usually the jail was empty.
Let me bring you up to date. A few years ago the municipal council of Surrey decided it would help society if there were curfew legislation in Surrey. About two years ago it passed a curfew law which ordered young people to be home at eleven o'clock at night, particularly on weekends. That policy lasted about three Saturdays. At eleven o'clock at night, the RCM Police would go to the local hangouts, McDonald's or wherever they happened to be, pick up the kids who were under age and take them to the police station. They were not being put in jail but just taken there while the police got in touch with their parents. At two o'clock in the morning they were still phoning the parents to come and get their children. Because they were usually unable to find the parents to look after their children, the municipal council was not able to carry out that curfew policy.
This is what has happened in our society in terms of parental responsibility. Is it the responsibility of our police forces to look after young people under 16 years of age after eleven o'clock at night? I thought that when parents were raising children it was their responsibility to look after those children, not the responsibility of society. Therefore, I regret that the government, through this legislation, will further relieve parents of their accountability for raising children.
I am concerned about this move because of another consequence. If the government at this point is relieving parents of their accountability, at what point down the road will it prohibit parents from exercising their authority over their children? The first stage is relieving parents of responsibility and the second is prohibiting them from exercising authority. This will result in state intervention in family responsibilities. We do not have to go far outside our country to find examples of the state assuming full responsibility for looking after families. That to me spells the deterioration of a society. The first and most important institution in the land is the home, and whenever the state intervenes in the conduct of the home and takes away the authority of the home, society goes down the skids.
The second contradiction in this kind of economic determinism which says that society is responsible, because of the social scales in our society, for creating a life of crime is the fact that much of today's crime is in the affluent areas of our society. If it is poverty which creates crime, why is so much crime committed by the affluent people of our society? Why are many of the young offenders of our society coming from the high schools in the affluent sections of our cities? Why is it? Why is the worst kind of crime-and, in terms of dollars, the highest proportion of crime-white collar crime?
There are some hard realities we as a country have to face if we want to address the nature of crime in our country. If we are going to address the problem, we will have to conclude sooner or later that crime exists because people decide to

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engage in criminal activity. They try to take shortcuts which run roughshod over the rights of other people. Parents decide that they are going to be irresponsible parents; young people decide that they are going to take advantage of their parents' irresponsibility, and sooner or later we have to have a law which says that parents and young people, and nobody else, will be held accountable for their actions. Parents and young people both have to be held accountable for their behaviour. One psychologist said, "You may have inherited that problem but you are responsible; you cannot pass it off on your parents forever; you cannot blame them forever." Sooner or later we must decide what kind of people we want to be, and there is no sense in kidding ourselves; we cannot pretend that we are doing young people a favour by suggesting that somebody else is responsible for their behaviour.
I suggest that the government would do all of Canada a favour if, at the committee stage, it re-evaluated the position it has taken on this section of the bill, replaced the section dealing with parental accountability for the behaviour of young people and made parents socially, and many times financially, accountable for the behaviour of their children.
Second, I agree in part with what the hon. member for Broadview-Greenview (Mr. Rae) indicated earlier this afternoon. He said that young people need the opportunity to experience and display a sense of atonement. I agree with that. Young people should not be locked in and labelled for life because of their behaviour at one particular stage of their lives. Society in many cases does act prejudicially against young people because of indiscretions, because of earlier rebellions, and sometimes because of false values having been given to them. They have engaged in activity which has been criminal, but they do not deserve to be labelled for life as young offenders, criminals or whatever definition we want to use. There has to be an opportunity for atonement. Young people deserve the opportunity to be trusted because there is very slim chance of atonement in young people if they are not going to be trusted. It begins with trust.
However, I add to what the hon. member for Broadview-Greenwood said by saying that atonement or a confession of atonement is totally irrelevant unless there is also restitution. That is how we know people are serious and genuine about their confession of atonement. The apology of a person who says he is sorry for what he has done is not accepted if he does not also restore the thing he has taken, whether it is money, reputation or whatever it is. It is easy for a young person to have engaged in a breaking and entering, a shoplifting or a theft of an automobile and then to say, "I am sorry", but that is not good enough, even if he means it, because part of the formula for atonement-it is integrally related to atonement- is restitution.
I want to use an adult illustration. About a year and a half ago, a gentleman was convicted of a crime in the province of Quebec. He happened to be the head of an organization known as the Apostles of Infinite Love, a pseudo-Roman Catholic institution. Hon. members have all heard of the Apostles of Infinite Love. This gentleman was convicted of the abduction
of some of the children who were in his institution, and he was sentenced. He served his sentence, and a week or two ago he was released on parole, apparently on good behaviour. The fact is that he has not returned the children he abducted. He still has them in his so-called monastery at St. Jovite. He has supposedly atoned for his crime, but he has not restored the children.
This ludicrous situation makes a mockery of all law and all sense of justice. This man has been convicted. He has served his sentence. Legally he has atoned, but he still has the children, and he cannot be tried again for that offence. The system has now rewarded him because he cannot be tried again for that offence. How are we to get those children back?
When we have glaring examples like that of atonement without restitution, we reinforce all across society the belief that in many cases crime pays. It pays as long as one rides out the system. Is there not something in our legal system which says one has not atoned for one's crime until one restores what one has taken? How many cases are there in which individuals have been convicted of armed robbery, taken their loot and hidden it, ridden out their sentence and come back and lived off their loot? The famous train robbery in England is a case in point. One of the perpetrators has become a hero in England because he has been able to make a mockery of the so-called justice system. Why should we entrench in the proposed Young Offenders Act a concept which says a person can be convicted of a crime and atone for that crime by going through the penal system but that that person does not have to restore what he has taken? That is wrong. It is bad law. We ought not to let this go through third reading-not let it go through committee stage, let alone third reading, until we incorporate in this legislation the concept that one cannot atone unless one restores, and no crime has been atoned until there has been restitution.
These are two concepts that I believe are wanting in this legislation. I think that we would do an injustice to our young people if we presented to them a system which allows them to avoid facing the reality of life by escaping the reality of their behaviour and shunting that accountability on to the state. We are doing a disservice to parents by allowing them to shunt the responsibility for their children to the state. We are not teaching our young people the reality of life if we say that they can atone without having to restore. I think that is the rock bottom concept that we have to incorporate in this legislation before we give it third and final reading.


Gordon Edward Taylor: I would like to speak briefly on the young offenders bill, and particularly under five headings. I think the basis of the young offenders bill should be enshrined with the words "The objective to build and not to destroy".
I find that young people today who get their fun out of destroying things have made up their minds that they want to live that type of a life; and it is essential for them during their
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younger years, to learn the joy of building as opposed to whatever joy they get out of destroying.
The first item in this bill that appeals to me is that young persons should bear responsibility for the actions that they undertake. That has not been the case for a number of years. I remember a court case in the province of Alberta where a group of young people between the ages of 12 to 15 broke into a hardware store, took the paint and the brushes and painted everything, in the store. They made a terrific mess. They dumped paint all over the floor and all over the other items. When they came before the magistrate, he slapped them lightly on the wrist and said, "Now, you should know better than that. Go home and don't do it any more." Who bore all the expense? The couple who were operating that store were not young. They were barely making a living. They had something like $3,000 worth of damage. They, who had nothing whatsoever to do with the crime, had to pay the total cost.
I said at that time, and 1 say it again, that the court did those young people no favour whatever in letting them get away with the "fun". If they had been told by the court to go back and clean up that mess, at least it would have taught them the lesson that they should not have done it. But they were not required to pay, they were not required to do anything except listen to a little lecture from the magistrate, and one of them said afterwards, "I wish he hadn't talked so long. I wanted to go somewhere else."
1 think we have to instil in our young people the message that if they destroy, they must pay, if they cause damage to somebody else's property, they must pay. I cannot say it nearly as well as the hon. member who just sat down. If we do not do that, we encourage young people to continue a life of crime. That is what some of our laws and courts have been doing inadvertently, not deliberately.
I know of another case where a group of young teenagers, all under the age of 16, thought it was fun to remove a "bridge out" sign on a district road. They moved the "bridge out" sign and they burned it. That night a young married couple, who were, as a matter of fact, on their honeymoon, went along that road and, of course, there was no "bridge out" sign. They went into the ravine and both were killed. Someone said to me, "Those young people will feel remorse the rest of their lives." I do not know whether that type of remorse is worth it or will bring back any happiness to the loved ones of the couple who were killed inadvertently because someone committed a thoughtless act and destroyed a sign.
I want to emphasize that this entire act should be predicated upon the fact that we pay for our sins, and if we destroy someone else's property, we pay for it in one way or another. That brings me to the second point I want to make. The juvenile courts have been working hard to help young people. Do you know how many times some of these young people have appeared in the courts? Would you say five or ten? When a juvenile judge asked me, I said, "Six, seven." He said, "Would you believe it? The boy you saw in court today has been before this court 55 times." That boy laughs at the court.
Young Offenders Act
The court could not do anything except levy a fine which his parents glibly paid. They had lots of money.
That is the point I think my hon. friend from British Columbia was just making. That is encouraging a boy to be a criminal. He loses his respect for the courts. In this bill, at least, I see a number of items now which will permit the courts to be effective so that they will no longer become a laughing stock among those who apparently want to be criminals. It will certainly restore the dignity of the courts and will give our juvenile judges some authority and some options that they can use in dealing with this matter.
The next point I want to deal with is the causes. Why do young people get more fun out of destroying rather than building? Why do young people want to steal rather than earn their money? Why is it that two young boys may live in the same neighbourhood, in the same environment, yet one goes out and works after school and on Saturdays to make his money while the other one steals it? I think we have to analyse the reasons for the criminal act, for the misbehaviour, or whatever you want to call it.
I would like to call it six o'clock, Mr. Speaker, and continue this evening.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Blaker):: It being six o'clock, I do now leave the chair until eight o'clock this evening.
At six o'clock the House took recess.


[Stage Direction]
AFTER RECESS

The House resumed at 8 p.m.
Gordon Edward Taylor: Mr. Speaker, before continuing I would like to take this opportunity to welcome the hon. Solicitor General (Mr. Kaplan) into the House. We missed him badly this afternoon; it is nice to see him here this evening.
In my view the cornerstone of this bill should be to build human lives into something worth while, to take a piece of broken earthenware and make it into a vessel of substance, to make good citizens out of those who somehow or other got on the wrong track and, to put it in a nutshell, to encourage our youth to build, not to destroy.
Before adjourning this afternoon I was endeavouring to deal with some of the causes of youth offences. This bill should play a very important part in encouraging analysis of those young people who are starting off on a life of crime. When we talk about rehabilitation, there is no better time to start it than in their young years. We should not wait until people are 40, 50 or 60 years old and then try to use our prisons as centres of rehabilitation. When we try to analyse the causes of young people becoming offenders and coming into conflict with the law, it is impossible to say in a blanket manner what causes persons to go down the wrong path. Tonight I would like to suggest a few causes I have found in dealing with young people. If one finds the cause, then one has a much better

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chance to rehabilitate and to correct whatever is causing the difficulty.
One cause which I have found to be very high on the list was learning disabilities in school. For many, many years we did not realize that slow learners had a problem. As I heard some teachers say, we thought they were dumb or dull. I have heard some people say that they lacked initiative. But when one really gets down to the root cause and finds a slow learner, when one finds that a young person is not keeping up with his class, generally there is a very sound reason. Some people do not learn as rapidly as others. Boys and girls who go through school like to be thought well of by their peers. As a student and as a teacher, I found that analysing boys and girls to discover why they were not keeping up with their class work was an important job. When 1 found the cause, then generally I was able to help the young person. Sometimes I found they were simply slow learners; it was just as simple as that. They could not keep up with the regular lessons. I remember asking one boy who was having difficulty in grade five or six when I taught in a country school of 11 grades, "How come, John, you cannot keep up?" He said, "Well, I do not understand what you are saying." I said, "Why didn't you say so?" "I do not like the other kids to think I am dumb", he said. So I said to him, "How would you like to stay in for half an hour a couple of days a week after your classmates leave and we will go over the things that are bothering you?" "Oh, boy," he said, "that would be wonderful." By the time that lad reached grade 12, he was one of the top students in the school. We found out what the trouble was-John was a slow learner.
1 went through a correctional institution in Edmonton a few years ago and I checked the number of students who were there. It was my belief that at least 40 per cent of those yong people who had come into conflict with the law and who were in that institution were there because they either had a learning disability or were slow learners and they had never been diagnosed as such, or ever helped. The school system had failed those people. As a matter of fact, I saw a boy 14 years of age in that correctional institution with a book in front of him. I saw from the cover of the book that it was a detective story. I thought it strange that he should be reading a story of that kind during classroom hours. When I walked to the back of the room I saw that he was reading a grade three reader. He had covered the book with the jacket from a detective story so that he would not feel bad. He had never learned to read. It is no wonder that by the time he reached grade five or six people called him dull. He was not able to keep up with the other students in his class. He had not learned the fundamentals in grades one, two, three and four, so he became a drop-out. Then his only friends were those in a similar category who came into conflict with the law. That boy said he did not want to break the law but the only friends he had were criminals. All of this was because he was a slow learner, because the educational system had failed him.
I would ask the Solicitor General to inquire into the number of young people in our prisons who are there because they were
slow learners or who had a learning disability and who came into conflict with the law, not because they wanted to but because the school system had not taken the trouble to find out what was holding them back.
In the correctional institution in North Edmonton they were going right back to the grass roots. Boys from 14 to 17 years of age were learning how to read. Once they had learned how to read, a whole new world was opened up to them. One boy of 18 said to me that he had not realized before that it was so simple. He reached grade seven and he still could not read, so he dropped out of school.
I think we must analyse the reasons why people become criminals. Sometimes our system forces them into this way of life. As the hon. member from British Columbia who spoke before me outlined, it is sometimes due to parental attitudes. Most parents like to see their children do well; but many parents do not realize whether their children are slow learners, fast learners or somewhere in between. Some parents do not realize that their child has a hearing or sight disability which can hold him back to the point at which he can no longer catch up with his peers, so he becomes an outcast and he finds other friends.
A policeman in Edmonton told me about finding a 13-year-old girl on the streets of Edmonton at one o'clock in the morning. He asked her what she was doing there. She had no answer. He found out where she lived and he took her home. The girl's parents were asleep. After rousing them, the policeman said to the girl's father, "I found your daughter down on Jasper Avenue at one o'clock this morning." The father was angry and asked the policeman why he had not left his daughter there. "Why are you waking us up in the middle of the night?" he said. That kind of parent is making criminals out of his children. The policeman said that he felt terrible as a result of the father's response. He said that he was only trying to help the child but even her parents did not seem to care.
Perhaps the reason that some of our young people lose direction is that they have no home life to speak of, no father or mother to encourage them to do the right thing. They drift off to the only place where they can find some friendship. I think some of these children just make a mistake. I am sure every hon. member in the House can think back to the time when he was a youth-a time when we all make mistakes. If we had been picked up by the police every time we made a mistake and charged with a criminal offence in a court of law, maybe we would be in a penitentiary today instead of in the House of Commons. There are excellent people in our penitentiaries today who are there because of circumstances, because they made a mistake and everyone thought they were criminals.
Sometimes our police do not help matters either. I forwarded a letter to the Solicitor General recently about a group of excellent young people who were being hounded by police officers who thought they were doing their duty. I remember a boy who came to my boys' camp one year about whom my assistant said to me, "I don't think we should take this lad." I said to him, "Will the boy be having a holiday?" My assist-
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ant's reply was negative. I said, "Then we are taking him in. That is what the camp is for." When the boy got to camp I took him into my tent and said to him, "Bob, I am sure glad I have you in my tent." Bobby said, "You are?" I said, "I sure am!" By the end of the week that boy was an excellent camper.
1 said to him, "How come you are always getting into trouble in your town?" He said, "Every time someone breaks into a store or breaks a window, the police come to my house. What is the use of me trying to be good?" He said, "Out here people treat me well. That is why I did not break any rules. I do not like breaking rules, but 1 have been hounded by the police." I believe police officers are taking steps today to ensure that this type of situation does not happen. It is a responsibility they have. Because a boy makes one mistake is no reason for him to spend the rest of his life as a criminal.
Then there are the ones who decide, through laziness or something else, that they will spend their lives as criminals. They decide that they will get rich by stealing, they will take what other people earn. These are the most difficult people to deal with. They have made up their minds to pursue a life of crime. I think there must be a penalty imposed on these people so they will know that when they break a rule, they will be punished.
The next point I wish to make deals with restitution. I wish to congratulate the present Solicitor General and the former solicitor general for providing a number of alternatives to our courts for dealing with almost every type of youth who comes into conflict with the law. Restitution is one of the most effective measures provided. This afternoon I cited the case of young people who broke into a hardware store and threw paint all over the place. They received a slap on the wrist and were told to be good. Within the month some of those boys had taken a truck and run it through a wall. The court had done them no good by telling them that it would overlook the first offence because of their youth. As I said before, we do our young people no good whatsoever when they commit a crime like that if we simply say, "Don't do it again." In the first instance, the magistrate ordered the boys to go back and clean up the paint. If they had worked there for two or three days before this happened, I do not think they would have driven that truck through the wall. They should have had to rebuild that wall.
There are many ways of obtaining restitution, and it is one of the best ways of making people realize what they have done. 1 heard of a case in Edmonton a few years ago, of a young man from a large eastern city who had never seen a pig. One day when a policeman was going by, he called him a pig. He followed the policeman around, calling him a pig. Finally the policeman arrested that 16 or 17-year-old lad. He was tried in court and the magistrate asked him if he had ever seen a pig. He said he had seen pictures of them but had never seen a real one. The magistrate sentenced him to work on a pig farm in north Edmonton for one week and said that when the boy came back he would consider what to do then. The boy worked on the pig farm, and when he returned he told the magistrate
Young Offenders Act
that he would never call anyone a pig again. He had learned his lesson. Had he simply been given a fine, which his father might have paid, he would probably still be calling policeman pigs, and perhaps worse.
Restitution is an excellent thing. Most of us learned at home that when we did something wrong, we had to pay the price. We learned that we either had to take the punishment that was coming or make good the damage.
I grew up with a boy who broke a fence one time. He simply decided to tear down the fence. We did not go to court about it, but his father said that he must rebuild the fence. I went along with him, because I was with him when he did it, and I helped him build it just as good as it was before. Today that lad is a minister of the church. He knew that if he did something wrong, he would be punished.
I hope that through this bill we can make people realize that if they do something wrong, they will be punished. Let us have no bleeding hearts about that point, which is a very important one.
When the court decides to send an offender to an institution, we should be sure that it is an institution where they can learn to build and not to destroy. 1 had occasion to visit a young lad who was convicted of killing his stepfather because he had committed a heinous crime against the boy's sister. He was just over 16 at the time. I went to visit him in a federal penitentiary. I asked him how he was getting on, and he said, "I am learning how to become a criminal." I asked if the guards were not counteracting that. He said, "No, you are with the prisoners all the time. I have learned more about crime in the time that I have been in this institution than I ever dreamed I could. I do not want to be a criminal but they are making me a criminal." I was happy when he left that institution and I hope he is doing well now. He was not a criminal type. He had made a mistake and maybe there was some reason for that. But he was not learning much in that institution, except about crime.
In many of our prisons today there is idleness and no work. That is one of the reasons why many young people get into trouble today. They have nothing to do. I had plenty to do when I was growing up. I had to rush home from school every night during the winter months to haul coal or to chop wood in the summer. There was always lots to do. I envied the boys in the cities who had nothing to do. I do not envy them now, I feel sorry for them. If they had lived on a farm they would always have had something to do. The devil finds something for idle hands to do, which is not good.
We should provide the opportunity to inmates of our penitentiaries or correctional institutions to learn how to work. We should give them something worth while to do.
That is one point in favour of the Bowden Institution which the federal government now operates. Some time ago a boy came out of there who is now operating his own tinsmithing shop. He learned to be a tinsmith in the institution. Before that, he had no trade, nothing to live for. Now he is a good

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citizen, is married, and doing well in his business. The objective is to try to rehabilitate these people.
As one hon. member remarked earlier, the cornerstone of this bill should be to encourage young offenders to build, to turn from their criminal activities and become not only good citizens, but to learn how to enjoy life. They should learn how to attain happiness from helping others, not robbing them; they should learn how to attain happiness from helping others less fortunate, rather than trying to tear down lives that have been built up, or stealing from others. The cornerstone of this bill should be to build, not to destroy.


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Mr. Jim Hawkes (Calgary West):: Mr. Speaker, this has been a day of information for members of the House regarding juveniles in our society. It has been a day characterized by concern shown by members of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada in this House who have demonstrated throughout the debate their concern for the young people of Canada, as they have done in the past.
It has also been a day of surprises. Of the 282 members of the House, 147 sit on the Liberal benches. It would seem that those 147 have no interest in juveniles because the day has been characterized by an absence of speakers from that side. 1 wonder if they have lost interest because we are dealing with a population that does not vote. I find that so much of the government legislation that comes along is dedicated not to wisdom and not necessarily to what is good for all Canadians, but perhaps far too often is characterized by what might be seen as something positive in the way of garnering votes. I am particularly pleased that the sponsor of the bill, the Solicitor General of Canada (Mr. Kaplan), saw fit to attend for perhaps 20 minutes of the debate this evening. He was not present this afternoon and currently is not in the House. I hope he will come from behind the curtain or some back room and listen to our concerns about the legislation he has placed before us this evening.
I should like to remind hon. members who were not present earlier that we are currently debating an amendment to the motion of the Solicitor General. The amendment is proposed by a former solicitor general, the hon. member for Durham-Northumberland (Mr. Lawrence), and is seconded by the hon. member for Edmonton-Strathcona (Mr. Kilgour), members of the Conservative party. The amendment states very clearly and very succinctly that it is the opinion of those members of the House that this bill should not even go forward to committee for further study because in its basic principles, it is based on inequality. 1 should like to read that amendment so that we are all clear on what we are debating. The amendment reads:
That this House declines to give second reading to Bill C-61, an act respecting young offenders and to repeal the Juvenile Delinquents Act, because the bill rejects the fundamental principle of equal treatment of all persons before the law by specifying that the act will apply to different age groups in different provinces.
I find it somewhat surprising that an 88-page bill would be brought before this House after the months of debate we had on the Constitution of Canada. It violates what we have been told is one of the principles of the Liberal Party of Canada, which is the current governing party of Canada, that all Canadians everywhere in Canada should be treated equally. Perhaps that should not be surprising. The last day we sat in this chamber was April 23. That evening we voted on the Constitution of Canada. The government party opposite, aided and abetted by the New Democratic Party of Canada, and its members from Saskatchewan, voted in this House to say that all of us in western Canada, as a consequence of the votes on that Thursday evening, would have less protection in the Constitution of Canada than we had before those votes.
The people who live in Quebec and in Ontario, through their elected officials, have a veto on future constitutional change. They are entitled in perpetuity to the protection of the Canadian Constitution. Prior to that vote on April 23, those of us who live in provinces in western Canada could, under certain circumstances, combine with one other province to exercise the veto. We did not each have a veto in each of the four western provinces but one province could combine with one other province. Two provinces acting together could protect themselves from unwanted constitutional change. But on the night of April 23, the governing Liberal party, aided and abetted by the New Democratic Party, said that was too good, "we want you weaker than that." From that moment on, no one premier in western Canada could veto constitutional change to protect us from changes we do not want. Not even two premiers could do that. It will take three premiers from western Canada to equal one premier from the province of Ontario or one premier from the province of Quebec.
Then I look at the bill before us tonight. I have been sitting is this chamber all day wondering whether or not debating this bill is a waste of time. I am glad to see the Solicitor General has come back into the House for a few moments. He appeared before the constitutional committee. During those hearings we tried to find out what was going to happen when the new Constitution was brought in. I want to bring one clause of the Constitution to the attention of hon. members. It is clause 15(1). It reads:
Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law withouth discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.
I wish to emphasize the word "age" in that clause. Here I have before me an 88-page bill which says with crystal clarity that, depending on your age, you will not have equality before and under the law. I think a case can be made that a three-year-old requires a different response from society than perhaps even a six-year-old, and certainly somewhat different than that required for a sixteen-year-old.
1 find in this bill the concept of "your" protection, and I say to all of the young people-although I suspect very few are watching our proceedings on television this evening-that this government has brought forward a bill which states clearly that if you are 17 years of age, you will have a certain
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protection under the law in some provinces, in other provinces if you are 16 you will have that protection, and in still other provinces, if you are 15 years of age that protection will be afforded to you. Therefore, depending on where you live in this country, under the young offenders act, which will be a federal law, young people will be treated differently by the law.
I say to the young people, those perhaps who would like to break the law, that if this becomes the law in Canada and a person happens to live in Hull, he or she might be better off if that person came across the river to Ottawa. Likewise, if a person lives in Ottawa, the law might treat that person better if he or she crosses the river and goes to Hull. How does that jibe with the glowing statements we have heard in the last few months about the concern of Liberal party members for the rights and the equality of Canadians? We do not get it in terms of constitutional amendments as we lump ourselves together in provinces. We do not get it in terms of basic law as it affects the young people in this country. The government wants it different. Depending on the province in which a young person lives, he or she will be treated differently by the courts of Canada based on his or her age.
At the same time, I wonder whether it is all a giant public relations hoax because the majority opposite will force this Constitution on the country, if it possibly can. Does the government think that this act will be struck down because it violates the basic principles inherent in what has been called a charter of rights and freedoms? Then where will we be in this country if this particular act is, all of a sudden, declared illegal by the Supreme Court of Canada? Where will we be in terms of our ability as a nation to treat the young offenders of this country? That should give cause for concern to all members of this House who come here charged with the responsibility of making this a better nation and a better world for all of our people.
Why do we deliberately proceed to discuss an 88-page bill, to move it to committee, to call witnesses and to spend all of that time on a piece of legislation which may be declared ultra vires? If the Solicitor General were here and if he were in the mood, I would ask him-although I probably would not get an answer because I am a member of the opposition party- whether he has taken the trouble to submit this bill to justice department officials for a legal opinion on whether or not it will be ultra vires of the Constitution of Canada, assuming that the new Constitution were in place. I can guess that he has not done this. The reason I guess that is that the Minister of Justice (Mr. Chretien) himself, on many occasions in testimony before the constitutional committee, has said, "we will worry about the legislation which is on the books of this country, we will examine it for its legality, not before we pass the new Constitution, but after."
The provincial government of Quebec has paid some very skilled legal talent to examine legislation which exists in that province. These people were to advise the Quebec government on what would happen to legislation if the new Constitution were put in place. It was reported that at least 100 pieces of legislation would become illegal instantly. We have a federal
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government which seems determined to use its transitory majority to change this nation in a hurry in ways which will be unalterable in the future. The least we could have would be a statement from the Solicitor General that he has a solid legal opinion that this legislation, if passed in conjunction with the proposed Constitution act of 1981 will still be declared legal. If there is any probability, and I suggest there is, that it will be declared illegal, why should we in this House spend today, possibly tomorrow, and who knows how many more days in the House and in committee, examining a piece of legislation which will be declared by the Supreme Court of Canada to be beyond the competence of Parliament?
Through the Constitution act, 1981, we are saying that the Supreme Court, five out of nine judges chosen by the present Prime Minister (Mr. Trudeau) or a particular prime minister of the day, without public examination, will be able to tell the Parliament of Canada, the duly elected people of this country, what they can legislate and what they cannot. That is the fundamental revolution that will take place. I suggest it has an impact on this piece of legislation.
Before we debate this much longer, I ask the Solicitor General to tell us clearly and unequivocally whether he has sought and obtained a legal opinion on whether this legislation will be declared ultra vires of the Constitution act, 1981. If he is not prepared to do that, I suggest to the government House leader that there would be considerable wisdom in arranging for this House of Commons a different order of business until that legal opinion has been sought. There is not much point spending the time of the members of this House and the tax dollars of Canadians debating a piece of legislation which is very likely to be declared ultra vires.
Any piece of legislation which takes us into the area of criminal law deserves more careful examination by the duly elected members of the House of Commons than most other pieces of legislation because it speaks of society's determination to protect itself. At the same time it speaks of society's determination to use its collective power to deprive individuals of their freedom. For those of us who have reached this point in our lives without having run afoul of the law or being charged with any criminal offence, this may seem to be distant. However, we all read in the newspapers from time to time about a miscarriage of justice where an individual has been charged, convicted and sentenced for a crime he or she did not commit.
We have an obligation to move slowly and carefully on the specifics of such a piece of legislation because we are trying to balance two very difficult principles at the same time: the protection of society from the wilful and damaging acts of an individual or groups of individuals, and at the same time the protection of the kinds of freedoms on which all of us in a society like ours place great value.
With the passage of time, our society has adopted a third principle dealing with rehabilitation. There is a concern for whoever is charged with breaking our laws and damaging our

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Young Offenders Act
society. We treat them in a manner calculated with the best wisdom we have to ensure they do not repeat that offence. The process of involving them with our police and judiciary is calculated to produce a situation where people change from violating our group mores or standards to making a positive contribution. That is an important third element in our system.
As I read this bill, I find a fair amount of creativity, which runs counter to our historic patterns in the Juvenile Deliquents Act, which will be helpful in meeting the goal of rehabilitation. A number of members have spoken about restitution. For example, if a young offender has broken the law by defacing a building, the likelihood of his continuing that kind of pattern might be reduced if he is forced into a situation where he has to clean the building, carrying out the hard physical labour in order to put it back to the state in which he found it. Research evidence shows that kind of sentencing and treatment has a positive effect. Some parts of this bill will make that kind of treatment more likely and, therefore, recidivism less likely.
1 am bothered about the other two aspects: protection of society and protection of the individual. This is not the proper time or place to deal with the bill in its entirety. We cannot in a speech in the House of Commons deal with the specifics of an 88-page bill. The purpose of a second reading debate is to deal with the bill's principles.
The first principle identified in our amendment which I find bothersome is that the bill clearly specifies that Canadians who live in different provinces will be treated differently under the law. That is unacceptable. Whether you live in Newfoundland, Quebec or Alberta, a federal court comes under federal jurisdiction. All Canadians should be treated equally and not differently depending on the province in which they live. On the basis of that fundamental principle, this legislation should be rejected until that principle is attended to and brought back for our consideration.
I know that time is running along, but I would like to deal with two or three other issues in clause 3, the declaration of principle. I wish to quote clause 3(6):
Young persons who commit offences require supervision, discipline and control, but, because of their state of dependency and level of development and maturity, they also have special needs and require guidance and assistance;
Where is the empirical, scientific justification for that statement of principle? Which 17-year-old youngsters require supervision, all those who break the law? What positive consequence is inherent in the concept of supervision? What do we mean by that? In societal terms it means parole officers. Historically that has been our method of supervision. Has it worked? I suggest the scientific evidence would indicate that supervision is not necessarily the answer for all these young offenders. Do they all need discipline and control? Are they all in a state of dependence?
I have just returned from a visit to some other cultures and societies in the last couple of weeks where I observed first-hand 15 and 16-year-olds who were in the work force in apprenticeship programs. On the basis of my observation I would say
their maturity and lack of dependence was a great deal greater than some of the 30-year-olds 1 have run into in my lifetime.
Surely the guiding principle involved here is that we as a society when we encounter young offenders should operate on the principle that we study the individual case, the particular age and the particular state of maturity of that individual and then attempt to design as well as we can a set of circumstances which will assist that individual in avoiding the commission of an offence in the future.
When we include a principle such as this, I wonder whether it will be possible for lawyers to argue in a court of law that particular decisions taken run counter to the principle of the proposed young offenders act. I also wonder why we have clause 3(c) which reads as follows:
Where it is not inconsistent with the protection of society, measures other than judicial proceedings under this act should be considered for dealing with young persons who have committed offences;
I wonder why we have judicial proceedings. As I sat on the committee on the Constitution I remember spending some days on the legal rights portion of that proposed measure. Those of us who are not lawyers, I think, all found it educational.
There are protections that come from a judicial system which do not come from other kinds of systems. I wonder why we are to have a principle in this proposed act which sort of invites the setting aside of judicial principle, and I wonder whether that will be used too frequently to the detriment of the young people who come under the law according to this bill we are considering tonight.
Clause 3(d) states:
Young persons have rights and freedoms in their own right-
I wonder, after trying to go through the bill, where those special rights and freedoms are to be found. 1 can remember testimony, again before the committee on the Constitution, by those involved in the Year of the Child, members of committees from across this country, who said that if we are to have a bill of rights, we need a section which deals with children and young people. I know, standing here this evening in this House of Commons, that there is no such section.
I see in this bill a statement of the principle that because of age and the state of maturity there need to be special rights. It even says that young persons have special rights and freedoms, but I cannot find them in this bill and 1 suspect they should be there.
I could go on in detail about other clauses in this bill, but in the last two or three parts of the statement of principles we encounter the concept of the family, and we encounter, in a very minimal sort of way, the concept of parenthood. If the Solicitor General were to heed the wisdom of members of the Conservative party in this House and withdraw the bill for changes, I wonder if he would spend a little more time in developing a stronger section about both the rights of families in Canadian society and their responsibilities.
Certainly when we proposed that the whole concept of the family and its importance in our way of doing things be part of
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the Canadian Constitution, that concept was rejected by the New Democratic Party and by the Liberal party. They do not believe that the family has any place in the Constitution of Canada. If they are not willing to have that concept of family enshrined in the Constitution of Canada and they do not think it is important in that measure, perhaps at least they could deal with it in a little stronger way in relation to the importance of the family and parents to young offenders and their relationship to young offenders. I suggest to the Solicitor General, members of cabinet and, hopefully, to the odd backbencher who might somehow get the courage to stand up and speak on this bill, that they consider strengthening that portion of this measure, and draw perhaps a somewhat clearer line, not just about the rights of families and the rights of parenting, but the obligations of families and parents. They have certainly specified with some degree of clarity the right of state over the rights of the individual. Perhaps they could balance it a little bit by strengthening the clauses dealing with the issues I have just mentioned.
In closing, Mr. Speaker, may I once again reiterate the fact that members of our party, the former solicitor general of Canada being the mover, have recommended that this House not give this bill second reading and reference to the committee. In effect, we are inviting the Solicitor General to withdraw it for more work. The reason for that recommendation is that the bill does not recognize the fundamental principle that all Canadians should be treated equally under the law. This is an 88-page bill deliberately dedicated to the production of inequality under the law. Therefore, in principle it is unsound, unCanadian and should be withdrawn.


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Mr. Robert Wenman (Fraser Valley West):: Mr. Speaker, I should like to begin tonight by commending the minister for bringing this measure forward. In doing so, I think he has indicated both respect and sincerity in his intent. I think it is important legislation to Canada and Canada's young people today.
The Solicitor General (Mr. Kaplan) correctly identified the objectives and purposes of this measure when he stated in the opening that:
They must strike a balance between helping young offenders and protecting society from harmful conduct. They must safeguard the rights of young people in conflict with the law, while discouraging offenders from committing further crimes.
I think that is fairly well stated. If I were to change one thing in those objectives, it is the tone which I find throughout Canadian law; we always talk in the third person instead of in the first person. We always talk about what "they" must do. I would like to see the word "they" corrected in an attitudinal sense to say instead "we" must strike a balance and "we" must safeguard because we must take that "we" even beyond ourselves as legislators and look at it as "we" the legislators, "we" the parents, "we" the community and "we" Canadians, not just the great "they" as in "other people" or some professional "they" who will solve our problems with juveniles.
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In his conclusion, the Solicitor General says:
It is the various professionals, such as family and youth court judges, lawyers, police officers, welfare officers and social workers who are responsible to make the system work.
The Solicitor General is wrong here. The age of specialization in which the professional has all the answers-just give him the problem, and it will be solved-is over. That has not worked. Our statistics show that. The professionals do not have all the answers. That has not worked.
The Solicitor General is responsible to make it work, not the professionals. Not only is the Solicitor General responsible, but I am also responsible. I am responsible to make it work. All members of the Canadian community are responsible to make it work, and there should be that emphasis that it is about time all of us took our responsibility instead of trying to pass off responsibility for juvenile delinquency or adolescent delinquency. Instead, we should say we will all take our responsibility when and where we find it.
Not only do we refer to the great "they" in referring to those who will solve our problems, but we also refer to the other "they" all too often. The second great "they" is the juvenile offenders. No longer will a juvenile offender be an offender when we accept the great "they" offenders back as part of all of us, because that is where they came from. They came from the "we", the "us" sector, and they became the "they". They became the rejections from our homes, from our schools and from our communities and, most important of all, they became the rejections from their peer groupings, a most important factor among young people of this age. We need to recognize that it is not just they who have needs. The great "they" have the same needs we have. We, like they, all need acceptance and acknowledgement through positive achievement. We need open and honest relationships. We need correction without overcorrection. We need respect and love.
Who are the great "theys" we are talking about here tonight? Who are these "theys", these juvenile delinquents? Let us identify them a little more closely. Before this act is passed, the offenders are those between 7 and 18 years of age. After we pass this act, we are talking only about a small part of that child-adult grouping, and I refer specifically now to 12 to 17-year-olds. That is narrowing it to a very particular group called adolescents. We are now talking about adolescent offenders.
Who and where are these adolescent offenders? We can even narrow it a little more than that. Statistics show that the offenders to whom we refer specifically within that 12 to 17-year-old grouping are 14 and 15 years old. Fifty-six per cent of juvenile or adolescent crime is committed by 14 and 15-year-olds specifically. We can narrow that even further and find that the peak among young men is in the fifteenth year. Eighty-six per cent of offences are committed by young men. The stereotype or prototype is specifically a 15-year-old male. Why do 14 and 15-year-olds get into so much trouble?

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Before I came here tonight I posed the very same question to the 14 and 15-year-olds in my house. I asked my daughter Jill and my son Kiven and their two friends, Glenn and Stewart, why 14 and 15-year-olds get into so much trouble. Their answers were indeed very revealing. In fact, I think they are the answers as to why young people get into trouble. They said young people get into trouble because they lack attention. They said young people get into trouble to try to gain some acceptance. They said they get into trouble because of family breakdowns and family problems and because they want to follow in their friends' footsteps. Their friends are doing it, so they want to do it too. They do it just for kicks or to add some excitement to their lives. They do it to be "cool". Above all they must be cool. They do it because they are bored. In a society which has given them everything, they are bored. There is a lack of direction. I think these young people have very well identified why young people get into trouble.
I spoke with a judge from the United States about this bill. He gave me some interesting statistics. He said that one of the problems he is facing is the family break-up situation. He said that in the state of Oregon where he is a judge, 81 per cent of marriages end in divorce. That is four out of five marriages. He gave another interesting statistic about family relationships as the basic problem, or one of the basic problems, causing adolescents to be brought before the law. He went around to the prisons to which he had sentenced young people and did a personal survey upon which he calculated statistics. He asked two questions. The first question he asked those young people was, "Who do you care about in your family and who do you think might care about you?" It was interesting that 82 per cent responded that either mother or sister loved or cared. The next question was, "Who do you hate in your family"? Ninety per cent said they hated their fathers. I only point this out to indicate the importance of the family structure, and that family structure has to be taken into account in any rehabilitative or corrective format because it is here that we have the greatest possibility for correction, for rehabilitation, and for reacceptance. We can perhaps reaccept a young person into a group home or a foster home, we can perhaps reaccept a young person into the school or into some community sports organization, but the ultimate success will depend on whether we can rehabilitate and get reacceptance by the family of that child. That is a critical area in any rehabilitation or reform.
Again, we can sit and list all the reasons why young people get into trouble. We all want to blame or list. We keep blaming. How many times have 1 heard the cycle of blame? Parents point their fingers at the teachers in the schools and say it is the teachers of the schools; and the teachers in the schools point the finger right back home. The police often say, "Why arrest them? The courts just release them on to the streets again, anyway." The courts say, "We do not make the law," and they blame the politicians; and the politicians blame everyone else. It is not a matter of blaming. It is, instead, a matter of accepting the responsibility and beginning to do something about it. I hope that this bill is the beginning of
acceptance of responsibility, and starting to point toward a program and policies which will work back toward acceptance and acknowledgement of young people through positive achievement.
I speak on this subject, not lightly, but with some experience, because, as a schoolteacher, I was given a group of 25 young people and told, "Do what you will with them. They are failures. They are 13 to 15. They are in Grade 8. They are not going anywhere." Some were slow, some had emotional problems, some were just cowering and frightened. But I did find, in working with these young people, everywhere I went, that they had one thing in common. They were all rejects. They were rejected by every element of our society.
If we are going to just reject them, they are going to react; and they will not accept rejection. They will fight that and they will gain acknowledgement. They will gain acceptance one way or another, and the only way that is open to them is negative because the positive ways have, in fact, been closed to them. Those routes have been closed. Many hon. members who have teenaged children can watch this rejection by the schools and by the society. It happens at 14. It happens at 15. Young people are suddenly confronted with the reality that a door is closing. We must end that rejection and turn it into reacceptance and reintegration.
We need to establish community service programs and restitution agreements. We need a sense of responsibility. 1 again refer to a section of the Solicitor General's report. He promises that this program is going to develop and that this act, policy or legislation will somehow provide community service programs and restitution agreements. He recognizes that the courts have worked in this direction and that by doing this we will establish a sense of responsibility, and opportunity to repay, and self-respect and self-esteem. Reacceptance amongst peers, schools, community and family are also factors which will have to be included.
When I was a member of the legislature, in the first year that I was elected I travelled to all of the correctional institutions in the province of British Columbia. I read about an idea called "youth juries". This was an idea of getting peer group interaction. The youth jury, in fact, would sit and judge with their peers and then perhaps call for community restitution. Then, following community restitution, hopefully this same peer group of young people would reaccept or take some responsibility to bring the young person back into their group. The kinsmen group or the Kiwanis, or whatever, would run some night programs, sports programs, and things like this, to try to find an opportunity for young people to achieve and to gain some recognition, following which they would move back into the schools and into the community.
As a result of representations, such an experiment was tried in my community. It really worked quite well to a point where it broke down in that people were not willing to carry it through. They would go as far as setting up the court and making the judgments, but they would not carry through on the reacceptance back into the community. However, this
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youth jury idea was tried in British Columbia and I think it has been tried elsewhere.
I think the idea of community service programs, restitution, accountability, are important factors, and I am glad to see that there will be some flexibility in the program to carry out these kinds of experiments. That is, in fact, what they are: experiments. But we need to experiment because we need alternatives in our programs. We cannot really blame the judge if he has only two or three choices. If all he can do is sentence the young person to jail or release him, we cannot expect the court action, the rehabilitation, to have much effect, because just to release a person or just to send him to jail is not the answer and does not provide enough alternatives.
We need alternatives which include strengthening our foster families and homes. We can do that federally. We can say that it is the provincial government, but it is not necessarily the provincial government. There is a substantial number of tax incentives which might get people from other areas, other families, and other types of families interested. There are incentives which could be provided to perhaps produce more and stronger family groupings. We need group homes and we need community support groups. I will be interested to see what the minister has to say about these kinds of programs, for which, he says in his booklet here, the federal government takes responsibility.
There are some specific concerns about this bill which I do want to mention. I do have concern relating to youth court records. It is fine to say that the court record will be destroyed; but in this day and age of modern science the court record is only one small part of the record of that young person. The more blatant and difficult one is found in computer records, because a young person can be picked up, charged, fingerprinted and photographed, if he is to be treated like an adult, and only then the charge is dropped. But the information, just that he was charged and the charge was dropped, is still in the computer, a computer whose access and interconnection is highly questionable in today's era of public information.
So my concern is that when we are talking about records, we are not just talking about court records, we are not just talking about a criminal record filed here in Ottawa. We are talking about all records, including interconnected computer records which relate not only to charges which were followed through, but, in fact, all charges which relate to young people who may have been accused wrongly or may have been treated unfairly by an unfair conviction which has been followed through.
As far as public hearings are concerned, one of the good things about youth juries, it was said, was that if there was public understanding, part of the punishment and rehabilitation was, in fact, a form of guilt, public humiliation and shame. That is what this part of the legislation implies; this open public hearing concept somehow implies public punishment. I am not sure it is what we want for two reasons. The first reason is that when we talk about a 14 or 15-year-old adolescent who will be reaccepted in the community, the reacceptance is made too difficult by punishing him publicly,
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by holding him up to ridicule and exposure. It may not work; I urge caution.
On the other side of the coin, many young people seeking negative attention commit crimes for attention. When he is punished in public, he kind of likes it because he gets a lot of attention. I am concerned about these public hearings or these court hearings. When these hearings are held in private, there is a better opportunity for rehabilitation than when public ridicule and scorn is heaped on a 15-year-old. They will get it any way; they will get it in school and they will get it in the community. To play with it in the newspapers and to play with it in public by letting people sit in who are not involved needs rethinking.
As far as fingerprints and photographs are concerned, I would have very grave concern if my child were picked up by the police for whatever reason, taken to the police station, charged rightly or wrongly, fingerprinted and photographed. Parental responsibility is accepted when the juvenile is taken in, certainly there should be a protection whereby no fingerprints or photographs are taken without parental consent and knowledge.
An hon. Member; It is absent in the bill.


Robert Lloyd Wenman: It is absent in the bill. It indicates that we will treat them like adults. We must break it down right to our own children. Somehow when we talk about "they", we talk about someone else's child. But when we legislate we must legislate for everyone's child as well as our own. We must take that into consideration. I hope someone is listening. Whoever that is, I ask them to reconsider the section on fingerprints and photographs.
Another section which gives me concern is the one on flexible sentencing, that somehow we will make it more uniform or more rigid. I am not sure that is correct. Surely the objective is to rehabilitate and return a 15-year-old to society. We must have the maximum flexibility to judge that young person as he matures. This ties in with the difficulty of putting a maximum age on determining whether a person is a juvenile. The 14, 15, 16, and 17-year-old grouping is a difficult one. Which child is an adult? Is it the child who has survived out in the world by himself for two years? Is he more responsible than a child coming from a highly protected home who is physically and mentally immature or somewhat physically and mentally slow? When does one become a mature adult? I wish we could see, on this upper maximum age, some way to determine whether a child is a child, whether or not he is responsible. We should almost leave that to the judgment of the courts. I know it cannot be done, I know the flexibility is not there. It is moving toward rigidity, and I am concerned about moving toward rigidity.
At page 19 of this bill it is indicated that the Government of Canada is responsible for programs developed to meet young offenders' needs. I want to be very clear about this because usually we hear governments saying that they are not respon-

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sible. It is hard to define responsibility, but the federal government has committed itself to programs in this bill. That must be the meat of this legislation.
It is nice to tidy up things, but in fact the programs developed to meet the needs of young offenders are the test. The minister's ability to define the needs and the programs of young offenders will be the measure that determines whether or not this bill represents a significant step, as the minister indicated in his response. The significance is found in the one sentence to which I have referred. I challenge the minister to define that significance for us.
There are many things this bill will not do. This bill will not change the economic conditions of inflation and high interest which forces two parents to carry on two full-time jobs, or perhaps three, just to survive or meet their basic requirements of food and shelter. It will not change the social disadvantage of economic privation; it will not change that. This bill will not solve youth unemployment, nor will it solve the social and negative results of the drug and alcohol symptoms of the turned-off youth in our society. It will not solve those problems. The attitudes of this bill must be a larger part of every piece of legislation which passes the House of Commons. We should not be discussing only the effects of adolescent crime at this time. When we are discussing inflation and high interest rates, we should be reminded that there is a relationship to youth problems. When we are discussing a bill of rights in the House of Commons, we should be recognizing the value of the family relationship. I am disappointed that we did not recognize the importance of the family in our Constitution. The family must be made strong so that young people, the adolescents about whom we are talking, can find a way back into their families. We need to show our intention, that we understand it by mentioning it in our Constitution. We need to recognize that materialistic values must be redefined or reunderstood. Perhaps it is more important to have a little less materially but to have one parent in the home. It is important to have a father in the home. There is an attitude in society that we all go out to work in the morning and we come home to rest. When we come to rest, our family is there, our young people are there. It should be the other way around. We should go out to get a job, to earn a living in order to build our families, and we should come home to work with our young people and to spend time with them. What a hypocrite I am to stand here at 9.30 at night saying that we should spend more time with our families. I stand on the floor of the House on my son's birthday. My wife had to go out to a PTA meeting-and here I am. We must begin to work with our families in order to strengthen them, to strengthen our values and to uphold those which are right and sound. They are the value of the family, our spiritual values, our societal values, the values of work, achievement and recognition and acknowledgement of those achievements, and the heritage of our country. All these values must be upheld in everything we do in this House of Commons and in the way in which we live.


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Robert Lloyd Wenman: Mr. Speaker, when we speak about this bill, it sometimes seems that it is not of too much significance. Surely if we look at it carefully we will see that it is, in fact, the very core. It is where we see reflected all the things which are wrong with our society, in the abuses and neglect which we show to our young people. I think we can create this 15-year-old boy that we are talking about now. This 15-year-old boy needs a time and a place, a time to achieve and a time to be recognized. Can we create that society? I hope we can.


Mr. Albert Cooper (Peace River):: Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to address a matter that really should have been dealt with a long time before I was elected to this House. Although I am thankful for the opportunity to take part in this debate, it seems to me that the opportunity should not have been accorded due to the fact that this piece of legislation should have been introduced and passed many years ago. Yet, I must express my surprise at the Solicitor General's comments as to the amount of discussion which should be afforded to this bill by the members of this chamber. When he introduced this bill for second reading on April 15 of this year, the Solicitor General (Mr. Kaplan) said:
-I think a relatively short period of time should be devoted to second reading-
Obviously, his reason for making that suggestion is so that the bill may proceed to committee where full discussion should take place. I believe this is a bill of great importance, not only to the people of my constituency but to the entire population of Canada. Therefore I hope that the Solicitor General will forgive me for delaying somewhat the referral of this bill to committee in order that I may let my views be heard in this chamber.
As I have already stated, this legislation is long overdue. As the Solicitor General indicated in his remarks on April 15, there have been many previous ministers responsible who have made an attempt to introduce such legislation. Undoubtedly the Solicitor General's predecessor, the hon. member for Dur-ham-Northumberland (Mr. Lawrence), would have done so himself had it not been for the fact that the Liberal government, in co-operation with the New Democratic Party, decided to change the direction of Canada and push us all down an economic spout and defeat the previous administration. No doubt the present Solicitor General has been itching for an opportunity to introduce this bill for quite a while, but he has not had the opportunity to do so due to his leader's preoccupation with the Constitution and getting it through Parliament.
When I say that this bill is long overdue, I have in mind the comments of the hon. member for Notre-Dame-de-Grace (Mr. Allmand) when he was solicitor general. On December 18, 1974, as reported on page 2363 of Hansard, the then solicitor general, in response to a question from my colleague, the Conservative member for Surrey-White Rock-North Delta (Mr. Friesen), said:
We hope to have a draft bill and a white paper prepared for early spring.
Unfortunately, the House never saw that draft. It did not see a draft in the spring of 1975 or in the spring of 1976. Finally, in the spring of 1977 a sort of draft bill was intro-

May 12, 1981
duced by the then solicitor general, who now sits as the Secretary of State and Minister of Communications (Mr. Fox). On March 21, 1977, the then solicitor general introduced a paper entitled "Highlights of the Proposed New Legislation for Young Offenders." Many of the members on this side of the House, such as the former member for Calgary North, Mr. Eldon Woolliams, were great proponents of the young offenders legislation. They believed that the time had finally come. A week after that paper was tabled, a series of meetings began between federal and provincial representatives to hammer out the consensus needed to ensure that the enactment of such legislation would, in fact, meet the desired goals. But that proposal did not quite get to see the light of day.
It can be seen that as far back as 1967, when a bill was brought before this House dealing with the antiquated star chamber attitude of the Juvenile Delinquents Act, right up to the present time we have discussed in this place over and over the fact that the present act should be changed.
I sincerely hope that this bill will not meet the same fate as previous ones. We can see why the Solicitor General might be a bit worried and why he might suggest that we get on with it and refer this matter to committee. Generally, we on this side of the House can agree with him. We understand the need to accomplish the passage of this legislation. But we still believe that this bill is not perfect. Yet it is still a good piece of legislation. This is certainly not surprising in light of the fact that the present Solicitor General had the hard work and expertise of his predecessor to draw from, along with many other solicitors general from previous years. I do not mean to take anything away from the present Solicitor General in saying that.
I would now like to turn to the contents of the bill which, as I have stated, has many substantive changes within its pages which are badly needed. In Bill C-61 we see that the over-all philosophy has shifted from one of parental responsibility in the Juvenile Delinquents Act to the more acceptable and practical approach of a youth being held responsible to some degree for his actions. This is the same philosophy which was adopted by the hon. member for Durham-Northumberland when he was solicitor general. It is also the same approach as put forward by the ministerial proposals of 1977. This is described in section 3(1) of the bill which states:
It is hereby recognized and declared that
(a)	while young persons should not in all instances be held accountable in the same manner or suffer the same consequences for their behaviour as adults, young persons who commit offences should nonetheless bear responsibility for their contraventions and society must be afforded the necessary protection from illegal behaviour;
At the same time this bill addresses the adult, which I think is significant and very important. Section 10 (3) states:
A parent who is ordered to attend a youth court pursuant to subsection (I) and who fails without reasonable excuse, the proof of which lies on that parent, to comply with the order
(a)	is guilty of contempt of court;
(b)	may be dealt with summarily by the court; and
(c)	is liable to the punishment provided for in the Criminal Code-
Young Offenders Act
We can see that the bill begins to address the responsibility of the young person, as well as the responsibility of the adult.
There is no problem for members on this side with the minimum age under which a youth may be prosecuted under the act. As we all know, the present statute holds that a seven-year-old can be prosecuted. The bill before us changes the minimum age to 12 years old. The limit of 12 years is certainly a reasonable one and one which has found agreement on all sides of the House, as well as in the provinces. However, where we do get into difficulty is where the maximum age is concerned. This is due to provincial inconsistencies. It was the desire of my party to have a uniform maximum age, that age being one on which both the federal and provincial governments could come to an agreement. That was our position, and it is still my hope, Mr. Speaker, that this government can garner an agreement from the provinces in order that such uniformity can be achieved. This is the entire reason for the amendment put forward by my colleagues, the hon. member for Durham-Northumberland and the hon. member for Edmonton-Stratchcona (Mr. Kilgour).
I would also like to draw attention to the legal and other rights which will be granted to young offenders through this legislation. Such rights are a necessity for this to be a meaningful piece of legislation. I am glad that they are included.
Mr. Speaker, I could go on at length about the good points of this bill, for there are many. However, I feel that there are other aspects that should be mentioned at some point in this debate, aspects which are not really touched on in the bill and which could therefore easily go unnoticed, both in this chamber and at the committee stage.
What I would like to speak to now are the rehabilitative aspects of the bill. It has been said many times in this House that our greatest resource in this country is not our oil and gas, nor is it our forests and fisheries. Our greatest resource is neither a vegetable nor a mineral. It is our children. That is where our future lies. With that in mind it should be clear that a good deal of emphasis should be placed on the future path of our children. This bill certainly goes a long way in improving the prospects of delinquents, but we must ask if it goes far enough.
Surely one of the reasons we have had a separate piece of legislation for offenders against the law who are not adults is that we desire to make sure that the young offender does not mature into an adult offender.
We can look at this bill and see that the legislation does attempt to ensure that a life of crime will not continue. This is evident when we look at the dispositions available at the court upon conviction. They range from an absolute discharge to such things as a $1,000 fine; restitution and compensation orders; getting the offender involved in community service; having the offender compensate the victim; probationary periods of up to two years; custody of up to two years; ancillary conditions, and combinations of all of these.

May 12, 1981
Young Offenders Act
I was very fortunate when I attended college in Minnesota that the professor of one of my classes was the head of Minnesota corrections. In dealing with him and working with him I was very fortunate to have an opportunity to work on a movie on the juvenile institutions of Minnesota.
One of the things brought out in that work very clearly and profoundly was the need for more than just institutions. We saw the whole gamut, from the bars and unbreakable glass right through to the pretty colours, plexiglass and nice looking buildings, but in fact that is not where the answer lies.
What really worries me is that not enough will be done to ensure that an offender will not return to his or her old ways. I am hopeful that this topic will see much discussion in the committee stage, and I hope that such discussions will not be limited to just the items which are covered by the bill. For example, I point to the rapid rate at which juvenile offences are accelerating in the middle-class strata. Not long ago there were many who believed that the rate of juvenile delinquency was a problem only in poverty-stricken homes. I do believe that is the case, Mr. Speaker. In fact, Mr. Marc Leblanc not long ago conducted a study to determine whether delinquency, defined as law-violating behaviour, is distributed randomly throughout the various economic strata. He states as follows:
-It is interesting to note that the adolescent from the upper class milieu commits as many delinquent acts as the adolescent from the working class milieu.
He continues and concludes:
Economic development and a rise in the standard of living do not seem to reduce delinquency. Poverty and posterity alike seem to produce the same effect.
In his essay entitled "Middle Class Delinquency", Mr. Leblanc also states:
-Observation indicates that the highest rate of delinquency exists in the most affluent countries.
Obviously, Mr. Speaker, our problem does not stem from the economic situation; it comes from something more serious, more rooted, something to which we must give more thought.
One of the things that society and we as individuals must address is the whole matter of the divorce rate, and stress on the family. What is happening? Our family unit is breaking down. The divorce rate is climbing. Is it any wonder that those kids lack a responsible adult model to follow? Does that in itself not create a lot of problems that result in an increase in juvenile delinquency?
If it is not an economic problem, then we should be looking at other areas, not only as legislators but as individuals and family people ourselves.
I am trying to point out that as an affluent nation, we can expect to have an increase in juvenile offences as our level of affluence rises. This means that we will have more and more children who will have to be watched through the legislation which is before us today. It means that the young offenders' court system will have a greater burden to carry in the future. Yet, nowhere do I see any indication that the facilities will be provided to ensure that the young offender will have the opportunity to be rehabilitiated before it is too late.
In the same context, I should like to point to another danger. This has to do with the provisions in the bill for commital and custody. We see that the youth court will retain jurisdiction over the offender until the sentence is pronounced, at which time the provincial director will decide on the place and level of custody. It is extremely crucial to have adequate facilities available for young offenders where they will not be exposed to criminal methods.
If a province is unable to handle its young offenders, that is, if a province is unable to provide an institution where a youth offender is placed in a hospitable surrounding, where will that offender be placed? What kind of institution will that young man or woman be sent to? If we look at the reform schools which presently house many of the offenders under the Juvenile Delinquents Act, we can see that they are certainly not the type of places that are totally conducive to reform. Albeit the facilities are certainly better now than they were 20 or 30 years ago, I find it hard to believe that they are good for the offender.
As stated in the principle of the bill, society must be protected. We must ask ourselves: at what cost should society protect itself? Should we begin to upgrade and improve the youth detainment facilities across the country, or should we be content with the present facilities and cross our fingers in the hope that the 14-year-old B and E artist will somehow see the light through the barred windows of his reformatory dorm?
As I mentioned earlier, when studying in Minnesota I had an opportunity to study a novel experiment being carried out in Europe which had some merit and which I think we should be examining in Canada. A widow in a community would be given a very small home and a small group of juvenile delinquents. She would also be given a very small amount of financial assistance, just enough to allow the group to feed and clothe themselves. It left them with a certain amount of financial need. As a result, those kids were expected to contribute to the financial needs of the home. The impact was phenomenal and the results were tremendous. The recidivism amongst those kids was almost zero.
In his essay, "Learning Technical Skills", Peter Letkemen gives a detailed account of the effects of reform institutions on the young offender. Mr. Letkemen points out that in most cases a person does not commit crime as an adult after a period of normal middle-class life, but that early delinquency "does seem to be a prerequisite for the adult criminal career".
Mr. Letkemen shows through numerous case studies how the hardened con began his career by stealing hub caps for which he was sentenced to a period of correctional rehabilitation in a reform school or similar institution. Time and again the cases show that in most instances the offender was actually educated in those institutions on how to become a successful criminal; hence the title that Mr. Letkemen uses, "Learning Technical Skills" is really a tongue-in-cheek title. In fact, those technical skills are criminal skills, skills that we do not want our young people to learn, skills that we are trying to do away with. In fact, the institution is a university for that kind of learning program.
May 12, 1981

I should like to read a few passages from this work which illustrate what I am trying to say. He writes:
Delinquency is also associated with the reformatory experience, which seems to be a first formal step in the direction of the criminal career.
Not only does it segregate the delinquent from his non-delinquent peers, but reformatory conversation as my respondent's comments indicate, centres around crime, perhaps even more than in jails and penitentiaries.
In other words, the point of interest for any debate seems to be crime. Mr. Letkemen goes into an actual conversation he had with one of his cases, as follows:
He mentions that he worked in a factory for three years and did part-time stealing on the side. He started using drugs and was arrested for illegal possession of narcotics and sentenced to six months in a reformatory, and in there he felt his criminal education began.
The convict then says:
And I went to a reformatory and in there I would say my criminal education began. In the shop that I was working at, that is, in the reformatory, I got talking to one guy about laying notes. And he showed me a couple of ways of laying notes, and explained to me how lucrative it could be. And various other ways of B and E-
We can see that in many cases reformatories are nothing more than educational institutions, promoting an education and giving a degree in something that our society and our legislation is trying to eradicate.
Perhaps those remarks would be more suitable in a debate on penitentiary reform. But I want to point out to this House that this is a very difficult aspect of the revision of the antiquated Juvenile Delinquents Act. It is important to bear in mind that the protection of society from a juvenile offender is obviously in society's interests, but it is even more obviously important to ensure that the juvenile does not become an adult offender. One of the things I discovered in working on a movie in Minnesota was that the recidivism rate among juveniles was 63 per cent. That means, for every 100 young people who ended up in some kind of reformatory, 63 would return. Obviously that system is not working. What are we going to do in Canada? We have to address that problem. It is a fundamental element of this bill.
This legislation before us does much to improve our old ways. The dispositions of the court are many and varied in order that the judge may find the best method of protection and rehabilitation. The committal to and the release from custody portions of this legislation are certainly better than those we have presently. The review of dispositions will certainly go a long way in keeping a watchful eye over the offender. But I ask this House to place some emphasis on the fact that we must protect the young offender from the world of crime if we are to protect ourselves. I hope that when this bill reaches committee, members from all sides will look for ways in which this legislation might be improved in this area. For the thousands upon thousands of young people who know not what they are doing, we should explore this area meticulously before we enact this bill.
I mentioned briefly the amendment put forward by my colleagues. It is an important amendment. If I can refer very
Young Offenders Act
briefly to the bill, I think we can see why. If we look at clause 2 under the heading "Interpretation", we can see the definition of an adult. An adult means a person who is neither a young person nor a child. If we turn to the next page we can see "young person". The definition reads:
"young person'' means a person who is or, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, appears to be
(a)	twelve years of age or more, but
(b)	under eighteen years of age or, in a province in respect of which a proclamation has been issued under subsection (2), under sixteen or seventeen years, whichever age is specified by the proclamation,
and, where the context requires, includes any person who is charged under this act with having committed an offence while he was a young person or is found guilty of an offence under this act;
If we look at those two definitions, we find right off the bat that we have started off with an inconsistency. We have a problem. In one province a person is an adult at the age of 16 while in another province a person is an adult at the age of 18. In one province a person is still a kid at the age of 17, while in another province at age 16 the person is an adult.
The amendment which my colleagues have brought forward is one that I can support wholeheartedly. I think it is a great improvement to this bill. As I have said throughout my speech, there are many things that I find good about the bill, many things I can support, and I think when we look at this amendment and attach it to the bill, we will find that we are dealing with and improving a piece of legislation which is so necessary. This is very important legislation. It affects our real assets, our youth. It is a far-reaching bill with many implications. It has many things which all of us must be concerned about as parents, as members of society and as legislators. It is important. Therefore, I would like to conclude tonight by saying that I would encourage the Solicitor General to support my colleagues' amendment so we can see this legislation proceed and begin to address some of the problems we face in society today.


Walter David Baker: Mr. Speaker, may I say what a privilege it is to follow the hon. member for Peace River (Mr. Cooper) who is carrying on the tradition of distinguished representation in this House of Commons, which became part of a legend in this House when his predecessor from Peace River, Mr. Ged Baldwin, QC, served that constituency and served the system of law and justice with distinction for many years.
Although there is not very much time left this evening, I do want to address the Solicitor General (Mr. Kaplan) at the outset on a matter which has to do with the amendment moved by the hon. member for Durham-Northumberland (Mr. Lawrence), seconded by the hon. member for Edmonton-Strath-cona (Mr. Kilgour) as this debate began at about three o'clock this afternoon. Over the course of the day following the introduction of that amendment, there has not been a speaker from the government side to speak to the merits of the amendment. I am not telling tales out of school when I say that I had been part of the speaker's list much earlier than this tonight. I waited hoping there would be someone from the

May 12, 1981
Adjournment Debate
government side to address the question of the important amendment mentioned by the hon. member for Peace River which does go to the heart of one of the principles of the bill. Quite frankly, I had hoped that question could be addressed and we would know the disposition of the government on the matter long before this, particularly when it involves a reasoned amendment put forward by members of Parliament and accepted by the Chair. I am not suggesting that the Chair acted improperly. On the contrary, I think it acted quite properly because the process of reasoned amendments is a good thing. It brings a new connotation to the debate. It is incumbent then upon someone on behalf of the government to rise immediately and address the question. There will be other opportunities for the government to do so, but I think it is important that not a whole day of debate go by without a serious amendment being addressed by the government.
The amendment is important because the bill has a provision in it, as one hon. member put it earlier, that there can be a different style and basis for justice in the country applying to young people depending upon which area of the country they may come from. One might be a young offender and be treated as such in one way if he or she lives in the province of Quebec, as was explained earlier by an hon. member. If that same person committed the same offence in Ontario he or she could be treated completely differently. We have ten provinces in the country and that situation would occur and could recur in ten different ways.


Robert Phillip Kaplan: That is the way it is today.


Walter David Baker: The Solicitor General interjects and says that is the way it is today. He is right. That is the way it is today. That is one of the things wrong with the Juvenile Delinquents Act, it applies differently in different parts of Canada, and that is my point.
The point of the amendment is that if the Government of Canada has rejected checkerboards with respect to the Constitution of Canada as being improper because they set up different rights in different parts of Canada, then surely the same principle ought to be rejected in the young offenders act. That is the point of the amendment. It is an important point for young people. It is an important point for law enforcement officials, and members of Parliament ought not to sit through a whole day's debate while that point is not addressed by members of the government.
May 1 call it ten o'clock, Mr. Speaker?



PROCEEDINGS ON ADJOURNMENT MOTION

[Stage Direction]
A motion to adjourn the House under Standing Order 40 deemed to have been moved.

Mr. Bert Hargrave (Medicine Hat):: Mr. Speaker, the reference that I am about to discuss tonight goes back to last February 26, page 7700 of Hansard. On that occasion I had addressed a question to the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance (Mr. MacEachen) that was prompted by his speech to the Montreal Canadian Club on February 23.
In that speech the minister made a direct reference to the $4 billion western development fund, $2 billion of which was to be spent over the next three years as a catalyst for co-operative efforts with the government and people of western Canada to ensure that potential constraints to longer-term development such as, and this is a direct quote from that Montreal speech, "inadequate transportation services or insufficient water supplies, are addressed on a timely effective basis."
I then asked the minister to enlarge somewhat on that very specific reference to insufficient water supplies in the west. I am sure that my question, which was a very serious one, caught the minister off guard as he was only able to respond very generally and vaguely.
In my supplemental question, I was even more specific and asked if this water reference might relate to a much-needed long-range contingency drought policy which the west is dearly in need of, or could it refer to the challenge of interbasin water transfers from rivers in northern Canada to southern Canada, in the west.
1 also made a sincere and appropriate compliment about that high profile federal agency, the PFRA. I sincerely hope that the parliamentary secretary who is to respond does indeed address himself to my remarks and obvious concerns about prairie water supplies and the serious potential of drought across the southern prairies.
Since last February, the potential for another drought has worsened considerably, and I say that in spite of the first general rains of the spring that came only last week. Those rains were quite adequate along western Alberta, but tapered off to much less than adequate at the Alberta-Saskatchewan border. In my opinion there is sufficient soil moisture to start growth in both our grasslands and cultivated soils. This is an improvement over last year. However, the critical feature of this potential drought situation is the serious shortage of surface water across the southern parts of all three prairies provinces, and this for the second year in a row.
I am referring to an almost total absence of snow run-off water over that entire area. This, of course, was the inevitable result of no snow to melt in the spring, a situation which began on Christmas day and really developed into a winter drought for the balance of the entire winter. The net result was a complete lack of a spring flood for the thousands of small forage projects which produce most of the forage feed supplies for next winter, again for the second year in succession.
It is the western cattle industry that will once again face severe feed shortages, and this time with considerably less carry-over of hay from previous years as well as reduced grass
May 12, 1981

supplies. I must point out that spring and early summer rains can still come-I certainly hope they will-but, with very few exceptions, they will not make a hay crop.
The minister's Montreal speech sounded as if the government had some contingency plans for needed water development on the prairies. If this is so, why not tell us about it? If PFRA is to be given the green light on a new phase of water conservation and utilization, let us hear about it. We have already had six weeks of serious dust storms from Lethbridge to Dauphin, Manitoba.
In spite of all of our present-day sophisticated weather techniques, there is no reason why we cannot have another decade of drought like the dirty thirties of 50 years ago. Let us take another look at interbasin river transfers in the west from our northern streams to the Saskatchewan-Nelson basin system, but all in Canada. The time may not be too far off when our freshwater supplies will be more important than our diminishing petroleum supplies. I have already said the western cattle industry will bear the brunt of this potential drought, much more so than the prairie grain industry.
Is it not about time for the Minister of Finance (Mr. MacEachen) to support the cattlemen's income averaging trust account proposal? This is a carefully researched plan put forward initially by the cattlemen themselves with the support of many associations and provinces. It essentially provides for a beef cattle stabilization plan on an individual cattle producer basis. It has much to commend it. This is the type of year when that approach could be very helpful.
My main remarks tonight are directed to the reference of the Minister of Finance to water in that $4-billion contingency plan for the west. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.


Mr. Gerald Laniel (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Industry, Trade and Commerce):: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to reply to the hon. member in the absence and on behalf of the Minister of Regional Economic Expansion who left for Europe this evening. In order to give him some particulars on the point he brought up in his question of February 26 with regard to insufficient water supplies and the possibility of a federal program, that is, a program providing emergency assistance in case of drought and the participation in such a program of the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration.

The constraint of adequate water supplies in the prairie region of western Canada applies to economic activity in all sectors, not only farming, from basic resource processing to agriculture and community and industrial development. The drought periods are those periods where inadequate supply shows up, and the very nature of the drought and when it occurs often has different effects on the economy. Recent analysis shows that a drought affecting agriculture in Saskatchewan by reducing, as an example, farm income to the
Adjournment Debate
extent of $450 million, could have a negative over-all effect on the Canadian economy of $1.6 billion.
With the increase of economic activity in western Canada, it is time to define these water constraints in relation to economic growth and stabilization-and in this I agree with the hon. member-to determine the level of water supplies which are adequate in times of drought, and to implement projects and programs to release these constraints.
The federal government, of course, does not operate in the water supply field unilaterally. The provinces have extensive responsibilities in respect of water management and economic development. Therefore, discussions with the people of western Canada and provincial governments particularly, must be a prelude to the federal government implementing programs to release water constraints.
It is, therefore, too early to say at this time which projects could be selected and what role the PFRA could play in the planning and implementation of those projects. It is not too early, however, to say that water supplies offer extensive constraints to economic development, and the federal government is willing to play its role in relieving these constraints.
In respect of the general planning and development of western Canada from the source of that $4 billion, perhaps the basic thing is to tackle this first problem before spending more money, making sure that everyone is protected; not just the farmers but those people who will help the further economic development of western Canada.


AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY-I. RESULTS OF CANADA-UNITED STATES MINISTERIAL DISCUSSIONS-APPEAL FOR RESTRICTIONS ON IMPORTS. 2. FUTURE OF CANADA-UNITED STATES AUTO PACT
Mr. Otto Jelinek (Halton):: Mr. Speaker, my remarks this evening stem specifically from my questions in this House on Monday, April 13, 1981, regarding the ailing auto industry in this country, and generally from many other questions during the last year to date put by me, by other members of this House, and certainly by the ladies and gentlemen of the press and others concerned with the state of the auto industry, which not only affects its employees and the industry itself but the economy as a whole.
I will not dwell on statistics because of time limitations and because basically most people know the statistics in this area. However, I would like to bring those statistics up to date very quickly. Yesterday the Automobile Importers of Canada came out with a statistic which shows that one out of every four cars in this country is an imported car. That is an increase of 71.5 per cent over last year. The second statistic shows that the Canadian deficit on parts under the U.S.-Canada auto pact has reached a staggering $4.2 billion. Those two areas, imports and the U.S.-Canada auto pact, are the two major concerns this government should be facing. Indeed, for over a year the Minister of Industry, Trade and Commerce (Mr. Gray) and others from the Department of Industry, Trade and Commerce

May 12, 1981
A cljournment Debate
have had numerous discussions and consultations both with the United States, with regard to the auto pact, and with offshore exporter countries, particularly Japan, which now sells 21 per cent of all automobiles sold in Canada.
When asked about the auto pact, the Minister of Industry, Trade and Commerce said, "We are not talking about joint decisions", that is, with the United States; "we are talking about making our own decisions". That was on April 11 or 12 of this year. However, no decisions have been taken. There have been none whatsoever. When we asked him about imports after the Japanese made an agreement with the United States, he said we will take unilateral action if the Japanese do not give us terms similar to those they gave to the United States. The discussions of last Saturday between the Prime Minister of Japan and our own Prime Minister (Mr. Trudeau) have failed. In fact, there are reports today that an official of the Department of Industry, Trade and Commerce said:
We have had a telex from our trade mission saying there was progress made on both sides during the talks. There was agreement to hold further talks-
That is the progress being made.
In the few minutes I have left I want to point out two things. First, Japanese imports must be curtailed to some extent, and not just with quotas because our situation in Canada is different from the situation in the United States. Therefore, we must not only legislate quotas but we must also tie them into an increase in local content plus an increase in foreign investment in the auto industry in Canada. We need this because after the agreement between Japan and the United States to reduce Japanese imports into the United States by 7.7 per cent, Canada is virtually alone among western industrialized nations with no restrictions whatsoever except the conventional duty. I could go down the list. Australia, the United Kingdom, France, Argentina, Italy and Spain all have restrictions dealing either with local content or other forms of restrictions which support their own auto industries. Yet in our country that industry is going down the tube. This affects one out of six employees in Ontario alone.
The second point upon which I want to touch is anti-dumping by the Japanese, and by the Soviets as well with respect to their Lada cars.
I have dug up statistics with respect to specific Japanese models. The Honda Civic, for example, is sold in Canada for $769 less than it is sold in the United States. The Datsun 310 is sold for $828 less in Canada than it is in the United States. The Toyota Tercel is sold in Canada for $721 less than in the United States. That is, of course, before federal sales tax and the exchange of the dollar is taken into account. However, the Japanese receive roughly 18 per cent to 20 per cent less for the same automobiles which are dumped into Canada, and this is before the reduction in the United States. Can hon. members imagine what will happen to our market if members of this government continue to sit on their fat behinds and fail to act, except to talk and to say there will be more discussions and more discussions? What will happen after imports into the United States are reduced? Hundreds of thousands of cars suddenly will not be shipped into the United States. They
cannot be shipped to the other western nations because they have restrictions.
I will refer to just one example. In Mexico there is 50 per cent local content. An imported automobile has to have 50 per cent local content. The list goes on.
I realize that I am running out of time. I do not want the parliamentary secretary to say the same thing the minister has been saying, that is, that there are more deliberations and meetings under way, because the industry, the economy and we have had enough. It is time this government took some action, and now is the time to take the action. I want to hear what it will be and when it will be taken.


Gérald Laniel: Mr. Speaker, I am not sure I will be able to satisfy the hon. member. We, of course, understand his preoccupation. It is a preoccupation of most Canadians, and not just those in Ontario or in provinces where there are automobile industries. The whole of the Canadian economy is affected by the industry, but in referring to the question put by the hon. member I wish to try to answer as succinctly as I can.
[ Translation]
Mr. Speaker, the discussions held by the Minister of Industry, Trade and Commerce (Mr. Gray) with the commercial representative of the United States and the trade secretary in Washington last April 10, to which the hon. member referred in his question, were an opportunity to review a whole series of questions which interest and concern both countries, particularly the auto industry.
During President Reagan's visit to Canada in March, it was also agreed to continue the discussions already launched with the previous American administration concerning the automotive agreement and the over-all situation of the auto industry. The recent discussions held in Washington by the Minister of Industry, Trade and Commerce gave us the opportunity to make the United States aware of the need to develop the North American industry in a way which is fair and equitable for both countries. Since an American delegation had gone to Tokyo to negotiate lower exports to the United States and to make the Japanese government aware of the situation of the auto industry in the United States, and since a similar Canadian delegation was about to leave for Japan, discussions during the visit of President Reagan made it possible to get better acquainted with the respective positions of the two countries concerning imports from Japan.
The Government of Canada is concerned over the automotive industry and has already taken several steps to help it, as we did with Chrysler Corporation, and through other measures which were announced in the House. With respect to imports of Japanese cars, the Japanese government knows that the
May 12, 1981

Government of Canada expects that any restriction which the Japanese might make in their exports to the United States would apply to Canada. In its discussions with the United States, the Canadian government will continue to seek ways to improve the application of the automotive agreement and thus enable the North American industry to get back on its feet.
Finally, Mr. Speaker-
[DOT]	(2215)

I wish to bring to the attention of the hon. member that as of today we must say that Canadian officials in fact made progress in discussions in Tokyo last week. They agreed on the importance of an earlier resolution of this question for the increasingly close relationship between the two countries. We looked forward to an early resumption of the discussion between Canada and Japan and Japanese officials, and we are optimistic that the matter can be resolved in a mutually satisfactory manner.
The hon. member will have to recognize that Canada benefits from its trade with Japan in a positive way. Our trade surplus is $1.6 billion and we have a bigger tariff than Japan. All these things must be taken into account if we want to protect not only the automobile industry but the whole industry of Canada.
[DOT]	(2220)


HEALTH AND SAFETY-USE OF DALKON SHIELD INTRAUTERINE DEVICES
Mr. Bill Blaikie (Winnipeg-Birds Hill):: Mr. Speaker, since 1971 some 127,000 Daikon shield intrauterine devices have been sold in Canada. The manner in which this device entered the Canadian market, the inadequate premarket testing of this device, the inadequate substance and application of our medical devices regulations, and the continuing inaction of the Liberal government which has endangered the health of Canadian women, illustrate precisely the type of situation that in Canada has become the rule rather than the exception.
Since becoming NDP health critic, I have asked many questions in the House relating to medical devices. None so completely exposes the weaknesses of our medical devices regulations as this one concerning Daikon shields. None so completely exposes the fact that Liberal governments are only willing to act after large numbers of complaints are received by the Department of National Health and Welfare about a particular device.
A little history is in order. As I said before, some 127,000 Daikon shield intrauterine devices were sold in Canada prior to 1974. Ninety per cent of these were actually implanted in the bodies of Canadian women. In 1974, A. H. Robins, the manufacturer of this particular device, ceased production presumably in an attempt to stave off the perceptions of liability which were growing with the evidence that more than 20 per cent of women who had Daikon shields had problems within three years of insertion. This is U.S. data, as usual there is no Canadian data.
Adjournment Debate
These devices were not recalled by government. Women were not informed of the danger. The company simply stopped making them. Subsequent studies showed that if a shield is left in for seven years, the probability of a major problem occurring is almost a certainty.
In September, 1980, A. H. Robins, responding to the growing body of literature associating the Daikon shield with a certain form of pelvic infection, put out a press release concurring with recommendations that the shield be removed from asymptomatic women, which is to say, women who as yet are experiencing no problem with their Daikon IUD.
The problem is this. According to Robert Manchester, a lawyer for the Boston Women's Network and an expert on the issue, there are likely some 12,000 women in Canada who may still be using this device.
All I have asked of the government in the House and subsequently in a letter to the Minister of National Health and Welfare (Miss Begin) is that a medical alert be put out on this device. Why not? What is the reason for not doing so?
In a letter of reply to me, the minister said that there have not been enough Canadian incidences to justify any action. How many is enough? Does the minister think that the reproductive organs of American women are more susceptible to disease than those of Canadian women, thus invalidating the evidence? By what twisted logic or, worse, fatuous indifference characteristic of the Minister of National Health and Welfare does she purport to be acting responsibly in this particular situation?
In its response to me this evening, no doubt the government will lament the fact that there are thousands of classes of medical devices on the market, and bewail its incapacity to test or regulate them all. What it will not say is that only five classes of these devices out of those thousands are subject to regulation and premarket review, and these five have been picked in response to public opinion rather than systematic scientific caution.
We are the laughing stock of the western industrialized world when it comes to the protection we offer Canadians in this area of concern, that of medical devices. If the Minister of National Health and Welfare does not act soon on this by bringing in amendments to the appropriate legislation and in other ways so that Canadian women and their health are not sacrificed to profit and to the inertia of her bureaucracy, she will be quite rightly laughed out of her image as protector of the health of Canadians.


Mr. Norman Kelly (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Supply and Services):: Mr. Speaker, the intrauterine device marketed under the trade name Daikon shield was manufactured by A. H. Robins of Richmond, Virginia, U.S.A. It was first available in Canada in August, 1971. It was promoted actively and its sales here rose from 26,000 in the first year to 54,000 in 1973. By 1975 a total of 127,000 units had been distributed.

May 12, 1981
Adjournment Debate
The company became aware of some 36 cases of septic abortion in the U.S.A. in 1973 and, in consultation with the health protection branch of the Department of Health and Welfare, issued a "Dear Doctor" letter on May 30, 1974, informing Canadian physicians about potential problems. At about the same time, further sales of the device were suspended in Canada. A survey by the department's regional offices that fall confirmed that the Daikon shield was no longer available for sale on the Canadian market.
In view of the importance of intrauterine devices, a nationwide survey was carried out in 1974 to determine use patterns and adverse reactions. The evidence obtained via questionnaires from physicians did not indicate that the Daikon shield was significantly more hazardous than others. However, it became evident that IUDs in general could give rise to health problems, and all major manufacturers of this product were asked to submit before March 1, 1975, evidence of safety and effectiveness of their IUDs. On June 4, 1975, the Canadian distributor of A. H. Robins was informed that, on the basis of evidence submitted, further sales of the Daikon shield would be considered a violation of the Food and Drugs Act. Other manufacturers were requested to provide a package insert
listing pertinent warnings and directions for the benefit of the patient. At the same time, steps were taken to require premarket review of all future IUDs.
Mr. Speaker, in 1975, there was no firm scientific or medical evidence to justify replacement of implanted Daikon shields. However, more recent data indicates that there may be increased risk of pelvic infection if the residence period of any IUD is extended beyond three years.
IUDs, then, have been subject to premarket review since 1976, and manufacturers are now required to recommend explanation or replacement within two years. This matter was reviewed by the health protection branch advisory committee on medical devices only yesterday, May 11, 1981. The contents of a possible "alert letter" to physicians are under discussion. This would review the recent literature and refer to recommended times of removal for each type of IUD.


Mr. Deputy Speaker:: A motion to adjourn the House is now deemed to have been adopted. Accordingly this House stands adjourned until tomorrow at two o'clock p.m.
At 10.28 p.m. the House adjourned, without question put, pursuant to Standing Order.

Wednesday, May 13, 1981