Aug 6, 2003
YCJA Revisited
By Leo Knight
On
Friday (Aug. 4, 2003) The
Province ran a front page photo of an 11 year old car thief
in handcuffs. Towering over him in the photo was a Vancouver
police officer emphasizing the tender years of the youth.
Later that evening, I was having a cocktail with a veteran VPD officer and we were speaking of the matter. He said, rather nonplussed, “An 11 year old car thief, so where’s the news value?”
The
inference is obvious. This is not an unusual occurrence in the
Lower Mainland. Youth crime, even committed by 11 year olds, is
running rampant.
Earlier in the week, the news media was abuzz about another 11 year old car thief. That story spoke of an incorrigible little punk and the inability of the police or the system to deal with him in any meaningful manner.
According
to the story, the boy lives in a group home and the government
paid staffers were going to keep an eye on him around the clock.
Literally, they are going to pay to put him under surveillance
by social workers.
What’s
wrong with taking the little turd and containing him in his
house? Never mind this watching him when he’s out and about.
In
April, the federal Liberals introduced their shiny new piece of
legislation to replace the Young Offender’s Act, called the
Youth Criminal Justice Act or YCJA.
The way I read the act, the acronym should stand for You
Can’t Jail Adolescents.
In
a nutshell, the Act, introduced in Parliament as Bill C-7,
stipulates that the system must do everything to “fix” the
troubled youth and that the last possible resort is to put the
youth in front of a court by way of a criminal charge.
One
of the problems with the legislation, and there are a myriad of
them, is there is absolutely no provision for the two 11 year
olds who are insistent on adding to the already skyrocketing
auto theft stats. Not that the previous Act did but, considering
current Health Minister and former Justice Minister Anne
McLellan said this was a priority in 1997, surely the Chrétien
government had enough time to consider how incorrigible little
pricks like these two might be appropriately dealt with.
Apparently
not.
The
YCJA is a fraud perpetrated upon the people of this country by
the government. Nothing
more or less.
Since
the Act was instituted in April of this year, there have been a
number of attempts to make us believe that youth crime is down.
Crime stats are compiled on the basis of charges laid. In a
nutshell, since the police are hamstrung in terms of laying
charges under the new law, the stats will drop. That’s an
absolute.
It
certainly doesn’t mean that crimes being committed by youths
are lessening to any degree. It just means that they no longer
count for anything.
I’m
sure that will be a great consolation to you when you come home
and find your home has been ravaged and your driveway empty.
Watch
this one. The federal government will tell you unequivocally
that youth crime is down. The
National Post had a look at the issue last week. They quoted
an Ontario probation officer, Bob Eaton, and the remarks are
rather telling. He said, “Three years from now they'll say
it's had a dramatic effect on reducing youth crime. Well, that's
because youth aren't being charged.”
“It
would be the same as if you took radar off highways -- speeding
would drop dramatically. Or if you took away breathalyzers,
there would be no more drunk driving, he concluded”
That
is exactly the sort of nonsense the federal Liberal are trying
to foist upon you. You see all those cars stolen by those two 11
year old incipient convicts? Never happened.
Or
sure the owners were without the use of them and ICBC will get
tagged for any damage caused. But, essentially, they never
happened, at least for the purposes of assembling statistics
measuring youth crime in this country.
The
majority of our youth are great kids. The small percentage of
teens that are continually showing up on the police radar screen
need to be dealt with in a serious way, not envisioned by the
framers of this legislation.
While
on the subject, how is it that the brain-dead idiot who
viciously beat Aaron Webster to death in Stanley Park two years
ago, is allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter?
Manslaughter
is supposed to be for an involuntary killing or a spur of the
moment homicide emanating from a fight. That sort of thing. How
is it manslaughter when the victim is hunted and killed, beaten
to death with a club?
Probably
it doesn’t matter in the end. The killer is only 19 now and
was 17 at the time of the brutal slaying. He is protected by the
YCJA. The media can’t name him and he has to be treated as a
youth under the provisions of the act.
Watch
the easy walk he gets through the system. Society’s
retribution for this horrific murder will be very weak indeed.
The
ironic thing is that fighting homophobia (Geez, I hate that
word, there has to be a better one) is a cherished plank of the
liberal platform. Yet, it is their own weak-kneed response to
criminal behaviour that protects the most vicious homophobe
imaginable.
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