Few subjects invite more serious and passionate debate than that involving crime in our society, and especially crime involving youth.
This is because it engages very emotional, and sometimes even contradictory, feelings.
Crime hurts. It hurts us physically, emotionally and financially.
It can make us want to lash out for revenge - and it forces us to look deep into our society for answers.
As federal New Democrats, we start with the basic premise that we all have an absolute right to be safe in our homes, on our streets, and within our communities.
As a party founded on basic principles of respect for the welfare of all citizens, we champion the health and safety of everyone.
We also accept that children, and youth, are expected to respect our laws, their elders and the various authority figures that permeate our society.
So when we are confronted with acts of crime, and especially of violence, we are angered, we are saddened and sometime we are shocked.
We feel not only that our youth have broken the basic rules we had hoped they have been taught - but we also feel a sense of responsibility that we have failed in our duties as parents and adults.
What is undoubted, however, is that the roles of our youth, our families, our institutions and our society itself are all part of the picture.
And all must be part of the solution.
From the federal New Democrats' perspective, any effective and civilized approach to dealing with youth crime must take into account certain basic factors.
We believe that we as a society must be tough on crime - but, to quote former Prime Minister Tony Blair, we must be equally tough on the causes of crime.
This is because it is clear that individuals do not operate in a vacuum.
Social studies have for decades established the link between poverty, lack of opportunity and elevated crime activities.
Studies have also uniformly shown that broken family units and reduced community support structures invariably are associated with greater youth crime.
Similarly, the likelihood of children committing anti-social and violent acts increases when they witness examples of such behaviour in adults, in society at large and in the media.
I don't think we need to be sociologists to know that children learn far more from what they see us do than what we say.
So what does this all mean in political terms?
It means that the 13 years of budget-cutting done by the Chretien Liberals has taken billions of dollars out of our nation's schools, community facilities and services for families and youth.
It means that 25 years of neo-conservative politics practiced by both Conservative and Liberal politicians since the early 1980's on has resulted in heavy stress on Canadian families.
As one example, parents today are working 200 hours more per year and making less money in real terms than only ten years ago. This means parents have less time to spend with their children and ensure they are kept busy, guided and on the right path.
It means that a society that goes to war in Afghanistan, and that increasingly tolerates violence in many forms, yields youth that think that violence is an acceptable means of expression.
So, in the federal New Democrats' view, we must be clear that reducing youth crime means we have to adopt polices that provide our youth and their families with facilities, programs and opportunities for growth.
We need to build community centres where our youth can engage in healthy physical and cultural activities, staffed by trained and positive adults.
We need to invest in our schools and higher educational institutions so that opportunities for our youth to become better educated are present. Extra-curricular activities involving music, sports and academics ought to be substantially increased, well-funded and available to all youth, regardless of income.
We need to ensure that our parents have access to good-paying jobs so they can raise their children in structures with security - and break cycles of poverty that so often lead to youngsters with little to lose, and less to gain.
We need to show by example that we favour policies that respect human rights and pursue peaceful solutions to problems.
Most of all, we need to resist those apparently simple answers like those currently being proposed by the Harper Conservatives.
Increasing punishment for youth while ignoring the real problems has been proven time and time again not to work. All it does is fill our jails, criminalize our young people and, as is evident in the U.S. - it doesn't do a thing to reduce crime.
Instead, setting public policy that supports strong families, healthy opportunities, access to good educations and setting good examples will take us much farther in reducing the real causes of crime for all age groups.
