TORONTO -- The Ontario Liberals spent $2 million on a report that "states the obvious" about the rise of youth violence and shows the government has done little to curb it, critics charged Friday.
And with the province in the midst of a major economic downturn, they fear the report's recommendations will simply gather dust rather than lead to any major changes.
"The challenges that have been identified for the government are very significant and you do wonder where they have been, particularly in the question of organizing through the Ministry of Children and Youth," said Progressive Conservative critic Julia Munro.
The report, commissioned by Premier Dalton McGuinty after 15-year-old Jordan Manners was fatally shot in his Toronto school in May 2007, found that racism and poverty were linked to a rise in youth violence in the province.
It calls for $200 million for improved mental health services, as well as a better co-ordination among government ministries.
It also recommends collecting race-based statistics, providing anti-racism training to police officers and making sure teachers and administrators at schools better reflect the neighbourhoods they serve.
"Poverty, racism, the lack of decent housing, culturally insensitive education systems and limited job prospects combine to create hopelessness, alienation and low self-esteem among youth that all to often explodes into violence," former diplomat Alvin Curling and retired Ontario chief justice Roy McMurtry said in their report.
But for front-line workers like Natasha Gibbs-Watson, director of the African Canadian youth justice program, there's doubt about what changes will actually follow the long-awaited report.
"This report is very important and very much needed," she said.
"(The question) is just what's going to happen ... and whether or not it gets swept under the rug or collects dust like all the other reports that have come out in the past."
Gibbs-Watson, whose social work program for at-risk youth is in jeopardy due to lack of funding, said she still hopes she'll see some changes.
"Our kids are in crisis right now, our community's in crisis and we all feel unsafe in the schools and in communities in general," she said.
NDP education critic Rosario Marchese said the report "states the obvious" and clearly demonstrates that the government needs to act quickly.
"We have a clear sense of what causes problems, and poverty is a big one. Racism is another big one. Lack of housing creates hopelessness," he added.
"These are the things that have been universally known for quite a long time, and I think, yes, we should co-ordinate the ministries so that we all know what we're doing."
It's not known how much it would cost to implement the report's 30 recommendations. The McGuinty government -- facing dwindling revenues and a $500-million deficit this year -- said acting on them will take time.
"We're going to bring the same approach to this as we did to the Ipperwash report -- we broke it down into three parts, essentially: those we needed to move on immediately, those are medium-term and those that are longer-term," McGuinty said.
"One of the things that they though we need to move on sooner rather than later was, we have to provide some restructuring in terms of government and better co-ordination in government at the community level as well for existing funding. That's the kind of thing that we can move on quickly."
Lawyer Julian Falconer, who led the School Community Safety Advisory Panel that was convened in the wake of Manners' death, released a report earlier this year that uncovered an alarming number of unreported incidents of violence and sexual harassment at specific schools in Toronto.
That report concluded that many of the more than 250,000 students at Toronto public schools contend daily with a "culture of fear" that pervades many of the city's secondary-school institutions.
It recommended using dogs to sniff out guns hidden in school lockers and closer monitoring of school front doors, as well as ensuring all other doors remain locked from the outside.
It also called for a provincial portfolio dedicated to monitoring school safety, an end to the zero-tolerance Safe Schools Act and policy measures to deal with gender-based violence and cyber-bullying.
The report's release came on the same day that a 17-year-old was charged in connection with the stabbing of a 16-year-old student earlier this week at C.W. Jefferys Collegiate Institute, the same Toronto school where Manners was shot.
