Thank you, Madam Chair. I'd like to go back to something Mr. Van Kesteren said.
I think it would be naive if we believed we were going to pursue our obligations in terms of advancing the reality of women in the same way. We approach that mandate differently. The different parties have differing perspectives. I've been here nearly four years, and I've heard a great deal of testimony in that time about how to secure the economic freedom of women, how to make sure they have the ability to free themselves of poverty and extricate themselves from violence. And over and over again in those four years, we've heard that women need a national child care system, affordable housing, pay equity, independence, and the ability to have lives that are filled with hope, promise, and free of violence. But despite the fact that for nearly four years that's what I've heard, we still don't have those things. They are not part of how this country functions.
So I think Madame Demers is making a very important statement here. She is saying that we have to come back and remember why we're here. We're here to advance the cause of women, and if we commemorate the reality of what happened at l'École Polytechnique in this committee, then we're taking a step forward.
I would agree that we need a national day of recognition about violence against women. Brian Vallée, who wrote War on Women, made an interesting comment. In a period of time that Canada was engaged in Afghanistan, we lost 131 soldiers and a diplomat. It hit the front pages. It was an issue we felt very deeply because they were young men and young women who our country sent to do what our country asked. And in that same time, more than 500 women died violently at the hands of people who were supposed to love them. Many of them died of gunshot wounds. We don't have a memorial to those women, and we need one.
In a former life I was an MLA in Ontario, and I was a rural member. One of the things I felt very passionate about was getting a community house, a safe place for women in that rural riding, because there was none, and I worked very hard to get that house in place. In the process of that, I talked to the executive director of the Women's Rural Resource Centre Strathroy and Area, and she talked about how women were abused and threatened and harassed with guns, with long guns. And the guns weren't just used to frighten them or shoot them; the guns were used to rape them. The barrel of the gun was used to rape them. The reality of what that weapon could do to the security, the hope, the aspirations of a woman in a rural area devastated me, because I knew it was true. I knew it was true.
Because of that, I have become a very strong supporter of whatever means it takes to protect women. I spoke to a former OPP officer whose job was to register and control weapons. He said the issue with the registry is that a woman—and this is a woman in an urban or rural setting—calls the police and says she's threatened. They have to be able to go and find all the guns. They have to know if there are two guns or three guns or four guns. They have to know how many guns there are, because that woman will not be safe until all those guns have been identified and removed. That's just the reality of it.
This discussion was inevitable. It was coming, given what's happened in this place in the last few weeks. I would say that we have to stand back from the emotionalism of this and look at the statistics, the evidence, the proof that is there; and in doing that, we should say we need to commemorate these women and never forget them, never forget what happened and never set it aside, for whatever reason. I hope this committee will do precisely that.
