Madam Speaker, the Bloc Québécois will support this bill with enthusiasm, just as we supported all its previous iterations.
We believe that victims of sexual assault must be well supported. The judicial process must be followed and, in our opinion, the only way to ensure that victims come forward and that there is due process, as our justice system requires, is to support the victims. We must ensure that judges who hear these cases do so with an open mind in order to be able to recognize the credibility of the victims and to examine the facts objectively and carefully.
In the past, there have been too many examples of situations where victims refused to come forward out of fear or a lack of trust in the judicial process. I believe that it is one of our main duties as legislators to ensure that victims of crime, no matter the crimes or the victims, trust the justice system enough to come forward and present their case.
That said, I would be remiss if I did not mention that the Bloc Québécois finds it very unfortunate that the government is using victims of sexual assault to introduce notions into this bill that were not in the previous versions and that have nothing to do with the purpose of the legislation. I am talking about the notions of systemic racism and discrimination.
Let me be clear: I am not saying that racism and discrimination do not exist in Quebec and Canada. They exist, and we agree on that. We do not agree, however, on whether racism and discrimination are systemic or institutional.
These issues are not clear-cut and they are currently a topic of debate in Quebec. They are not clear-cut and no one can agree on the meaning of these words. When we held hearings in committee on the previous version of Bill C-3, we heard from a number of witnesses. However, we did not ask any of those witnesses questions about systemic racism, systemic discrimination or all of the other notions the government has put into Bill C-3.
Parliament is voting today on a bill that started out as a pious hope on the part of Rona Ambrose. Members will recall that the Bloc Québécois enthusiastically supported that bill. At the time, I even moved a motion in the House to send the bill directly to the Senate and for the Senate to quickly pass it before the end of the Parliament. However, we know that the bill died on the Order Paper when an election was called. Since the bill was not passed, we are starting over again today.
Until now, this was not about systemic racism or discrimination. However, we are making a decision here as legislators and saying that our judges must take training on systemic racism and discrimination even though we have not heard from experts on that subject and we have not put any thought into it. We are doing that through the simple but detrimental process of making last-minute amendments during the clause-by-clause examination of the bill.
We are changing the situation by introducing abstract notions, notions on which there is no consensus and on which we have not heard from any experts, into a laudable bill that everyone agreed on and that sought to give judges training around sexual assault. I think that is unfortunate and I would ask my colleagues to refrain from taking this approach.
If we want to bake an apple pie, then we need apples, not grapes. What we are doing here is adding grapes to our apple pie. In the end, we will have an apple-grape pie, which is rather unfortunate. I do not know what the Senate will do with this iteration of Bill C-3. We will see.
Once again, the Bloc Québécois has always been there to support all victims of crime, no matter who they are, particularly victims of sexual assault. We have been there from the start and we will always be there. We will support this bill, but we are not happy that it now includes concepts that do not belong in it.
Lastly, I want to say that we must not stop here. Yes, making sure our judges get sexual assault training is good, but we need to keep working on this. Victims of sexual assault need support throughout the legal process. It is traumatizing for victims to testify about a crime, and it is all the more traumatizing when that crime is as intimate as sexual assault. Often, that testimony is given years after the crime was committed, and victims who must testify are forced to relive the crime.
Yes, they need a judge who is open, who listens to them objectively, who understands their state of mind during their testimony and who is capable of evaluating the evidence objectively and effectively. However, the system also needs to support these victims in myriad other ways, and Bill C-3 does not enable that. Things will have to be done differently.
I remind members that the provinces are responsible for administering justice. We will always be committed to ensuring that Quebec can manage the entire judicial process. However, in order to truly support victims of sexual assault all through the process, the federal government should make significant investments. Bill C-3 does not include any such investments, but they are worth mentioning.
Let's not delude ourselves into thinking that training for judges will be a cure-all and that it will eliminate every problem. This is a very important issue that we still all agree on, but it goes beyond that. We will have to continue to work with victims and be cautious when dealing with a topic as important as victims of sexual assault. There is no consensus in Quebec or Canada on the notions of systemic racism and discrimination, and we have not heard from experts to advise us on how to legislate these major issues. The government must not introduce unclear notions into a bill, as it has done and as it will be tempted to do with other bills.
I reiterate our concern, but the Bloc Québécois will support this bill.
