Thank you so much for the question. Your riding is extremely diverse and a fantastic example of the strength of our diversity and of our immigration system.
As with polygamy, so with forced and underage marriages we do not have definitive statistics, obviously. These are practices that families and individuals go to great lengths to disguise as something else, to pretend are not happening. But in the case of one settlement organization in Toronto, which has already been mentioned today, there were more than 200 cases recorded over only two years just in the province of Ontario and just by one settlement organization.
The Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development has received 100 requests for consular assistance from Canadians related to forced marriage since 2009. These are people who went to the trouble of requesting assistance from a government department.
It is a serious issue. As you mentioned, it is widespread in certain parts of the world. I would draw everyone's attention to the website and the documentation put forward by Girls Not Brides. It's an important partner for Canada in the worldwide effort to stop forced marriage. The map they have showing child marriage by country shows it as an unfortunate phenomenon on every continent, but the highest absolute number of cases they can document is in India, actually. Given the population of India, that may not be surprising, but it has also been a public issue in that country, as it is elsewhere, and rightly so, because the vast majority of women and girls in India, as everywhere else, would dearly like to avoid this fate.