Many of us around the table were involved in consultations in the preparation of this bill in all major urban areas of Canada and beyond. I'm particularly grateful for the work that my parliamentary secretary, Costas Menegakis, did in this respect.
The view across the country was uniform. This is happening in Canada, not on an enormous scale but on a significant scale, and one that hasn't been fully documented. The few studies that we have from settlement organizations, from university researchers, give us grounds to believe that there are hundreds, even thousands, of these cases occurring even over limited numbers of years. One case is frankly too many.
We found that women and girls, especially, but all advocates on behalf of the protection of Canadians from all forms of violence, were very interested in moving forward with measures of this sort. They identified very clear gaps in the criminal justice system that prevented law enforcement, that prevented prosecutors, from taking action to date in the ways that we all would have liked to have seen.
On the question of cultural practices, these are practices that have been defended in families, in homes, in communities, on the basis of tradition, on the basis of the sanctity of family, on the basis of culture, and those defences will not work.
Any culture of violence, any culture that justifies violence in Canada won't be acceptable to Canadians. That's what we're trying to attack in this bill.