Chair, I'm grateful for those questions but confident of the answer. Around the world, according to Girls Not Brides, there are 720 million girls and women alive today who were married or entered into union before their 18th birthday. That is 10% of the world's population.
Why do people want to come to Canada as immigrants? Why do they, as women and girls, see life in Canada as better than in almost every other part of the world? Why do they respect our justice system? That's because they have a reasonable expectation that forced marriage, early marriage, will not happen here. Yet it still happens, as we know from several settlement agencies, as we know from academic studies, so these protections against practices that are defended in the name of culture, not by all Canadians, not by most Canadians, but by small groups of Canadians, need to be dealt with, and this bill does exactly that. There is a culture of support for forced marriage in Canada on a limited scale that needs to be eliminated and that's what we hope to do with this bill.
I'm confident that the Liberal Party will come around to the new name. A couple of years ago their leader objected to the use of the term “barbaric”; now they accept that. Give them a little time and they'll come around to the use of the word “cultural”. It takes a while for the penny to drop on these points for the Liberal Party of Canada, apparently.
On the defence of provocation, we're very confident of the amendment that is proposed here. We're saying that the only provocation that might be acceptable in a court of law is very serious violence by the victim. Indictable offences punishable by up to five years or more are violent offences. Am I right?