Citizenship and Immigration Committee on March 31st, 2015

[Gillian Blackell]

Housing isn't something that our department would be in a position to fund constitutionally. We have an interdepartmental working group with 13 federal departments and agencies on early, forced marriage and on related violence, as well as female genital mutilation and cutting. We have regular discussions about funding, looking to leverage various funding opportunities throughout the federal government, and we've had discussions with Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation about enhanced funding to shelters. Most of their money goes directly to the provinces and territories.

There are some challenges in the federal system to having funding for the particular services you're mentioning, but we are reaching out to the provinces and territories directly to make them aware of the importance of these issues.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

We have to move on, I'm sorry.

Mr. McCallum.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Thank you.

Just to return to my earlier point about the issue of the five-year sentence, and that could include non-violent crime like theft and mischief, I think. From a legal or technical point of view, would there be a way to amend that to limit the crimes to acts of violence? I think that was the intention, not to include these more minor crimes.

[Joanne Klineberg]

There's a way to draft many things.

One of the main challenges I think would be in how the offences one wanted to have captured would be identified. They could either be identified through particular offences being specifically listed, or they could be identified with a description such as “an offence that involves violence”.

Part of the problem with the use of the word “violence” is that it's not a word that appears in offence provisions. For instance, the offence of assault is “the application of force without the consent of the other person”, so even the offence of assault is not described from a criminal law perspective in terms of violence.

One would have to think very carefully about the way to capture the sorts of offences you wanted to see included to the exclusion of others, and difficulties I think would arise with certain offences that people might reasonably disagree into which category they fall.

[A voice]

Like criminal harassment....

[Joanne Klineberg]

Criminal harassment is a good example of an offence that certainly can cause a person to feel traumatized and fearful, but doesn't involve the physical application of force. Child pornography offences, for instance, there's a way to look at them such that they are violent offences, but there's another way to characterize them such as they aren't. So there's a characterization challenge.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Okay. Thank you.

Turning to a different question, in the House the revenue minister said that the justice minister is working with his provincial counterparts on a framework to limit marriage for 16- and 17-year-olds to situations where a court has approved the union. I'm wondering whether the government could suspend the application of the 16- and 17-year-old marriage provisions until a provincial government enacted rules as I've just described.

[Lisa Hitch]

Constitutionally the federal Parliament has jurisdiction only over, as I mentioned, that absolute-floor minimum age below which there can be no marriages, so there really is no constitutional way to do that. The government would have to set the age at either 16 or 18. In either instance, there would be no marriages possible below it, but it's within provincial jurisdiction to deal with what happens above it up to the age of majority.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Thank you.

Finally, officials in the Senate hearings on Bill S-7 referred to an internal Justice study on provocation. I wondered if it might be possible for you to send a copy of that study to the committee.

[Joanne Klineberg]

Yes, for that we looked at appellate cases from 1999 to 2014 that dealt with some legal issue pertaining to the defence of provocation. We will have to confer with our departmental supervisors to see if we can provide it. If we can, we certainly will.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you.

Mr. Aspin.

[Jay Aspin, Conservative, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Welcome again, officials. Thank you for giving us your advice on this important legislation.

I want to focus on the barbaric practice of forced marriage. I have a few questions, perhaps for Ms. Tsai.

What information is known about the prevalence of forced and underground marriage in Canada?

[Gillian Blackell]

I will respond, if that's all right.

[Jay Aspin, Conservative, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

Absolutely.

[Gillian Blackell]

As the minister mentioned, these are certainly issues that are fairly clandestine and difficult to identify. In terms of hard data, there's no actual category for forced or underage marriage at this point in time, and therefore there's no reliable statistical data in this regard. However, one of the most relied-upon sources is the study by SALCO, the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario, which identified 219 cases in Ontario between 2010 and 2012.

The Department of Justice has also been looking at this issue for a number of years and funded two anecdotal studies on forced marriage in Canada to gauge the scope of the issue. The first was by Naïma Bendriss, in association with Rights and Democracy. It dates from 2008. It examined the incidence of forced marriage in Montreal and Toronto through interviews with service providers. The study did confirm the existence of forced marriages in Canada and that many women were unaware of their rights. It did identify the link between forced marriage, honour-related violence, and polygamy.

The second study was by Dr. Zohra Husaini—

[Jay Aspin, Conservative, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

Okay, I have a few questions here and I'm limited in time.

Do families typically take these forced marriages out of the country?

[Lisa Hitch]

That's what I was just going to throw in as my cautionary note. Those studies do not distinguish between marriages that were celebrated in Canada and marriages that were celebrated outside of Canada. Certainly it would appear that a large number of them were celebrated outside of Canada, so yes, that's a concern.

The other concern, of course, is that probably a number of telephone and proxy marriages were involved as well, where one of the parties would have stayed in Canada and the other would have been in another country.

[Jay Aspin, Conservative, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

Thank you very much.

That was a good segue into my next question. How will these proposed amendments prevent young girls from being taken out of the country for the purpose of forced marriages?

[Gillian Blackell]

The amendments with the specific offences of underage and forced marriage ceremonies in the Criminal Code serve as anchoring offences for the extension of the offence on the removal of a child from Canada for the purpose that a criminal offence would be committed abroad, which currently applies to a number of sexual offences as well as female genital mutilation. We're now able to extend that to removing a child from Canada for the purpose of an underage or forced marriage.

It also allows for the linkage to the specific peace bond, so that specific peace bonds could be taken out to prevent these marriages from occurring, including preventing the defendants from removing the child from the jurisdiction, or from travelling or making arrangements for the marriage. There are specific measures to prevent that.

[Jay Aspin, Conservative, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

What can you folks tell us about honour killings? Do you have any statistics or evidence in that regard?

[Gillian Blackell]

As with forced marriage, there's no actual legal category of honour killing, so we don't have any statistics through Statistics Canada that would identify percentage of homicides that were actually related to honour.

However, we have examined reported cases and identified around a dozen cases that appear to have been related to honour. Not all of these cases, of course, involve the defence of provocation. They were not always raised in all of those cases, for sure. The commonality between these cases is that either the defence raises or the prosecution identifies the case as being related to the family honour as being one of the motives for the actual killing.

[Jay Aspin, Conservative, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

With regard to honour killings and with regard to the proposed legislation, and forced marriage as well, will there be some tracking or monitoring with regard to this?

[Gillian Blackell]

Again, in terms of tracking cases statistically, you need to have a particular category in the Criminal Code for the uniform crime reporting survey to identify it. That's the police-based tracking system. It has to fall under a particular category, so once we have a specific offence of forced marriage, we would be able to track it.

I want to indicate, because I hadn't identified my notes, in terms of honour-related violence, that since 1954, we've identified at least 20 people that have been convicted of first or second-degree murder in Canada where there was some evidence on the record that it was related to family honour.

[Jay Aspin, Conservative, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

That seems to verify the information I have, that there have been approximately 25 Canadian criminal cases of honour-based violence since 1995, with 21 of these crimes occurring within the last decade.