Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm going to direct my questions to SALCO. It's with some pride and a paternal feeling that I was one of the.... When I was a just-graduated law student, we gathered together and thought of this great idea of creating this legal clinic and that one day maybe they'd make parliamentary submissions. Here they are, making parliamentary submissions, so yay, Shalini and Ms. Abdullah. Thank you for being here.
I take your points. We very much feel this is a much-overdue reform to family law. I think it is very much on the right track in a lot of the things you mentioned. Thank you for those comments.
We wanted to outline a couple of things. I think we're on the same page, but it's a question of whether we can perfect it. I'll ask questions of you both at once because I'm sharing my time with Mr. Ehsassi.
One is in respect of the definition of family violence, which you mentioned. I took your points, Ms. Abdullah, about cyber-attacks and spiritual threats. With the family law violence definition, we're always trying to balance being broad enough but not overly broad where we fear having too long a list that becomes somehow under-inclusive—if you see what I mean. Do you feel that patterns of coercion, psychological and other threats, the types of cyber-attacks you mentioned, are already covered in the definition we have right now? If not, why not?
Two, the brief we have is the one you jointly signed with the large group, and that brief mentioned that we have the spiritual, cultural and linguistic upbringing of the child as part of the parental decision. It's particularly looking at indigenous, but not exclusively. You said that we should also incorporate that under the “best interests of the child” component. Can you tell me why it's needed under the “best interests of the child” component? Is it unique to indigenous? That's the way the brief read. I appreciate that SALCO is looking at things like South Asian background and people who speak Punjabi, Urdu, etc.
Can you touch on both of those, please?