I want to start by thanking Mr. Aldag for being the sponsor in the House and for being very supportive of this bill.
I want to thank Mr. Housefather, the Chair of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. I also want to thank my friend Mr. Nicholson; we miss you. We haven't worked with you in a while, and now I'm back here working with you. Vice-Chair Murray Rankin has asked me to speak to Bill S-210, an act to amend An Act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the Civil Marriage Act and the Criminal Code and to make consequential amendments to other acts.
The purpose of this bill is very simple, and the bill contains just one clause. The bill would just repeal the short title, “Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act”. That act covers four areas: polygamy, national age of marriage, forced marriage, and provocation. The content of the act and the way the act will be interpreted would remain the same.
Since the passage of Bill S-7 back in 2014, I have objected to pairing the words “barbaric” and “cultural”. That's not a Canadian value. When we put the two ideas together, we take responsibility for horrific actions away from the person who committed them. It's not a community that commits those acts; it's a person. Instead, we associate the crime with a culture and a community, and we imply that such horrible practices are part of a culture or a community.
I would like to take this opportunity to quote two witnesses who appeared before the human rights committee to speak to this bill during the last Parliament, to emphasize just how pairing the words “barbaric” and “cultural' marginalizes communities instead of the people guilty of these horrifying acts.
Professor Sharryn Aiken from Queen's University said:
I am not in a camp of being an apologist for violence—not at all. Let's not make any mistake about that. It's rather the pairing of “barbaric” and “cultural” that is the problem, because it seems to imply that the people who are perpetrating harmful practices and/or the victims of harmful practices are somehow relegated to some select cultural communities. As we know, that is a patent falsehood. We know that family violence, domestic violence, wife assault, and other forms of abuse are endemic across Canadian society.
It affects newcomers, long-time residents, indigenous Canadians, and Canadians of many generations. It affects Canadians of all social levels in our country.
That is the problem with the short title. It suggests that we have to be wary of certain specific communities, rather than focusing on eradicating violence everywhere.
Many of you here will know Avvy Yao-Yao Go of the Metro Toronto Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic. She is a very prominent person in Toronto. She said:
at the end of the day, if we go back to the drawing board, some of the provisions might well be kept, but then you need to change the conversation as a whole because, right now, the conversation is not just about whether the families are engaged in criminal acts but whether they are doing so out of their barbaric culture.
To give you an idea of the picture that is being painted when certain cultures are called barbaric, I would like to read the definition of the word from the Oxford dictionary: “savagely cruel”, “primitive; unsophisticated”, “uncivilized and uncultured”. That is how we describe cultures when we associate them with barbaric practices. We paint entire groups as cruel and uncivilized. We live in a country that prides itself on its diversity. By calling other cultures barbaric, we are going against the very value that lets Canada stand out among other countries around the world.
That is not what Canadian parliamentarians do. Rather than marginalizing cultures and cutting them out of Canadian society, we should be sewing our different cultures together and promoting unity.
During her speech on this bill, Senator Ataullahjan, who is a Conservative senator, said:
We achieve this with the passage of Bill S-7, but we achieve even more if we take steps to better position and, in this instance, to better communicate the intent of our laws, especially when they're of such importance and consequence to new Canadians.
In discussion with members of the community over the past months, many have expressed their support for Bill S-7 and the important issues that it addresses. However, at the same time, they also expressed serious concerns with regard to its short title....
I support ... Senator Jaffer in this regard, and I would urge you to support the removal of the short title of this bill.
When I was a little girl, I grew up in a colonial English setting, and we were called “barbaric” many times. When I came to this country, I was very much included in the fabric of this country. When this bill came before us and it called it “barbaric cultural practices”, it really was a knife in my heart. I thought I had left that word in the colonial past.
I come to you today to say that this is not what we are about. Nothing will change; it is just a repeal of the title. It will not go anywhere, because, as you know, being accustomed to all this, there are four bills that have been amended, so they are all separate. However, what it will say to Canadians is that we don't talk that way; our Parliament does not go to that level. That is why I'm asking you today to right a wrong and stop calling a culture “barbaric”.
Thank you very much.
