Certainly, and it's a bit of a complex question to unpack, because there are a number of different policy areas that this bill covers, and the motivation within each policy area may be slightly different.
If I could boil it down for the purpose of simplification, a significant portion of the energy that's been dedicated to this bill is focused on the problems we're seeing with intimate partner violence in this country. It's egregious to me the level of violence facing Canadian women, as is the routine nature of the stories we see in our newspapers in which that violence is too often perpetrated by a man who is in a relationship with the victim.
When we hear calls for the government to take action to address femicide more squarely, we're not dealing with a philosophical issue; we're dealing with cries for help from family members who are dealing with the years that will not be lived of their most closely held loved ones. When we're dealing with coercive control, we are hearing from women who may have escaped violence, hoping that they can offer protection to other women in similar circumstances. When we hear about the need to change the laws around criminal harassment, we're responding to very real calls for action, where people have gone through the process but have been unable to meet an evidentiary standard, notwithstanding that they've not been able to live safely in their communities.
Similarly, we want the mandatory minimum penalty regime to deal with the world that we actually live in, not some hypothetical version of it where we can ignore the decisions that were taken by the courts, which we have an obligation to respect as elected officials. We wanted to ensure that we had mandatory minimums in place to say that there will be serious consequences for serious crimes, while we respect the nature of the court's decisions with respect to safety valves for circumstances that would result in a consequence the public would find intolerable.
There are other changes that were motivated by shifting technology, again for criminal harassment and AI deepfakes. This is to make sure our motivation is to offer protections that we always thought would exist, recognizing that laws need to be updated to reflect the modern tools being used to commit morally culpable behaviour that may be outside the definition of a crime.
Finally, because I don't want to eat up all of your time, Mr. Chang, the prevalence and expanding rate of exploitation of children online is something we needed to address. As a parent, I have grave concerns about the ability of people who would do harm to engage with kids who are the age of mine. We have to adopt protections that will recognize that these heinous behaviours take place in our communities, and offer protections against them.
We can't lose sight of the fact that this bill is one part of a larger, broader strategy that will seek to end violent crime in our communities. Those are the kinds of motivations that justified the introduction of this bill.