Mr. Speaker, once again, the NDP shows its utter disregard for the real interests of women and girls and in really protecting women and girls.
The member opposite has just shown she has very little idea of what is going on in her home province.
Polygamy is happening in Canada. It is happening in Bountiful, British Columbia. We are proud that the first prosecutions for that crime in Bountiful took place under our government. They have not yet resulted in convictions. We hope they will.
The member is naive if she thinks that those in polygamist relationships are not still coming to this country through misrepresentation, through the weakness of our immigration system, which she would have us make weaker still.
The member has not read the story of the Shafia family that left Afghanistan in 1992. Mohammad Shafia married Rona Mohammad, who was unable to have children. In 1980 he took Tooba Yahya to be his second wife in a polygamist marriage. When the family immigrated to Canada, Rona was presented as an aunt.
If the member opposite thinks that was the only such case, and that it is not still possible today without polygamy being listed as an inadmissibility in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, she is dead wrong.
Tooba, the second wife, allegedly said to Rona, “You are a slave. You are a servant.” She spoke these words to her not in Afghanistan, not in the UAE, not in Pakistan, but in Canada. Then on June 30, 2009, sisters Zainab, Sahar and Geeti Shafia, along with their stepmother Rona Amir, were found drowned in a submerged car in the Kingston Mills lock in eastern Ontario.
In that case and in any case involving murder in this country, it is still a legitimate defence for the perpetrator of a murder to stand in the court and say, “I had every right to do this because my wife called me names”, or “I had every right to do this because my wife disobeyed me”, or “I had every right to do this because the food she prepared was not adequate.” That is a legitimate defence under the defence of provocation in this country. It is, and members opposite are denying it. They do not know their stuff.
Under this bill, the defence of provocation would have to be itself an action that would have been indictable and punishable by five years of imprisonment.
We are going to end these absurdities. We are going to end this barbarism, whether the NDP or the Green Party, whose naivete is on full display today, like it or not.