Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for her career on the Hill and for being a woman who has carved a path for many of us. She has probably had to deal with much of this throughout her career as well.
I do not know of a workplace nowadays where people do not have to take some sort of sexual harassment training. It is about how we perceive sex and sexual consent in a pluralistic society and there is a wide array of how people view that. At the end of the day there is only one acceptable course of action, to normalize and define what we mean by harassment. In preparing for this speech, I found that the Ontario government has a policy on this. Many workplaces have very clear and defined policies. There is no reason that we cannot adopt that.
We talk about harassment, but we also need to talk about what consent is. I remember giving a speech on the bill that dealt with the changes in prostitution laws. My whole thesis was that we fundamentally do not understand what sexual consent is in a cohesive way in this country. I remember a journalist tweeted asking me if what I wanted was a confetti cannon. No, and that is the point. There is such a limited understanding of what constitutes appropriate behaviour and when we are confronted with something that is inappropriate, I go back to what Megan said, that the onus is on us to laugh it off or extract ourselves from the situation. There should be frameworks and behavioural codes of conduct that prevent the person who is being abused from having to defend themselves. That behaviour should not have happened to begin with and we have a broader societal obligation to prevent it from happening. That means bosses, co-workers, friends, family, everyone, and this will not change, nothing will change, until we as a society embrace that principle writ large.