Mr. Speaker, I commend the minister for her work on this legislation.
As she has said, divorce proceedings can be combative and adversarial. Often the children are treated as though they are the spoils of war, with devastating consequences for the whole family.
I welcome the focus of the bill's being on the best interests of the child and the way threats to children and protecting children from harm are given more clarity. The list is not exhaustive, but it is good.
My concern is what the courts do. The minister is familiar, of course, with the bill. Subclause 7.8(2) gives information to the courts to be aware of when they are making orders.
I know two mothers who have suffered the loss of their children because a court did not believe them.
Alison Azer became a friend of mine through the trials and tribulations of her non-custodial ex-husband taking four children out of her reach and secreting them to Iraq, Syria and then other locations. She begged the court not to let her ex-husband have passports for the children. He convinced the court they were only going on vacation to Europe.
Even more tragic is Sarah Cotton's case. I met her at her daughters' funeral. Both of her daughters were killed on Christmas Day. She had tried to convince the court that her non-custodial former partner was not sufficiently stable, and could be a threat to the children. Because he had never shown any signs of possibly hurting them, he was given Christmas Day visitation.
I do not know that this legislation could be improved in this area. There should be a positive obligation on the courts, almost like the precautionary principle. It is difficult because it is adversarial. A former partner might invent claims that the ex-partner represented a threat to the child.
We might want to strengthen the obligations of the court under subclause 7.8(2) to do more than consider whether there is a civil protection order or a child protection order, or likely to be one, and direct the court not just to make inquiries but also to direct it to specific things that it must consider, such as the possibility of a former partner taking children out of the vicinity or out of Canada altogether, or worse, doing serious violence to or killing the children.