Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to join the debate on Bill C-3. I have really appreciated the opportunity to hear many of the excellent speeches given by colleagues on all sides about this important piece of legislation. For me, it certainly underlined the importance and value of Parliament.
When we have these discussions about listening to victims and understanding what survivors have experienced, it gives us an opportunity to recognize those situations. I think the debate itself, not just the passage of the legislation but the conversations that come out of it, provides a great deal of benefit as well.
Some of the points about process have been particularly important. Picking up on something that my colleague from Brampton North said earlier, many good ideas come forward from private members' bills, but opportunities to bring private members' bills all the way through the process are relatively limited. I was involved in a private member's bill that received unanimous consent in the House and in the Senate, but in slightly different forms, and the reconciliation never took place before the next election.
I appreciate the fact that this has now become a government bill, but it does underline a bit of a structural challenge: It is much harder for us to move good ideas forward that come from members of Parliament who are not in the government, even if the ideas have very wide support across this place.
I had the opportunity to speak in support of this bill at second reading, so I want to briefly summarize some of the points I made at that time. I will then take my arguments in a bit of a different direction. I want to talk a bit about building up confidence and recognizing some of the limitations of this bill. I have the honour of serving as the shadow minister for international development and human rights, so I also want to share some thoughts about the international context we are operating in when it comes to combatting sexual violence and what lessons we might take from this conversation for our engagement internationally. I think there is a lot there. I think there is a lot we can learn from and apply to our international development and to our work on promoting human rights around the world that specifically comes out of this conversation.
The bill in front of us, Bill C-3, requires those seeking to become judges at the federal level to agree to undertake education with regard to sexual assault law and social context, essentially committing themselves to becoming aware of and educated about issues around sexual assault. This is aimed at responding in particular to cases where judges have made some very insensitive comments and—