Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Drummond for his question, for his hard work. His question shows that he is aware of the plight of women and girls who have experienced sexual violence.
Today we are just taking one step. Designating an awareness day is one thing, but passing legislation on this issue is a whole other thing. I agree with my colleague's suggestion that we must bring back a bill that would address the issue of human trafficking and modern slavery.
However, I think we need to do a lot of work on rehabilitation. It is worth looking at the idea of a reverse onus, but we cannot disregard the key principle of our legal system that people are innocent until proven guilty. We will just have to be cautious and look at how to frame the reverse onus in some specific circumstances in the bill. Now that the awareness day is a done deal, we need a bill that will further address this issue.
There are a lot of concerns. Some laws exist, but we also need measures to protect victims. We need to study the scope of human trafficking, collect better data in Canada and Quebec, and ensure that judges and police officers make use of the provisions of the Criminal Code. We must also provide funding to community groups. In general, we need to define human trafficking as it relates to sexual exploitation and violence offences. All of this can be addressed in bills that would help combat these heinous crimes.