Mr. Speaker, I thank all my colleagues for doing me the honour of allowing me to rise today to respond to the speech by our colleague, the member for Châteauguay—Les Jardins-de-Napierville. It is an honour.
This is an emotional topic for everyone here. As the other members have already said, our colleague, the member for Châteauguay—Les Jardins-de-Napierville, who is also the Secretary of State for Nature, was one of the victims on December 6, 1989. We will never forget the massacre at École Polytechnique.
For years, we have been reading the names of the 14 women who were murdered and the two women who were injured. Everyone knows that our colleague is one of them. The Standing Orders forbid me from saying her name out loud, but it is an honour to work with her in this place. She is a woman of extraordinary courage because, after that disaster, after that massacre, she continued to advocate for gun control with PolyRemembers.
We can always do more to address violence against women. The International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women was created because of the massacre that took place here in Canada. It is hard to believe. I remember it like it was yesterday.
Despite the École Polytechnique massacre and the heightened awareness of violence against women, it persists. Violence by an intimate partner against a former partner and the killing of her children are things that continue to happen.
As my colleagues have mentioned, of course we recognize that particularly vulnerable are indigenous women and girls.
There was an inquiry into the murders of indigenous women, but the recommendations have not yet been implemented.
The recommendations, the calls for justice, of the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls inquiry gather dust, and indigenous women and girls continue to go missing and continue to be killed.
Globally, right now, there is an extreme increase in gender-based violence as an act of war in Darfur, Sudan, with connections to Canadian arms manufacturers in Sudan now. Women and girls globally are far more vulnerable to violence because they are women. Femicide occurs far more frequently around the world than we see with our male colleagues, many of whom are feminists. There is no question that to be born female in this world means to be more at risk than to be born male.
Violence against women and girls is a scourge that continues. I celebrate the work of the Moose Hide Campaign and the many men who stand up to say they want to be seen as a man who condemns toxic masculinity.
I am being careful; there is much I could say about our failures domestically, but today is a day of internal reflection. We know we have to do more in our society as a whole. We know we need to raise up and thank the courageous women on the front lines who defend the right of women to live in security.
I will never forget the words of Margaret Atwood on this point. She said that men are afraid that women will laugh at them; women are afraid that men will kill them. That is a deep reality. I know that when I walk alone in a parking lot and hear footsteps behind me in the dark, I am afraid in a way that my husband in similar circumstances would not be.
We in Canada can do more. We need to honour the memory of the young, brilliant women engineering students who had their whole lives ahead of them. Thank God one of our colleagues survived the shootings and is now here as a voice against violence against women and for better gun control. Now sheer happenstance has laid in her path the role of Secretary of State for Nature. I want to thank her, honour her and celebrate her work.
I ask that all of us together live up to the promise that Canada holds for the world as a place that will condemn the Taliban and a state that practises apartheid against women and condemn violence against women wherever it occurs. We must increase our efforts as a country united to end the scourge of violence against anyone, and on this day redouble our efforts to end violence against women.