Mr. Speaker, tonight we are debating Bill C‑16, tabled late last year. What still impresses me, however, is the timeline.
For months, if not years, the Standing Committee on the Status of Women has been calling for progress on a number of issues: court delays, the criminalization of coercive control and, as the Bloc Québécois and other stakeholders have also urged, the issue of intimate AI-generated images and deepfakes. People have been calling for all that for weeks, months and years.
It took a press conference by the Standing Committee on the Status of Women where we displayed non-partisanship, where members from all political parties sitting on that committee called on the government to criminalize coercive control and take action on violence against women.
It is an important first step, but why did it take so long?