Citizenship and Immigration committee  If a peace bond is taken out against the defendant and the defendant breaches that peace bond, they are currently susceptible to a term of imprisonment of up to two years. This will be changed with Bill C-26, I think it is, which would increase the maximum to four years of impris

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you. As the minister mentioned earlier, when you apply for a peace bond—a peace bond is a preventive court order, although it is in the Criminal Code—and a peace bond is taken out against the defendant, it does not constitute a criminal charge. That defendant would not hav

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Exactly. Normally that would be the case, although anyone could do so on behalf of a victim if they felt that was necessary.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you. If a child is under the age of child protection in the jurisdiction where they reside, then the child protection authorities would become involved and stand in on behalf of the child, for any act, in terms of requesting a peace bond or any other intervention with the

Citizenship and Immigration committee  This bill does not set out minimum sentences.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  You're talking about maximum sentences. What's important is that sentences correspond to the seriousness of the actions. If we look at…

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Because there isn't an actual legal category and it's not a legal term, this will depend on your definition and how you are examining the case law. We took a fairly conservative approach to the case law and it had to actually have something on the record either raised by the crow

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for your question. We looked at the forced marriage practices of a number of countries similar to Canada. As you know, in the last decade, at least 10 European countries have introduced forced marriage offences. Most of then have set out sentences of two to seven years

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The amendments with the specific offences of underage and forced marriage ceremonies in the Criminal Code serve as anchoring offences for the extension of the offence on the removal of a child from Canada for the purpose that a criminal offence would be committed abroad, which cu

Citizenship and Immigration committee  As with forced marriage, there's no actual legal category of honour killing, so we don't have any statistics through Statistics Canada that would identify percentage of homicides that were actually related to honour. However, we have examined reported cases and identified aroun

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Again, in terms of tracking cases statistically, you need to have a particular category in the Criminal Code for the uniform crime reporting survey to identify it. That's the police-based tracking system. It has to fall under a particular category, so once we have a specific offe

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I will respond, if that's all right.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  As the minister mentioned, these are certainly issues that are fairly clandestine and difficult to identify. In terms of hard data, there's no actual category for forced or underage marriage at this point in time, and therefore there's no reliable statistical data in this regard.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for the question. If I may, the Department of Justice has been looking at these issues for a number of years and has held seven sector-specific round tables or workshops with police, crown prosecutors, victim services workers, child protection workers, shelter workers,

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Housing isn't something that our department would be in a position to fund constitutionally. We have an interdepartmental working group with 13 federal departments and agencies on early, forced marriage and on related violence, as well as female genital mutilation and cutting. We