Justice committee  I think it was made clear by my predecessor and I think it was made clear in my opening remarks, that in Bill C-84 we have picked two areas on which there is widespread agreement, and which we could get done now. We are filling a gap in one case, and we are addressing a practice

Justice committee  As my predecessor also stated, we're going to keep moving forward with this dialogue and to try to make our Criminal Code and society better.

Justice committee  I'm not going to speak about a consensus that happened in 2004. I wasn't privy to those discussions. I was, quite frankly, doing other things at the time, so I'm not fully versed on all of those various discussions that happened in 2004. What I will commit to doing is keeping di

Justice committee  My immediate priority is the passage of this legislation. The two practices that are identified in this piece of legislation are important to prohibit and define in each respective case. I'm open to discussing other ways forward.

Justice committee  Well, I've just started in this job, and I have to admit that I enjoy the challenge. That said, I'm not going to commit to a particular timeline today. I have, in good faith, said that I'm open to discussing moving forward in the future and to addressing the very concerns that yo

Justice committee  There is a link that has been drawn. There isn't as much data as perhaps there might be, simply because a lot of it is covered up. I will admit to a data gap there, but a link has been drawn with enough credible information to say that it's an important factor. We're also protect

Justice committee  There is a traditional distinction between birds and animals that runs through the common law. There is a provision specifically for roosters, for cocks, because sadly they are often very damaged in the fighting, and it is often the case that they're also fed with steroids to mak

Justice committee  The distinction there is because of that. Certainly if the committee wants to look at that as part of its study and has suggestions in that regard, we would be open to that.

Justice committee  I think it's open for the committee to study that. My understanding is that there is always potential to rehabilitate a dog in a way that doesn't exist with a rooster.

Justice committee  It was undertaken before my watch began in this role, so I can't go into all of the details of the way people and groups were consulted, but I can say that we consulted the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies, the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association and the Canadian Feder

Justice committee  Certainly clarity was given on the definitions, the definition of both bestiality and also the fighting provisions. Clarity was given to groups to differentiate the term “baiting”, for example, which doesn't mean baiting for the purpose of fishing, angling or other activities, bu

Justice committee  Well, by prohibiting it, that immediately gives police the power to stop it in a way they don't have now. They could do it with cockfighting, but they couldn't do it with other kinds of animal fighting. There was a study in Ontario in 2016, “Dogfighting: A Problem in Ontario?”,

Justice committee  It certainly was. The U.K. has the same definition that sadly was the case in D.L.W., so the U.K. definition does require penetrative sexual activity for its definition of bestiality. The United States doesn't, so common law jurisdictions in the United States that have dropped

Justice committee  I mentioned in my opening remarks the Canadian violence link conference of 2017, which began to draw out some of the pre-existing data and research on that sort of thing. To put it quite simply, it's about vulnerability, and both children and animals are vulnerable. A sexual pr

Justice committee  As legislators, I think any piece of the puzzle we can improve.... There are many moving parts, with Bill C-78 and the Divorce Act being one, as is administrative justice reform, which you have already looked at, and Bill C-75 and moving forward with that are all a series of part