Mr. Speaker, I, too, would like to share some thoughts in regards to Bill S-7.

The Liberal Party will be supporting Bill S-7. I have had the opportunity in the past to stand and express a great deal of concern in terms of the title of the bill, but there are aspects of the legislation that do warrant support. Therefore, the Liberal Party will be supporting the bill.

However, I will pick up on an issue that my colleague for Trinity—Spadina just made reference to, which is the 1,200-plus murdered and missing first nations aboriginal women and girls, and the lack of action.

I bring this up, and I suspect my colleague brought it up, because if we take a look at this piece of legislation before us, it attempts to deal with gender-based violence or biases. We need to emphasize that every society has some form of gender-based violence.

This is one of the reasons we opposed the short title of the legislation, which has a lot more to do with the spin that the Prime Minister's Office wants to see than it does in terms of what Canadians want to see. That is the reason for the bizarre title, “Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act”, and many would suggest racially based rationale that the Conservatives threw in the word “cultural”. This has offended many people in every region of our country, many different stakeholder groups, because of the Conservative government's attitude toward culture.

When we talk about the violence and exploitation that takes place, as I said, every society has some form of gender-based violence. Here in Canada even, we will find it time and time again, and I am one of the members of Parliament, and only one, who has raised the issue of the first nations aboriginal women and girls who have been murdered and missing over the years. In fact, many of those young ladies and girls at one point were in Winnipeg North—

Kevin Lamoureux

$491,080.00