October 24, 2005
Abandoned brides in India
Private Members' Statements

M. Polak: I want to, first of all, commend the member for Yale-Lillooet for raising the issue in the House. I think we also owe a debt of thanks to the media — the Province newspaper and many of the Indo-Canadian media outlets — who have recently brought up the topic as one for discussion. It really is a topic that needs to be brought out into the open. As the member opposite highlighted, one of the difficulties in addressing and challenging these kinds of behaviours is that people feel uncomfortable talking about it. There is a lot of shame associated with it.

           I want to begin, though, by highlighting for this House the fact that this is not an issue that is easy to unravel. It certainly is challenging for us to keep from oversimplifying it. For example, it would be a logical assumption to make that the majority of women who are negatively impacted by this are from poor rural villages. In fact, one of the more interesting parts of the documentary articles in the Province was that this really runs far and wide throughout the Punjab, from poor rural villages but also into upscale city suburbs. That has its cause back in the idea of Canada as this great and wonderful place to live, which it is, but it means that even those who might be doing financially all right in their own country are certainly seeing Canada as a place where dreams come true.

           I suppose that's fitting. When one thinks of marriage in whatever culture one is in, marriage is that place of happily ever after. Marriage is what we read about in the fairy tales. Marriage is supposed to be the lasting dream that's there for a lifetime. Certainly for these brides who are abandoned, it is not that.

           It also reaches further, though. There are also many cases where we see women who agree to be a bride and who engage a marriage and then, when they come to Canada, do not arrive and take up residence with their husband and, instead, will go elsewhere in Canada. So this is a problem that has many, many facets.

           I also want to highlight the fact that this is, unfortunately, an issue where people often mistake arranged marriages as the culprit. I want to be sure to say to this House that I think that is an unnecessary confusion. There was a very well-written paragraph from the Voice newspaper in which Shashi Assanand, the executive director of the Vancouver and Lower Mainland Multicultural Family Support Services Society, wrote about arranged marriages. I'll just read that briefly:

The Indian belief that love comes after marriage is based on the fact that when a marriage takes place, it is the union of two families and not the two individuals who are getting married. The purpose is to strengthen family relations with another family and the advancement of both families. Therefore, it is very important that the family backgrounds of the couple are similar. Great care is taken to match the socioeconomic status, education and family values.

           Certainly, although there are those who would seek to defraud, there are those who are greedy, and all those things come in as motivators in these terrible incidents. At the same time, we have to recognize that for the most part, families are looking for something better for their children — certainly better for their daughters — and that's one of the things that motivates them to become unfortunately involved in such tragic cases.

           Certainly, we have to recognize that this is a problem across the piece. It's contributed to by immigration laws that are not founded on a sensitivity to different cultural mores and, therefore, allow it. We also see this same kind of issue crossing over into areas where we have Caucasian-Canadian men searching the Internet for brides that they can take from other countries. So this is a broad issue. It has been highlighted well by both the Province newspaper documentary and also within the Indo-Canadian Punjabi language press. I think it's time, certainly, that this issue be brought forward and talked about and that we try to reduce the shame and understand that this is people defrauding one another. It's people taking advantage of one another.

           It is not all Sikhs, it is not all Indians, and it doesn't involve all arranged marriages. By and large, we have the same values as cultures, in that we want to promote our families to be healthy. We want to promote our children into a better life, and we seek the best for them.

           Certainly, I'm confident that by working together in Canada, we can find ways to assist the Indian authorities as they address this issue. Hopefully, our federal government will address itself to necessary legislative changes that may improve the immigration process in such a way as to deter further victimization of women in this way.