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This week Canada’s Conservative government moved ever closer to enacting a tough new law designed to stop child-marriages, polygamy, and forced marriages from being brought here through immigration. But most of the bill’s contents would also make it far harder for native-born Canadians to practice polygamy.

The Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Practices Act, which has already been passed in the House of Commons and is now in committee in the Senate, also removes any possibility that the “honor culture” prevailing in many Middle Eastern countries could be used to mitigate murder charges.

But both opposition senators and advocates for the immigrant community have challenged the bill, which makes changes to several existing laws including the Criminal Code, Immigration and Refugee Act, and Civil Marriage Act, as unnecessary, counter-productive, and even racist.

Independent Sen. Art Eggleton challenged the bill’s sponsor, Immigration Minister    Chris Alexander, during committee hearings this week to explain why existing Criminal Code provisions against honor killing and polygamy were insufficient. Alexander responded: because both are still happening.

“With the Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act, we intend on sending a very clear message to anyone coming to Canada that such practises are unacceptable,” Alexander said.

The message would apply to homegrown polygamists too, happily noted Vancouver Sun columnist Daphne Bramham, author of The Secret Lives of Saints, an exhaustive expose of British Columbia’s Mormon polygamy cult in Bountiful. In a column this week Bramham noted most of the “barbaric practices” sanctioned in the bill are found in the B.C. cult, where they have been practiced for many decades, providing a few powerful men with dozens of “wives” much younger than themselves.

The bill, if enacted, will make it a crime, punishable by up to five years in prison, to knowingly participate in an under-16, or forced, wedding, thus including parents or siblings of a coerced bride, or a coerced or willing groom. Justices of the Peace or clergy, who previously faced charges for officiating at weddings violating provincial laws, would now face two years in prison for violating these newly-toughened federal laws.

Polygamous marriages would be nullified. No one could immigrate to Canada with more than one spouse, nor engage in a second marriage once they get here.

Those who know of any of these null or illegal marriages, or know of plans for any future weddings, would be able to inform a provincial judge knowing the official could then summon those involved to a hearing and require a “recognizance” of the adult spouse to promise to refrain from the marriage—on pain of a one-year jail sentence. The judge could seize any passports in the suspect’s possession to prevent him leaving the country with his “fiancée,” as well as order him to give up any weapons.

As for the provision against honor killing, this involved a change to the Criminal Code section that allows the downgrading of a murder charge to manslaughter if there is sufficient “provocation.” That provocation is currently defined as “a wrongful act or an insult” that would temporarily enrage “an ordinary person.”

The current provision allows an immigrant from an “honor culture,” who had killed a family member, to claim he has been enraged by his victim—as any relative would have been in his homeland. Thus, activities considered acceptable in Canada such as dating or kissing or dressing in ways disapproved of by the family could turn a murder charge into manslaughter.

But if the Zero Tolerance bill is passed, the provocation would have to be behavior that itself constituted a criminal offence meriting at least five years in jail, not a mere “insult.”

Nonetheless, the whole bill is misguided, declares the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario, which nonetheless condemns polygamy, forced marriages, and honor killing. “We believe that this racist Act and its implementation will further marginalize the victims and survivors of forced marriage,” states SALC. By criminalizing all who participate in arranged or polygamous marriages, according to the clinic, the law would drive these relationships underground. No immigrant, even an abused wife, will inform on relatives if they could face imprisonment or deportation as a result. Education would be a better approach.

But others agree with the government that strong messages are needed—and not only to immigrants. Nancy Mareska, founder of Stop Polygamy in Canada, told LifeSiteNews, “We need to make Canada’s immigration agents think twice before they let in polygamists.”

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Mareska disputes the claim the bill is racist. Her own group was organized a decade ago to lobby the B.C. government to prosecute Bountiful leaders for polygamy (in Canada the Criminal Code is federal law, but prosecution is in provincial hands). “Mormon polygamy in Canada is Caucasian.  Many immigrant polygamists are people of colour.” Mareska is a strong supporter of the bill.

Gwen Landolt, national vice-president of Real Women of Canada, also endorses the Zero Tolerance bill, especially for strengthening the Criminal Code provisions against polygamy, which were so weak that until the Supreme Court of British Columbia ruled it was consistent with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 2010, the Bountiful cult had openly defied the law for many decades. Now four male leaders face trial.

“Polygamy is harmful to women because it allows them to be abused, treating them as chattels at the discretion of a few men. They are not treated as equals and their children do not get proper parenting,” she told LifeSiteNews.

The new bill might not affect the existing case against four Bountiful leaders, Landolt says, but it would certainly nip in the bud any effort to perpetuate polygamy there.

Peter Jon Mitchell of the Ottawa-based Institute for Family and Marriage adds that both social science and neuroscience have demonstrated the advantages of monogamy. “We seem to be hardwired for monogamy,” he told LifeSiteNews, citing studies showing how the brain responds positively to the longterm relationship in marriage. Polygamous relationships, on the other hand, induce stress in the brains of the competing wives, especially those pushed down the pecking order by new arrivals in the ménage.