All of a sudden, after decades of feminist advocacy, provincial and federal politicians can’t seem to say enough about gender-based violence (GBV). Sadly, they’re not saying much that’s new or that offers me hope we’re moving in the right direction. Here are two examples.
At the federal level, we are fairly swimming in GBV-related initiatives. The Standing Committee on the Status of Women released its report on coercive control in Canada last month. The Conservative Party, in the form of Private Member’s (PMB) Bill C-225, introduced several weeks ago by MP Frank Caputo, provided its law and order response to gender-based violence. A Liberal PMB, C-223, the Keeping Children Safe Act, would amend the Divorce Act with respect to family violence and parenting.
Then, there are two government bills: C-14, the Bail and Sentencing Reform Act, which includes provisions specific to IPV-related offences (and which will ensure that already over-crowded provincial jails become even more over-crowded) and Bill C-16, the Protecting Victims Act,which runs to 166 pages and, in its print version, weighs just under two pounds. (I weighed it on my kitchen scale.) It’s full of bits and pieces of changes, mostly to the Criminal Code, which purport to address GBV-related issues.
An optimist would say that Bill C-16 has something for everyone. A cynic might be more inclined to say there is nothing in it for anyone. I’m in the cynic camp.
I am underwhelmed by what I’ve read of the Bill so far. It proposes changes to the criminal law on such issues as coercive control, criminal harassment, femicide, mandatory minimum penalties, production of third party records, stays of proceedings because of lengthy delays, child sexual exploitation and the Victims Bill of Rights. As I said, something for just about everyone.
My interest lies primarily with three areas the Bill addresses: the addition of the term femicide, amendments to the criminal harassment provisions of the Criminal Code and the criminalization of coercive control.
What’s in a word?
Bill C-16 proposes adding a new heading to the existing murder provisions in the Criminal Code:
Femicide, including of intimate partner, and other aggravated circumstances.
This would include making murder first degree, whether or not it is planned and deliberate, if the death is caused by someone while they are engaging in or after they have engaged in certain kinds of abuse of their intimate partner or in an act of a sexual nature or while motivated by hate based on various factors including sex or gender identity.
Given that there are already a number of other circumstances in which killing someone, even if it’s not planned and deliberate, automatically becomes first degree murder, this seems like a positive change. Further, including the word femicide in the Criminal Code sends a message that killing women and girls because of their gender is a unique kind of offence.
Objective vs subjective
Some of the proposed changes to the Criminal Code’s criminal harassment provisions – in particular, those that make explicit reference to technological forms of stalking and that define harm to explicitly include psychological harm – make good sense.
However, I’m troubled by the proposal to change the standard of proof from subjective to objective. While this is being pitched as a way to take pressure off the victim/survivor, it means that judges will be determining the reasonableness of the victim’s fears. This approach to something as nuanced as criminal harassment is problematic; in particular, because not all judges are well educated on GBV, trauma and the fear that many survivors have of their partner or former partner. A judge who doesn’t understand this may not be able to make a fair assessment of whether the victim’s fear is reasonable.
Criminalizing coercive control
Bill C-16 contains much of the content of last year’s PMB to criminalize coercive control. I’ve opposed this since the concept first surfaced several years ago. You can read my detailed critique of this in earlier blog posts, but here’s the essence of it. Criminal law has failed to respond adequately to IPV, with the result that reporting rates are low and rates remain high. There is every possibility that criminalizing coercive control will lead to increased rates of charges against survivors and create havoc in those women’s family law cases. Coercive control is poorly understood and hard to prove in the criminal context.
This time around, there seems to be a commitment to delaying implementation by up to two years to allow for education of judges, police, Crowns and others, which is a step in the right direction, but there also needs to be a commitment – with appropriate resources – to raising public awareness so we all understand what coercive control is and how to identify it.
Until education for all professionals in the criminal system is mandatory and an independent accountability system is put in place to track their application and interpretation of the law, we should not be adding new offences to the Criminal Code. Even then, we should be looking at alternative ways, including restorative and transformative justice, to respond to GBV.
Same old, same old
In 2024, as a response to ongoing calls on the province to declare IPV an epidemic, the Ontario legislature’s Standing Committee on Justice established a subcommittee to examine both IPV and sexual violence. Among other activities, the subcommittee held public hearings. Its work was stopped by the 2025 election, but following that, it completed its work of preparing a report, which was released publicly in early December. The government portion of the report runs to 877 pages. Both the NDP and the Liberal party provided dissenting reports, that are 123 and two pages long respectively.
I chose not to participate in the hearing process because I don’t believe we need more hearings to understand what we need to do to improve our responses to and to eradicate GBV. We have more than 20 years of reports from the Domestic Violence Death Review Committee, recommendations from inquests as well as the Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission and various reports from other provinces. We know what the problem is and what we need to do to fix it. What we lack are the public and political will to get started.
I have not read the main report and I don’t plan to. It’s my personal boycott of what I consider to be an inauthentic process by the provincial government, which knows perfectly well what it needs to do. Cynical? Yes. But also realistic, I think.
A positive first step – a show of good faith, if you will – would be for Doug Ford to stop his blustering and declare IPV to be an epidemic. Whether or not this happens, we must all call on the provincial and federal governments to create some kind of independent body – an accountability committee, GBV Commission, a GBV Commissioner — to oversee their work to address GBV. Only when governments are, as they should be, accountable to us will we create the environment in which we can make the eradication of GBV a real possibility.