Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to address Bill C-16, the protecting victims act. This bill represents an important step in reinforcing Canada’s commitment to protecting victims and supporting survivors of crime. When I was a law student, I worked in a community legal clinic in Toronto. Interacting and advising women who were living with domestic coercion and violence was a sobering experience for me. I was privileged to work with lawyers in the violence against women and children sectors where I learned much more about the cycle of abuse, a malignant dynamic that was afflicting so many families. Later, when I worked as a family law lawyer, I encountered many women trying to navigate the legal system while simultaneously attempting to break free from the financial, emotional and social coercion that their intimate partners exercised over them. It had taken many years for some of them to even recognize they were victims of such control and manipulation. Isolation from their families, friends and social supports; restrictions to accessing their own money; and erosion of their self-worth and value through psychological manipulation were regular symptoms I encountered. Of course, there were limits to the help I could provide as a new lawyer, and I was grateful for the community groups and social supports that I was able to refer my clients to for that help. My early career as a family law litigator also taught me of the pervasive obstacles these women faced and continue to face in accessing justice through the legal system. My experiences with these women and their families inform the words I bring to this House today and ratify my support for our government’s action to protect them. Bill C-16 advances four core goals in protecting victims: strengthening the criminal law’s response to gender-based violence, including intimate partner violence and femicide; strengthening protections for children against sexual exploitation, particularly in online spaces; improving the treatment of victims; and addressing delays that undermine confidence in the justice system. I will focus today on how the bill would enhance the criminal justice system’s response to gender-based violence and improve protections for children from sexual exploitation. Every two days in Canada, a woman is killed by her intimate partner. This extreme form of violence is both devastating and disturbingly prevalent. These realities demand a strengthened and explicit response in our criminal law. We can strengthen the Criminal Code through Bill C-16 to ensure that murders occurring in certain aggravating circumstances are treated as first-degree murder, the most serious offence in the Criminal Code. These include murders of intimate partners that occur in the context of a pattern of coercive or controlling conduct, murders that occur in the context of sexual violence or exploitation, and murders motivated by hate, including based on gender. The bill would also treat manslaughter occurring in these same circumstances more seriously by requiring sentencing judges to consider imposing the penalty applicable to second-degree murder: 25 years of imprisonment. Importantly, Bill C-16 would explicitly refer to these killings as femicide. Words matter, and naming these crimes matters. In doing so, we recognize and acknowledge that women and girls are disproportionately the victims of these forms of homicide, and it reflects victims’ lived realities. While femicide represents the most extreme form of gender-based violence, such violence often takes many other forms, including mental abuse. Abusers may exert control by isolating intimate partners from family and friends, monitoring communications, controlling finances or making threats involving children. This pattern of coercive or controlling conduct often precedes intimate partner femicide. Through the protecting victims act, a new offence would criminalize engaging in a pattern of coercive or controlling conduct toward an intimate partner. The new offence is modelled on Scotland’s approach, which is widely regarded as the gold standard because it does not require proof that the victim feared for their safety. Clearly defining “coercive control” in the Criminal Code is intended to help law enforcement identify the true aggressor in intimate partner violence cases and reduce the risk of dual charging by requiring a contextual assessment of power imbalances and patterns of exploitation of vulnerabilities. This approach recognizes that coercive controllers often target vulnerabilities, while violence used by victims is often defensive. The new offence would be supported by training to support the offence being applied by law enforcement in a manner consistent with its core objective of protecting victims. To complement these reforms, the protecting victims act would modernize the criminal harassment offence by removing the need to prove the victim’s subjective fear, instead requiring proof that a reasonable person in the victim’s circumstances would perceive a threat to their physical or psychological safety, reducing the need for survivors to relive their trauma in court. The protecting victims act would also respond to an emerging form of digital-based gender violence: sexual deepfakes. While child sexual abuse material is already criminalized regardless of whether images are real or fictional, the existing offence for non-consensual distribution of intimate images does not clearly capture AI-generated images that are indistinguishable from real ones. Bill C-16 would address this gap by ensuring that sexual deepfake depictions of identifiable persons that appear real and are distributed without consent are treated the same as real intimate images, affirming that consent is required regardless of how the image is created. The bill would also criminalize threatening to distribute intimate images, including deepfakes, to address sextortion and intimidation and would increase the maximum penalty for the offence from five to 10 years’ imprisonment. The proposed legislation contains a range of measures to better protect children from sexual exploitation, including online. For example, significant concerns have been expressed about child sexual offence mandatory minimum penalties, MMPs. While Parliament has been signalling that sexual crimes against children should be treated as far more grave by increasing MMPs, courts have struck many of these MMPs down as violations of section 12 of the charter, which characterizes them as cruel and unusual punishment. Our government is responding to this through the proposed protecting victims act. We propose to reinforce these MMPs for predators who create, possess or distribute child sexual abuse and exploitation material by allowing judicial discretion, in rare cases, where applying an MMP would be grossly disproportionate in the facts of the case before the court. The protecting victims act would ensure those who prey on our kids face prison time for the most heinous crimes imaginable, by reviving 13 MMPs for child sexual offences that were previously struck down by courts. This approach is designed to protect and preserve mandatory minimum penalties while ensuring they continue to apply to the serious crimes they are intended for, thereby addressing the court’s constitutional concerns under section 12 of the charter, cruel and unusual punishment. It is an approach that members of the opposition have supported very well. The protecting victims act also proposes reforms that would modernize offences that target sexual exploitation, sextortion and child luring and child sexual abuse and exploitation material. These reforms include creating a new offence that would prohibit threatening to distribute child sexual abuse and exploitation material; expanding the child-luring offence so it would explicitly apply to those who communicate with children to sextort them; criminalizing the distribution of bestiality depictions, including deepfake ones, which is conduct that is known to be used to manipulate children for sexual purposes; expanding certain child sexual offences to protect children from those who may invite them to expose their own sexual organs for a sexual purpose, including where no physical touching occurs; and ensuring Canadians who sexually assault children abroad could be prosecuted at home. The proposed reforms also seek to strengthen requirements for Internet service providers under the mandatory reporting act, which imposes duties on Internet service providers, including one to notify police when their services are used to commit a child sexual abuse and exploitation material offence. Service providers would have to preserve data for a longer period of time and transmit critical information to law enforcement. The act would also more clearly cover a broader range of online platforms and would extend the limitation period for the prosecution of offence under that act. Finally, to address those who recruit and involve youth in the commission of criminal offences, Bill C-16 proposes to create a new offence that would prohibit recruiting, counselling, encouraging or inviting a young person to be party to a criminal offence. These reforms are necessary. They move Canada forward toward a justice system that recognizes modern forms of abuse, protects survivors before it is too late and refuses to allow predators to hide in technology, bureaucracy or legal loopholes. I mentioned earlier that every two days a woman in Canada is killed by her intimate partner. That day came for Darian Hailey Henderson-Bellman, a 25-year-old woman who lived in my riding. She was killed by her intimate partner, a man who had numerous interactions with law enforcement and should never have been released into society after he was previously charged with domestic violence. The system failed Darian and her family, but her murder is not in vain. Through the valiant and dedicated work of her parents, Flo and Paul Henderson, Darian’s story has been shared and discussed, including in this very House. Darian’s story and those like hers play a key role in the fabric of this legislation. We owe it to women living under the shadow of coercive control, we owe it to the children who are confronted with threats on their phones and we owe it to victims who wait for years for justice only to be turned away. Laws shape culture, and culture shapes safety. When we call femicide by its name, we expose misogyny for what it is. When we prosecute sextortion, we protect dignity. When we protect children, we protect our country’s future. When we expand victims’ rights, we honour their courage. I implore everyone in the House to support these reforms because safety is not optional, dignity is not negotiable and justice should not be a privilege; it must be a guarantee.