Bill C-247 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Criminal Code (controlling or coercive conduct)

This enactment amends the Criminal Code to create an offence of engaging in controlling or coercive conduct that has a significant impact on the person towards whom the conduct is directed, including a fear of violence, a decline in their physical or mental health and a substantial adverse effect on their day-to-day activities.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses.

Ms. Stephens, you have noted operational challenges in incorporating coercive and controlling behaviour into the Criminal Code.

You spoke of the English experience. In England, we have seen the law now on the books for about six years, relatively few charges, but not that great in the number of convictions, which would perhaps speak to some of the operational challenges you mentioned.

Mr. Garrison has tabled a bill, C-247, which you referenced. You said in your view it would be unduly complicated. You spoke of the fact that there could be amendments to the bill that could perhaps improve it.

Could you elaborate on what could be done to perhaps strengthen this bill or is your broader point that we shouldn't be going down this road?

[Megan Stephens, Acting Executive Director and General Counsel, Women's Legal Education and Action Fund]

Thank you so much.

My name is Megan Stephens. I'm the acting executive director and general counsel at the Women's Legal Education & Action Fund, LEAF. I am grateful for the opportunity to appear here today from Tkaronto, The Dish With One Spoon Territory, as part of your study on coercive and controlling behaviour.

For 36 years, LEAF has worked to advance the equality rights of women and girls through litigation, law reform and public education. LEAF has long advocated for the need to improve the justice system’s response to gender-based violence, including intimate partner violence or domestic violence.

I want to start by thanking you for taking the time to study coercive control. This work is really important, because intimate partner violence remains a pervasive and widespread problem in this country.

We know the status quo is not working. One in three women in Canada experience domestic violence and other forms of gender-based violence. The risks of such violence are greater for women who live with multiple intersecting inequalities, including indigenous, Black and racialized women, women with disabilities and migrant women.

We also know that over the course of the last year, as much of the world's attention has been focused on the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been another shadow pandemic playing out as lockdowns have isolated women with their abusive partners. Frontline workers in shelters and transition homes across the country have reported increases in physical violence, as well as a dramatic rise in reports of coercive control being used by partners.

Coercive control may be a relatively new concept to many of you, but it has long been recognized by both frontline service providers and academics as lying at the core of intimate partner violence. While there are many different working definitions of coercive control, it's generally understood as a course of intimidating, degrading and regulatory practices used by abusers to instill fear and threat into the everyday lives of their victims. Importantly, it's a highly gendered practice that often seeks to maintain or expand the gender-based privilege of a male partner.

While I commend you for this study, I also want to underscore the importance of proceeding carefully in your work. In my submission, it would be a mistake to rush to criminalize coercive control without thinking through the potential unintended consequences of criminalization. While such a move might be symbolically powerful, we have unfortunately seen too often how the criminal justice system can be weaponized, revictimizing those it seeks to protect.

There are, in my respectful submission, important operational, policing and prosecutorial challenges associated with the proposed criminalization of coercive control, all of which require careful consideration.

In terms of the operational challenges, it will not be easy to transplant the concept of coercive control from clinical and academic contexts into the criminal law. The concept covers a broad range of conduct and is the subject of multiple definitions—as many as 22 by one academic’s recent count. If coercive control is to be criminalized, the elements of the offence should be clear and draw on terminology and language used elsewhere in Canadian criminal law. Adding an overly complicated new offence to the Criminal Code won’t help survivors.

I am concerned that Bill C-247, which draws heavily on the British legislation, is in its current iteration unduly complex and would require some modification.

Assuming you could operationalize an offence of coercive control, there will also be challenges in ensuring that police officers are able to understand and identify reports of coercive control. Extensive training would be essential for police across the country. Even with the training, the U.K. experience suggests that many police are still struggling to see coercive control as worthy of criminal charges.

Another more significant policing challenge is that many survivors, particularly those from marginalized or vulnerable communities, face real barriers to reporting, including a distrust of police. Real work is needed to restore the trust of survivors in police and the justice system more generally.

Finally, as someone who spent more than a decade working as a Crown prosecutor before joining LEAF, I think there would be significant challenges associated with the prosecution of coercive control.

I am especially concerned about the potential impact of prosecutions on complainants. As drafted, the offence requires proof both that the accused’s actions could reasonably be expected to have a significant impact on the victim, meaning that it was objectively reasonable to have that impact, and that they have in fact had such an impact, meaning that complainants will need to give evidence about how they have been affected by the conduct.

This could lead to the revictimization of women as they navigate the criminal justice system, having to testify about their experiences, having their credibility impugned, and opening them up to invasive requests for access to their medical or therapeutic records to call into question whether and how they have been impacted.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to the witnesses.

It's certainly helpful to look at what other jurisdictions have done as we consider Bill C-247 as well as the issue of coercive control more broadly.

Ms. Illingworth, you noted that several U.S. states have passed laws in this area. I actually wasn't aware of that. I understood that there is a bill in the New York general assembly. As well, in the State of Tennessee, it's my understanding that its law on false imprisonment has been amended to include categories of behaviours that constitute domestic false imprisonment.

Can you point to the other states so that we could give those laws consideration as we study this very important issue?

[Andrea Silverstone, Executive Director, Sagesse Domestic Violence Prevention Society]

Good afternoon, Ms. Khalid and members of the justice committee. Thank you for having me today and for providing me with the opportunity to discuss a topic I am incredibly passionate about: coercive control as a framework for understanding and addressing violence.

I am the executive director of Sagesse Domestic Violence Prevention Society, which is a provincial organization in Alberta that supports individuals, organizations and communities to disrupt the structures of violence. I am also a graduate student at the University of Salford in Manchester, United Kingdom, working towards the completion of my master's degree in the psychology of coercive control.

Coercive control is a pattern of behaviour that seeks to strip away a person's freedom and their sense of self. It is a liberty crime. Focusing on coercive control as a criminal offence is crucially important in devising measurements of criminality, because it reflects the multiple tactics of coercion and control employed by perpetrators of violence.

The current framework of criminal offence does not reflect the experiences of victimization or the harm perpetrated to victims of domestic violence. This is evidenced by high attrition rates, sentencing data and low conviction rates in cases of domestic violence.

Relationships with coercive control result in greater injury to the victim and are characterized by more frequent and severe violence that's less likely to desist. The increase in severity makes the need for legal intervention in cases of coercive control even more imperative, in order to interrupt the escalation and frequency of abuse.

Because the current criminal framework to address domestic violence does not take into account coercive control, the justice system is not viewed by many victims or victims' advocates as a tool to address domestic violence in society. This is evident not only through the low conviction rates and high attrition rates I already mentioned, but also through the fact that less than a quarter of victims of domestic violence report it to the police.

It should be noted that when the justice system in the United Kingdom changed its working definition of domestic violence—years before the legal system changed to make coercive control a criminal offence—calls to the police increased by 31%. This is because once the definition changed to encompass the true experience of the severity of coercive control, victims believed that the abuse they were experiencing would be addressed by the police and, by extension, the courts.

Because our current criminal justice system focuses only on events that are deemed criminal offences, it ends up excluding many other threats that make up ongoing coercive control, blinding the justice system and leaving it without the tools to actually address violence in our society.

I've been working in the domestic violence sector for over 20 years, and I believe that including coercive control as a criminal offence is a game-changer. It's going to give the justice system the opportunity to intervene in violence before it escalates. Coercive control is present in 95% of relationships where there's domestic violence. It's one of the best indicators of lethality. If the police and justice system have the ability to address coercive and controlling behaviour criminally, it's going to allow them to prevent the escalation of domestic violence.

It will change how society views domestic violence. If our justice system puts the lens of coercive control on domestic violence, it will create a discourse in the public in which all Canadians will understand that violence is much more than a black eye and that people stay in violent relationships because of a loss of personal agency. It will destigmatize domestic violence, allowing us as a society to do a better job of addressing violence.

It will save our system of care—non-profit agencies, police and health—and businesses money. It's way more economical to intervene before the domestic abuse becomes physical. It allows the perpetrators to get support before the lethality of their crime increases. It breaks the stigma around domestic violence, allowing both victims and perpetrators to get support.

Domestic violence is at epidemic rates in Canada and is rapidly increasing due to the effects of COVID. We need to improve and innovate our approach to addressing and stopping the violence before it escalates. Making coercive control a criminal offence in Canada is our opportunity to do this.

I'd like to end by making four recommendations. The first is that we immediately implement a new nationwide working definition of domestic violence to reflect coercive and controlling behaviour. The second is that the Canadian criminal law be changed to reflect the criminality of coercive and controlling behaviour. The third is that support be provided for nationwide training for police, judges and Crown prosectors on the framework of coercive control and domestic violence. The last is that we appoint a coercive control and abuse commissioner for Canada, with expertise in all forms of abuse, to provide public leadership and expertise to legislators about abuse issues and to play a key role in overseeing and monitoring the provision of abuse responses with a focus on coercive control.

I want to take this opportunity to thank Mr. Garrison for bringing forward his private member's bill and bringing attention to this issue, and I want to thank the committee for allowing me the opportunity to present to you today on an issue that is so important to me and for all Canadians.

I look forward to the opportunity to answer any questions and to continuing this dialogue.

[Heidi Illingworth, Ombudsman, Office of the Federal Ombudsman for Victims of Crime]

Madam Chair, thank you for inviting me to appear here today.

I am the federal ombudsperson for victims of crime. My office is an independent, arm’s-length organization within the Department of Justice Canada. We work with victims by taking and reviewing their complaints and making recommendations to federal decision-makers to ensure that victims are treated fairly and with respect across the criminal justice system.

I want to pay my respects to the first nations, Métis and Inuit ancestors, and affirm my office’s commitment to respectful relationships with one another and this land.

I would like to begin by thanking the honourable member Randall Garrison for his efforts to bring awareness to the issue of coercive control in Canada. I do appreciate that the subject is very meaningful to him personally. In fact, my office commissioned a paper on this subject last spring and I wrote to the Minister of Justice to request that he introduce such legislation. This is because at my office, we hear regularly from survivors of intimate partner violence who feel that they are not heard, believed or treated fairly when they report their experiences to the police. That is why there is a need, in my view, for legislation to criminalize coercive control, which is a pervasive form of psychological violence.

Briefly, coercive control consists of repeated behaviours that aim to isolate and intimidate an intimate partner. These behaviours can include limiting the victim’s freedom, verbal abuse and threats of harm to the victim, their child or pet.

Currently, IPV is approached as an incident-based problem. It is treated as an episodic or one-time event and the repetitive dynamics of coercive control are not recognized. This makes it extremely difficult for law enforcement to intervene effectively. Experts have identified coercive controlling behaviours as important precursors for femicide worldwide. This harmful and dangerous behaviour has been criminalized in other jurisdictions, such as England and Wales, Ireland, Scotland and several American states.

As you undertake this study, it is important to consult with diverse experts who serve survivors on the front lines. It is also critical to apply a GBA+ analysis and hear the lived experiences of survivors, especially those from indigenous communities, Black people, people of colour, individuals with disabilities and members of the 2SLGBTQQIA community to ensure diverse voices are considered.

The following data shows us how prevalent intimate partner violence is in Canada. In 2020, between January and September, the Calgary Police Service responded to 15,038 domestic incidents. This is 55 calls a day in a city with a population of approximately 1.5 million. In Winnipeg, a city with some 817,000 residents, they typically record 16,000 domestic incidents a year. That’s 44 per day. Statistics show us that victims of IPV are disproportionately female. We also know that this plagues our society and costs us billions of dollars every year.

Honourable members, I put this to you: It has to stop. That is why I support the study of this legislation. Several provisions of Bill C-247 bring positive change for victims. I especially welcome the proposed broad definitions of the concept of connection found in proposed subsection (3).

We are submitting a written submission as well, which will address some of these issues more fulsomely.

Honourable members, I would like to say in closing that I believe the Canadian legal and justice systems must be more responsive to the lived realities of victims and survivors. I work directly with survivors, and that is why I think it is time that we address this gap. Victims deserve access to justice, which is often not possible due to our limited legislative framework. By making Criminal Code amendments, we can improve women and children’s safety. We must also take the time to address the current police limitations in recognizing these coercive and controlling behaviours.

I welcome the opportunity to answer your questions. Thank you.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

Thanks very much.

Ms. Isshak, certainly the private member's bill I proposed is one suggested tool for dealing with this problem of coercive, controlling behaviour. You talked about an integrated legal response. Very quickly, can you give me some idea of the other measures that you had in mind?

[Genevieve Isshak, Clinical Director of Residential and Community Services, Hiatus House]

Thank you, everyone.

As the clinical director of residential and community services at Hiatus House in Windsor-Essex, Ontario, I really appreciate the opportunity to speak with all of you with respect to Bill C-247.

Our mission at Hiatus House is to break the cycle of domestic violence, one family at a time, by providing 24-hour crisis help and emergency shelter to abused women and their children. This is combined with public education, research and specialized counselling services for all family members impacted by domestic violence.

We know that one in four women have reported that they have experienced domestic violence. Because this does not include the unreported instances, we believe this number is closer to one in three, which is similar to what the World Health Organization reports worldwide. Keeping these numbers in mind, I would like to ask you to just consider how many of you know or have known of a family member, neighbour, co-worker or friend who has experienced domestic violence. Should one of these women in your life ever need assistance, Hiatus House is the only shelter for women experiencing domestic violence in Windsor-Essex.

Amidst the current pandemic, we know that survivors of gender-based violence are most at risk of violence in their own homes. We know that the most common location of abuse for women and their children is in their homes. We hear the necessary pandemic messaging that staying home is staying safe, but what happens when home isn’t a safe place to begin with? Being coerced to stay home results in people feeling even more isolated and leaves little opportunity for escaping their abuser and finding safety.

Abusive partners use isolation—both physical and psychological—as a means to control their partner’s contact with friends and family to emotionally bind the partner to them with the shackles of fear, dependency and coercive tactics of control.

We know that the risk to women in abusive relationships is dynamic and that these women are subject to isolation, emotional and psychological abuse and controlling acts of violence. This abuse invariably escalates over time. These abusive behaviours are intended to cause fear and gain power and control over a woman’s thoughts, beliefs and actions. Controlling another person’s thoughts, beliefs and actions does not require specific overt acts of violence, although those acts certainly may be occurring as well.

As such, the bill will help keep women safe and hold abusive partners accountable for their violence, whether that is an overt act of violence or the type of emotional and psychological abuse that is most common in the intimate abusive relationships that I have just detailed.

Our interest in the bill is focused on the safety of women who are subjected to gender-based violence including intimate partner abuse, and the eradication of all forms of gender-based violence. We are grateful for the possibilities that the bill offers and commend MP Garrison for his initiative in bringing this critical piece of legislation forward.

As you are all well aware, the question of finding the most appropriate criminal response to intimate partner abuse has challenged the violence against women movement, politicians, policy-makers and shelters for decades. While we think Bill C-247 offers important ideas, we believe it is imperative to also take the time for a fulsome and inclusive discussion about integrated legal responses before committing to just one approach.

We believe that the national action plan on violence against women currently in development is important to consider. Such an inclusive discussion would ensure that unintended negative consequences as well as possible benefits—of any law or policy reform—are carefully considered and appropriate and adequate resources are put into place to support those reforms. We urge you to create space for these diverse voices when the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights examines this bill.

We also offer our input at any time it may be helpful. Our expertise and experience over many decades of working with women with diverse experiences of violence has taught us much in the implementation. We concur with the intent of the bill and value its genesis in the context of COVID-19-related surges in intimate partner violence.

With that, I thank this committee for inviting my opinion on behalf of Hiatus House today. I hope that you will consider providing careful study and adequate resources to effectively and appropriately implement the bill and allow it to accomplish its well-intended goals.

An end to violence against women and their children in Windsor and Essex County and across all of Canada—creating a life where all family members are empowered to live violence-free—is our vision for the future.

Thank you,

[Professor Janine Benedet, Dean pro tem and Professor of Law, Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia, As an Individual]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Thank you to the members of the committee for inviting me to participate in this hearing.

As you heard, I'm a professor of law at the University of British Columbia and my research focuses on legal responses to violence against women, with a particular focus in recent years on sexual violence. I'm pleased to see that this committee is seriously considering how to address the problem of coercive control in intimate relationships, which is inflicted in most cases by men against women and girls.

I think it is important to note that while addressing this problem may serve to prevent further serious violence, and certainly the private member's bill in question speaks to the terrible mass killings in Nova Scotia, it's also important to understand that this coercive and controlling behaviour causes great harm to victims, affecting their sense of self-worth and throwing up real barriers to accessing the resources they need to get away from an abuser.

It's also important, and I would say this based on my own work, to recognize that coercive control may be a precursor to sexual violence in addition to or instead of physical violence. I agree with the aims of the bill, and in general I think such an offence could be useful for police and Crown counsel. I can see that this offence forms a useful middle step between an assault charge and a peace bond in some cases.

Having said that, I think it does bear saying as well that there is a history of some police and Crowns failing to use the tools they already have at their disposal, and creating one more offence will not solve the troubling tendency to disbelieve women when they report violence or the lack of other supports in the community to address the violence that they experience.

In the time remaining to me in my opening remarks, I would like to address some of the relationships and behaviour that may be overlooked when we speak of coercive control and mention a couple of features of the text of the offence that could raise concerns about whether it will achieve its important aims.

For the past several years my colleague, Isabel Grant, and I have been researching sexual violence across women's lifespans, focusing on the particular challenges that arise when prosecuting sexual assault against older women and against teenage girls, for example.

In our research we saw numerous examples of coercive control against these victims that were age-specific. For example, in our study of cases involving teenage girls we saw that the single-largest group of perpetrators were male family members, most often fathers but sometimes brothers, uncles and grandfathers. Most of these men lived with the girl in question but some did not. Controlling behaviours included controlling what a girl could wear, taking away any privacy she might have, isolating her from other family members and friends, and refusing to let her go to school or ride the bus. In one case we reviewed, a father refused to let his daughter speak to her brother, going so far as to separate them at meals so that they couldn't have contact with each other.

In the cases of older women, our primary conclusion was that the barriers to detection and prosecution when the abuser is a family member are significant. In the cases we could find we saw coercive behaviour by husbands but also sons, nephews, and grandsons. These sometimes took age-specific forms such as controlling access to necessary medication or doctor's visits or cutting the woman off from transportation so that she wasn't able to get around on her own. It also included cases of making the woman believe that she was forgetful and incompetent, that she was in the early stages of dementia and, therefore, couldn't manage her own affairs.

I want to say that while it is spousal or dating relationships that may come to mind first when we think about coercive control, I would urge the committee not to overlook these other kinds of relationships in which this behaviour also occurs and is often a precursor to other violence.

I'll conclude by saying there's a lot to discuss here in terms of the offence itself, in particular, the mental element. Fundamentally, what I would say is that it's important not to create an offence that replicates some of the problems we've had with the criminal harassment or stalking offence, and I see some of those challenges here.

I'm looking forward to discussing that more with the members of the committee.

[Nathalie Levman]

Do you mean of the private member's bill, Bill C-247?

[Nathalie Levman]

The scholarship does address that. There are other articles as well that look at the implementation of the offence in the U.K. and talk about difficulties with gathering the evidence, including difficulties with law enforcement even being able to recognize that this is, in fact, what's going on, particularly, for example, when the incident comes to the law enforcement's attention because of one violent episode. They have to be able to situate that in a pattern of conduct that may have taken place over months or years. That can be a struggle. Of course, the evidence would come, as you're pointing out, from the victim herself. I will use gendered language because the statistics support me on that.

Before I turn it over to my colleague from WAGE, if I could move quickly to the other side, which is that there are also criminologists who are recommending some caution with respect to enacting and developing these types of offences, in particular from the U.K. and Australia. You may know that New South Wales is considering a private member's bill very similar to C-247.

I would bring the committee's attention to an article called “The Criminalisation of Coercive Control: The Power of Law?”, which is in the International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy. I found that very informative and you may, too.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

As this is the first day of our study on coercive and controlling behaviour, I just want to take a second to put on the record how we got here. If we were doing a normal study of a private member's bill, as the sponsor of Bill C-247 I would get to make an introductory remark. Let me just say a couple of things briefly.

At the beginning of the pandemic I did a phone-around to the two independent police forces and two RCMP detachments in my riding. All four of those police commanders, when asked what the main thing was that they were seeing in the pandemic, first remarked on the increase in domestic violence calls. It was interesting that it was across the riding. It was interesting that it was the immediate response of all four.

When I had a discussion with them about how police felt about that, they very quickly raised their frustration that their ability to act was limited only to the most serious physical violence and their frustration at their inability to address issues of coercive and controlling behaviour, which quite often—almost always, in fact—are associated with more direct forms of physical violence.

I did a call-around, then, to the service providers for women's groups and women's shelter organizations in my riding and, of course, found the very same thing, that they reported a very sharp increase in demand for their services. Interestingly, they reported the same frustration. In the attempt to try to keep their clients safe, they were frustrated by the inability of the police to act until it was much later on in the relationship.

As a result of those conversations, I began to look at what more we could do as a society to address this problem. The British example was brought to my attention by Mitzi Dean, a local MLA who is now the Minister of Children and Family Development in British Columbia.

I drafted a private member's bill, Bill C-247, which is modelled on the British law, so that we could look at whether this addition to the Criminal Code could help provide another tool for addressing the problems of domestic violence in this country.

The second part was to try to get more people to discuss and be aware of what's being called by some a “shadow pandemic”. I then decided to put forward a motion to this committee to conduct this study.

For me, the study has two parts. One is to raise the profile of this very significant increase in domestic violence and intimate partner violence during the pandemic. The second is to look for solutions, which may involve my private member's bill, but there may be other solutions that we could adopt that would help address this problem.

That's how we got here this morning, from my point of view, and I'm really pleased to have the department officials here to help us try to address this problem. I'm certainly looking forward to the wide variety of witnesses we will have coming forward in later sessions.

We've had an attempt by the federal government to come forward with a strategy to reduce and address gender-based violence.

Ms. Smylie, has that strategy taken into account the phenomenon of coercive and controlling behaviour?

[Nathalie Levman]

My colleague, Stéphanie Bouchard, already gave our comments and tried to make some of those distinctions.

You know, of course, that traditional criminal law focuses in on incidents, so it's an incident-based approach. That said, there have been some exceptions to that rule in terms of more modern offences. The criminal harassment offence is in fact a very good example of that. It aims to address the overall impact or cumulative impact of behaviour that takes place over a period of time. That's precisely what this coercive control offence being proposed by Bill C-247—and which is also place in the United Kingdom, Scotland and Ireland—attempts to do. It is broader than our criminal harassment offence, but it takes a very similar approach to it in the sense that the legal test would be to look at the overall impact on the victim or the recipient of that type of conduct and to criminalize it and recognize that spousal abuse or intimate partner violence takes place over a period of time and often involves more subtle types of behaviour that serve to subjugate.

Evan Stark, who is one of the leading sociologists on this issue and has done a lot of research on it, talks about it being a kind of liberty crime resulting in the subjugation of the victim.

[Rhéal Fortin, Bloc, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I would like to thank the witnesses who are with us today. Domestic violence is an important issue, and any and all related factors are concerning, so I'm glad you're all here this morning.

I've looked at the overall situation, and the biggest question I have is this. How will the line between offences be drawn when it comes to domestic violence versus harassment versus coercive conduct? I realize Bill C-247 provides a definition. By the way, this morning, we are considering Mr. Garrison's motion, not the bill, but I appreciate that there is a connection and something of a definition.

Ideally, I would like to hear from all three of you, but since Ms. Farid is general counsel, perhaps she can answer. Nevertheless, you are all senior counsel, so I don't mind if one of you is especially keen to answer the question. What I'd really like to know is how the courts will distinguish between those three situations.

Ms. Farid, perhaps you can go first.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Certainly I want to thank you, Minister, for being here with us today. I also want to thank you for the spirit of collaboration and co-operation that you've always exhibited toward me when it comes to justice issues and the justice file.

I was very pleased to hear you mention domestic violence, or intimate partner violence, in your opening statement. I want to focus a little bit on this question.

When I first did a phone round of the many police forces and detachments in my riding in March because of COVID, every one of them raised the problem of a spike in family violence, domestic violence or intimate partner violence at the outset of COVID. I believe this is a continuing trend, and one that we will see exacerbated as many families struggle with loss of income and other challenges posed by COVID.

One thing the police said to me was that they often lack tools to deal with this question of violence before it becomes overt physical violence. I introduced a private member’s bill, Bill C-247, that tries to deal with the phenomenon of coercive and controlling behaviour, which quite often is a precursor to that violence. This would provide police with another tool that they could use to intervene earlier in intimate partner violence.

Minister, is the government interested in pursuing such an initiative, one that would help police to have additional tools to deal with intimate partner violence?

Criminal Code

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-247, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (controlling or coercive conduct).

Mr. Speaker, today I have a private members' bill that would help address domestic violence in Canada by making controlling or coercive conduct in an intimate relationship a criminal offence. Right now police often lack the ability to intervene in domestic violence cases before physical violence takes place, even though significant harm may have already been inflicted on one of the partners. People living in fear of violence should not have to wait to experience violence before receiving help and protection. This bill acknowledges that victims of controlling or coercive conduct suffer serious harms that are not overtly violent. Harms resulting from fear of violence often include declining mental and physical health, and limitations on the partner's ability to carry on an independent and autonomous life.

During this pandemic, governments have told Canadians to stay home to stay safe, but unfortunately not every home is a safe place. In fact, I know in my riding, as in most communities, police have seen a spike in domestic violence calls during the pandemic. Creating a new offence for controlling or coercive conduct will not only help stop the serious harm already being suffered, but also facilitate earlier intervention by police, which may avert physical violence later on.

If this bill had already been enforced, it might have been possible to prevent the shootings in Portapique, Nova Scotia, earlier this year. The shootings began with an incident of domestic violence between individuals whose problematic relationships had been brought to the attention of the police by neighbours and friends numerous times, though without ever rising to the level of physical violence that would have allowed police to act. This bill will fill that gap. The federal ombudsman for victims of crime has recently called for adding this kind of provision to our Criminal Code, and a similar bill has been enacted in the U.K.

I hope the government will support this private members' bill and help facilitate its early passage through the House.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)