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.