Thank you, Chair.
Thank you to everyone for having me. It's a privilege to be here.
The protection of victims is at the core of public safety. The federal government deserves credit for taking up several politically fraught issues at once, both long-standing and novel, but it's one thing to be able to tackle these problems and another to ensure that the policies are crafted in such a way that they meet the objective in substance and not just in style.
The fact that 10,000 cases are stayed or withdrawn annually is an affront to justice for the accused, victims and our general public safety. At MLI we've argued that legislative refinement of the Jordan framework is warranted, as the court's ceilings were not the product of data-driven analysis and institutional knowledge but were legislated from the bench. Parliament is on firmer ground when it deploys the additional resources and time it has at its disposal to find an appropriate solution to the issue, as it has here.
The bill's amendments are welcome in this regard, but they should go further by expressly recognizing organized crime and national security matters as categories that warrant special treatment. They involve issues that are unusually document-heavy and operationally complex, with cross-border evidence, multiple accused and intelligence sensitivity.
The image-based abuse reforms are among the strongest parts of the bill, but they too do not go far enough. For many victims, the core harm is that images stay up for far too long. Canada should learn from the recent American legislation, as we argued at MLI with Bridge2Future. This means a 48-hour takedown capacity with expectation and consequences for platforms that fail to act.
The concept of coercive control is well known and can be operationalized in a way that is precise. The bill is directionally right to include it, but the definition is dangerously loose as drafted. What counts as a “pattern” is undefined. Is it two acts or is it 10, and over what period? When does basic financial management become coercive control of economic resources? When do basic domestic disagreements—about parenting, let's say—become control over the manner in which a child is cared for? The definition, we argue, should be amended in line with what the concept in fact is: a sustained pattern of domination, intimidation, isolation and threatened consequences that deprive a person of ordinary agency within an intimate relationship.
To achieve that, a predicate offence—rather than a stand-alone model—where multiple acts are defined over a period of time, perhaps with Crown approval, would be superior. It would avoid excessive overcharges and the capture of basic disagreements and absurd scenarios, as I've illustrated, that could gum up the justice system. Scotland adopted this predicate approach and had 95% prosecution rates, whereas England, in its loosely defined model akin to what's in this legislation, had success rates of 13%.
Moving on to femicide, I argue that the language should be removed and that it can be without sacrificing any of the additional offence types or the severity that it is to be rightly associated with. Unlike organized crime, for example, which recognizes patterns of behaviour and clusters of offences under a concept with additional powers for police and prosecutors, along with penalties associated with it, “femicide” is a misleading term. It implies that someone has the intent of killing based on generalized misogyny. In reality, people generally have specific motives related to concrete facts and realities, not a generalized hatred of women.
Parliament is already ensuring harsher treatment for killings committed in the context of coercive control, sexual violence, trafficking or hate through this bill. The law can specify those aggravating features, require courts to consider more serious sentences where they're present and improve statistical tracking of violence against women without adopting activist terminology that is effectively a distinction without a difference.
With regard to minimum sentencing, the government is right to reassert Parliament's authority in this regard, but the safety-valve approach remains too deferential to the same jurisprudence that created the problem. Courts have stretched section 12 to second-guess sentencing policy that properly belongs to legislatures, and could do so again here. They could find, for example, that an offender's race or migration status warrants this special treatment, as they have been prone to. It's important to remember that there is, in fact, already a great deal of discretion in the law. Police decide what facts justify charges, prosecutors decide how to proceed, and in many cases the Crown can elect by indictment, summarily or under a different offence altogether, depending on the facts before them.
A better model would be mandatory minimums with a set of narrow and objective grounds that, when coupled with gross disproportionality, could qualify the offender for a lower sentence—things like the age of the victim, prior convictions or the use of violence or threats. That would preserve Parliament's sentencing signal and reduce opportunities for imaginative judicial revision.
To conclude, Bill C-16 is genuinely impressive in its scope and intent, but it must go beyond that to ensure that the laws are properly tailored to address the problem they're meant to. It must include less symbolism, beyond what may be attractive politically or most expedient to carry out.
