Justice Committee on April 15th, 2026

[Tamara Kronis, Conservative, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

If we have two accused who are convicted of kidnapping with a firearm, which has a five-year mandatory minimum, and who have equal participation in the crime but have different personal circumstances, the judge could, theoretically, give one of them a six-month sentence and the other one a six-year sentence, if the judge decided that the circumstances of one of the offenders warranted it.

[Angela Marinos]

Sentencing is, as you know, an individual exercise. Yes, there's a range.

I am not a criminal prosecutor. I should add that caveat.

Yes, presumably there is the possibility of getting two different sentences.

[Tamara Kronis, Conservative, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

There is also the principle of parity.

Let me put it this way. If the Supreme Court of Canada can use reasonable hypotheticals, then I've just laid out a reasonable hypothetical. You could have personal circumstances of the accused. How do we explain that to the victim?

[Angela Marinos]

It's really hard. When you look at the jurisprudence on mandatory minimums, for the most part, the court is not striking down the mandatory minimums for the specific offender. It's striking down the legislation for the reasonable hypothetical. Reasonable people can disagree.

I was an intervenor in Senneville. Intervenors don't have the right to take a position on the outcome. If you ask me my personal opinion, I would be siding with the dissent on that particular case.

Is a reasonable hypothetical reasonable? Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. There are five people who think one hypothetical is reasonable and four people who don't.

[Tamara Kronis, Conservative, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

If you're looking at it from the perspective of the victim, then where you're at in this particular scenario is that the two accused have participated equally. The impact on the victim is the same.

[Angela Marinos]

That's right.

[Tamara Kronis, Conservative, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

However, the court is going to put the interests of one of those accused ahead of the interests of the victims.

[Angela Marinos]

In Senneville, I always took the court back to the fact that we were dealing with hundreds and hundreds of images of mostly little girls, age three to 10, that these two accused had.

Explaining to those victims.... What I said to the Supreme Court of Canada was that these are not victimless crimes. We may not know who these children are. They have names, but they're unidentified. They are often unidentifiable, but it doesn't mean they're victimless. I completely agree it would be very difficult to explain why this decision was struck down, but there you have it.

[Tamara Kronis, Conservative, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you, Ms. Kronis.

Next, we have Mr. Housefather.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses.

Thank you so much, Ms. Cooke, for telling your story.

Ms. Marinos, you were able to bring forward three of the five main points you had in your brief. Do you want to briefly summarize the other two for everyone?

[Angela Marinos]

The other two have to do with records, and they have to do with restorative justice.

The restorative justice is very simple in our view. We need to ensure that complainants' voices and inputs are integrated into the restorative justice process, and there needs to be some sort of safety valve for the situation where everyone agrees that restorative justice is a good process but then it doesn't work. What happens then?

The second one was therapeutic records, adding section 286.4, which we think is missing from the area of records and also adding current and potential harm to the subject of the record or therapeutic record as a factor that can be considered. This is basically ensuring that the confidentiality of the complainant's personal information is respected.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

I want to get to your specific recommendation related to section 276. I understand, which I hadn't been aware of, you're an intervenor in R v. A.M.

[Angela Marinos]

Yes.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

As I understand it, we've added in a phrase “or any other offence under this Act that is of a sexual nature or that is committed for a sexual purpose”. You're concerned that the general provision may not deal with some offences where the argument will be made that they're not necessarily sexual offences.

[Angela Marinos]

That's right.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Can you explain to everyone what that means and why we should be amending the bill?

[Angela Marinos]

This came up in R v. A.M. squarely where the defence counsel was arguing that they wanted to cross-examine the complainant, not on the sexual services part of the offence but on running your own business and being an independent contractor. This was a commercial element.

When I saw that phrase, the appeal was under publication ban, but one of the questions that came up when this phrase was mentioned was that this is rife for litigation. Do we want more litigation? We want less litigation, and I say that as a litigation lawyer.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

As I understood it from your brief, you're suggesting we take the therapeutic records section of the law and add those sections to this section.

[Angela Marinos]

That's right. We'd make it consistent. There is case law that says that clause 276 and the records and therapeutic records scheme are parallel systems with the addition of 286.4, which isn't included.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

That makes a lot of sense. I appreciate that because, again, this is new. I hadn't thought of the fact that the general would not include the specific, so thank you.

I want to go to the next point you had made about exploitation, which in the current draft requires a reasonable expectation that the person's safety or that of a person known to them would be threatened.

[Angela Marinos]

That's right.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Again, at first blush when I read that I thought that made a lot of sense and that it's a well-drafted provision. What you're saying, however, is that there are ways of threatening somebody that don't involve their physical safety. Can you get into that and explain it to us? For example, if I threaten to burn your house down but you're not in it, then I'm not threatening your safety. I'm threatening your property, which is equally, to some extent, important because it's the whole value that you've created over your life.

Can you explain that for us?

[Angela Marinos]

That's exactly right, and it's coming directly from the R v. A.M. case, in which the complainant told the police, “He threatened to burn my house down. He threatened to kill my cat.” If you look at the provision as it stands, as you said, it only covers their safety or the safety of a person known to them. It doesn't cover threats like, “I'm going to burn your house down when you're not there,” or “I'm going to burn your parents' house down,” or “I'm going to kill your pet if you don't do these things.”

If we're making these changes, why not add the fuller panoply of the manipulation tactics and threats that traffickers use?

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Introduce the word “manipulation”, which is not currently there in the definition.