Evidence of meeting #26 for Justice and Human Rights in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was harm.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Leah Zille Co-Chair of the Board, Child and Youth Advocacy Centres of Canada
Thank you, Chair and members of the committee, for the invitation—
Bloc
The Vice-Chair (Rhéal Éloi Fortin) Bloc Rhéal Fortin
Ms. Zille, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I have to mention the other participants before I give you the floor. That was my mistake.
We also have, Lindsay Jolie, chief operating officer of the Boost Child and Youth Advocacy Centre; Marta Hajek, executive director of Elder Abuse Prevention Ontario; and Dr. Naomi Parker, co-director of the Kindex Research and Knowledge Centre.
Each of you will have five minutes for your opening remarks. The committee members will then have questions for you.
Ms. Zille, you now have the floor for five minutes.
Co-Chair of the Board, Child and Youth Advocacy Centres of Canada
Thank you, Chair and members of the committee, for the invitation to appear today.
My name is Leah Zille, and I am here today on behalf of Child and Youth Advocacy Centres of Canada. I am joining you from Port Moody, British Columbia, on the ancestral and unceded homelands of the Kwikwetlem, Tsleil-Waututh, Musqueam, Squamish, Katzie, Kwantlen, Qayqayt and Stó꞉lō peoples. I am grateful to live and work on this land.
In partnership with Kindex, we have submitted a written brief outlining the research, systems context and key issues raised by Bill C-16. Today I will focus on how these issues show up in the day-to-day realities of the children we support as they move through the court process.
Across the country, child and youth advocacy centres support children and youth who have experienced abuse. We bring police, child protection, victim services, and medical and mental health supports together around the child with the goal of reducing further trauma and limiting how often children have to share what happened to them. We do this work because we know children can heal. How systems respond plays a critical role in that.
When children come to us, they are already carrying far more than they should have to. We see the fear, the confusion, the shame, the hurt. Our 51 CYACs across Canada are designed to support them in a trauma-informed way, but those same children still need to move through a justice system that was not designed with children in mind.
We are encouraged by Bill C-16 and strongly support its direction. That said, we see a clear opportunity to strengthen how this bill shapes the court experience for children and youth.
I'd like to highlight the importance of strengthening access to testimonial aids. We cannot overstate the impact the courthouse experience can have on a child.
Picture an eight-year-old walking into a courthouse, arriving at the same time as the accused. They wait for hours, not really understanding what will happen. Waiting causes their anxiety to build. They are brought into a room full of adults and asked to speak about deeply personal experiences with all eyes on them, answering the same questions in different ways, pressed to be sure and to repeat details. Many leave that experience feeling unsure of themselves or as though they were not believed. That can be devastating, but that is the context in which we are asking children to participate.
Children provide their best evidence when they feel safe and supported. Testimonial aids are not extras; they are essential supports that make participation possible. Bill C-16 takes important steps to strengthen recognition of these supports and improve transparency when their use is not granted, but we are concerned with the challenges with consistent application.
These supports are still often treated as something that must be requested or decided late, rather than as tools that strengthen participation and the quality of evidence. For children and youth, testimonial aids should be presumptive, not exceptional. They should be considered early and applied consistently across jurisdictions, because when they are not, what we see is increased anxiety, difficulty participating and, in some cases, children disengaging from the process altogether.
Legislative reform is an important step, but it is not enough. For these changes to be effective in practice, the committee should ensure that programs providing testimonial aids are properly resourced to meet increased demand and that supports such as accredited facility dogs and remote testimony rooms are consistently available. This will require strong federal, provincial and territorial collaboration to ensure effective implementation on the ground.
We also need adequate resources, training and infrastructure to support consistent application and equitable access across the country, because access should not depend on where a child lives or who is involved in their case.
A similar challenge shows up when it comes to advancing victims' rights, particularly in access to information. Families are often left trying to piece together what is happening. They do not always know what comes next or what to ask for. That uncertainty creates stress for caregivers, and that stress directly affects a child's ability to heal.
Strengthening the Canadian Victims Bill of Rights is an important step. It reinforces the right to information and begins to shift responsibility onto the system, but in practice much of the system still depends on families knowing what to ask for. Information should be proactive, clear and timely, not something families have to seek out. Families should receive core information about what is happening, what comes next, what supports are available and how their child will be supported, along with a consistent point of contact. When information is clear, families are better able to support their child and children are better able to stay engaged.
In closing, I want to reiterate that we are in support of Bill C-16. It reflects important progress, including in its recognition of online harms, while also pointing to the need for a more comprehensive and coordinated response to the risks children face in digital environments.
Accountability also matters, and sentencing should reflect the seriousness of harm to children. However, what matters most to families is how the system functions along the way—that it is timely, coordinated and avoids adding further harm.
We know children can heal when the systems around them support that healing. How our systems respond matters. The justice system is an integral part of that response. This is an opportunity to get that right.
We would encourage the committee to ensure that this legislation supports and protects children in healing so that they can move forward with their lives and get back to feeling like kids again.
Thank you.
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The Vice-Chair (Rhéal Éloi Fortin) Bloc Rhéal Fortin
Thank you, Ms. Zille.
Ms. Jolie, you have the floor for five minutes.
Lindsay Jolie Chief Operating Officer, Boost Child & Youth Advocacy Centre
Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. My name is Lindsay Jolie. I am the chief operating officer at Boost Child and Youth Advocacy Centre, located in Toronto, Ontario. Thank you for the opportunity to address the committee today.
Boost CYAC is a multidisciplinary community-based organization that provides a coordinated response to children, youth and families impacted by abuse and violence. As one of Canada's leading CYACs, for over four decades we have served thousands of children and families each year through partnerships with police, child protection, health care and mental health services.
Through this work, we see first-hand the full trajectory of harm, from the bravery of first disclosure through investigation, testifying at court, mental health supports and ongoing services.
What we see with the clients we support are not isolated incidents. We see continual patterns of children being contacted, groomed, manipulated, threatened and harmed. These situations escalate quickly, are increasingly facilitated by technology and have immediate and severe impacts. By the time a situation meets a criminal threshold, harm has already occurred.
Within that context, Boost CYAC supports key elements of Bill C‑16 that reflect these realities.
We are very supportive of two distinct but related aspects of this bill.
First, the recognition of AI-generated and manipulated images is critical. We are increasingly seeing situations in which images are altered or entirely fabricated through the use of emerging technologies. A child does not even need to share an image to become a victim.
Second, and importantly, the bill's strengthened response to threats to distribute child sexual abuse materials is incredibly significant. At alarming rates, children and youth are threatened, isolated and controlled through fear, often before anything is ever shared. The impact is profound, and this change reflects the reality of how exploitation is happening.
We also want to highlight the importance of Bill C‑16's recognition of offences related to inviting a child to expose themselves. In practice, what we see is not about consent or curiosity. It is about power, coercion and control. These interactions are often the entry point to exploitation. They begin with trust building, quickly shift into pressure and escalate into threats. Recognizing this clearly in law is critical for protecting children.
One additional point to highlight is the bill's recognition of patterns of coercion and control. What we see in our work, whether in children, witnessing or youth experiencing intimate partner violence, are not isolated incidents but patterns of behaviour that are often hidden and highly manipulative and that escalate over time. These patterns rely on secrecy and confusion, and children and youth sometimes do not recognize what is happening. They may experience pressure or self-blame or believe that the situation is their fault.
Recognizing these patterns of coercion in law is a significant step toward increasing understanding and awareness. Boost CYAC is a leader in prevention education, and we believe that knowledge is power. Youth need to understand what coercion is, clearly and explicitly. By naming and criminalizing these patterns, Bill C‑16 will help validate young people's experiences, support earlier identification by the adults around them and strengthen our ability to intervene or stop harm before it happens. That is essential for prevention.
We are also encouraged by the strengthening of the mandatory reporting act through the changes proposed to it. Exploitation investigations are complex and take time, and too often key evidence is lost before systems can respond. Extending preservation timelines, requiring more complete technical information and including all Internet platforms are the start of holding tech companies more accountable and will meaningfully improve the ability to identify offenders and intervene earlier.
Bill C‑16 strengthens Canada's ability to respond to this harm, and we see that as a meaningful and important step forward. We cannot, however, rely on criminal law alone. Right now, the online spaces where this harm is happening are operating freely, without consistent, enforceable standards to keep children safe. There is limited or no accountability for how these environments are designed or how risks to children are managed. That needs to change.
We encourage the government to take the critical next step of passing clear, enforceable online safety legislation that requires technology companies to design for child safety; address high-risk environments, such as private messaging; and be accountable for reducing harm.
Protecting children online should be a fundamental responsibility, and right now we're behind. Other countries have taken this step. In the U.S. and Australia, enforceable online safety laws are already driving platform safety, accountability and faster removal of harmful content. The evidence is clear that when governments set expectations, platforms start taking the protection of children seriously. Canada has an opportunity to do the same.
At Boost CYAC, we are proud to be leaders in this field, working every day alongside our partners to support children and families impacted by abuse. This harm is not going away. It is evolving, and it is becoming more complex.
We want to thank the government for taking the protection of children seriously and for the meaningful steps reflected in Bill C‑16.
We look forward to continued prevention efforts by this government.
Thank you so much.
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The Vice-Chair (Rhéal Éloi Fortin) Bloc Rhéal Fortin
Thank you, Ms. Jolie.
Ms. Hajek, the floor is yours for five minutes.
Marta C. Hajek Chief Executive Officer, Elder Abuse Prevention Ontario
Distinguished Chair, committee members and fellow panellists, thank you for the opportunity to appear before the committee today and contribute to your study of Bill C-16.
To Elder Abuse Prevention Ontario, this bill represents an opportunity to address ageist inequities by more fully recognizing the risks of coercive control faced by older Canadians.
As CEO, I am speaking on behalf of an organization that is provincially funded and has spent over three decades addressing elder abuse, its growing complexities and root causes. Since Ontario's introduction of the first strategy to combat elder abuse in Canada in 2002, we have focused our work on coordinating community response, raising public awareness through education and training frontline service providers across all sectors to prevent, recognize and effectively respond to abuse and neglect of older persons.
While we are not legal experts, after 34 years in this sector, we know of what we speak. Along with our Canadian colleagues working in this space, we are deeply troubled by the diminishing personal safety of older Canadians, and that warrants us sending up flares.
Older adults in Canada are facing escalating risks. During the pandemic, incidents of abuse dramatically increased by as much as 800%, by some accounts. The drivers of that increase were social isolation, dependency and reduced oversight. They have not receded but, in many cases, have become entrenched.
At the centre of this serious form of elder abuse is coercive control.
The Department of Justice defines coercive control as a pattern of behaviour used to dominate another person. It causes a power imbalance through intimidation, emotional abuse and financial control. For older adults, it can restrict access to assets, interfere with health care and medical decision-making, limit mobility and isolate individuals from their social supports.
It is not a single act but a pattern—a slow tightening that erodes independence, dignity and personhood. It is most often not perpetrated by intimate partners. Statistics Canada reports that 36% of older victims of family violence are abused by their children, compared with the 28% who are abused by their spouses. That would indicate that the majority of elder abuse occurs outside of intimate partner relationships.
Bill C-16, as currently drafted, limits protections against intimate partner violence and creates a serious and indefensible gap. While an older person subjected to coercive control by a spouse would be protected, another abused by a child, grandchild or caregiver would not be. Harm does not change based on the relationship, and the law should not either.
We see the results of that gap every day. Psychological harm erodes a person's sense of self and, in many cases, their will to live. These conditions shape end-of-life decisions, increase mortality risk and quietly shorten lives.
The federal government is right to recognize coercive control as a form of gender-based violence and a precursor to femicide, but interpreting the scope of Bill C-16 too narrowly risks excluding a significant and gendered form of harm: when coercive control is exercised by family members, particularly against older women.
Older women face distinct vulnerabilities as they are living longer, are more likely to be widowed and are dependent on family for housing, financial support and basic necessities of life. Unlike intimate partner bonds, they are not relationships that can be easily exited. Leaving an abusive situation means risking homelessness, loss of care or complete isolation. These scenarios, or where dementia is an added factor and the older person cannot articulate what is happening, create forms of entrapment. It may not always result in femicide, but unchecked, it can result in prolonged suffering, neglect and preventable deaths.
To put this in context, as of January 2025, there were 771,939 Canadians aged 65 living with diagnosed dementia, with 414 being added each day, and of these, 61% are older women. Living with dementia does not mean forfeiting their rights to protections afforded others.
Expanding the scope of the bill to include relatives and informal caregivers does not stretch the intent of the bill. It fulfills it. House procedure is clear: Amendments must remain within the principle and scope of the bill. Addressing coercive control in family relationships, where the same patterns of domination and harm are mirrored and exist, directly aligns with its purpose. To exclude these relationships—
Bloc
The Vice-Chair (Rhéal Éloi Fortin) Bloc Rhéal Fortin
Ms. Hajek, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but your time is up. My job is very thankless.
Ms. Parker, the floor is yours for five minutes.
Naomi Parker Co-Director, Kindex Research and Knowledge Centre
Thank you, members of the committee and Mr. Chair, for the opportunity to appear before you today.
My name is Naomi Parker, and I'm appearing on behalf of Kindex Research and Knowledge Centre. Kindex supports the 51 child youth advocacy centres across Canada in generating evidence and mobilizing knowledge about best practices in responding to child abuse.
I am also the director of research at Luna Child and Youth Advocacy Centre in Calgary, Alberta, where we respond to the most complex and severe cases of child abuse through an integrated and trauma-informed model. More than 140 professionals from child protection, law enforcement, health care and victim services, as well as Crown prosecutors, work together under one roof, supported by tools such as accredited facility dogs and remote testimony courtrooms. This coordinated approach allows us to respond faster and reduce system-induced trauma to achieve better outcomes for vulnerable children and youth.
It is from this frontline and research-informed perspective that I want to voice my support for the intent and direction of Bill C-16, which includes several reforms directly relevant to protecting children and youth. I want to thank my colleagues Lindsay and Leah for the relevant content that they've already spoken to. As Leah mentioned, we have submitted a full brief.
Today I would like to focus briefly on three pressing issues where targeted amendments and implementation considerations could further strengthen the bill's impact for children and youth.
The first is around sentencing for child sexual offences. It remains inconsistently applied, despite Supreme Court guidance in R v. Friesen that these crimes are inherently violent and cause profound lifelong harm. We ask that the progress on mandatory minimums in this bill be paired with the introduction of graduated sexual offence categories to enable the justice system to respond proportionally to the full range of harms experienced by children and youth. Without this proportional structure, very different forms of harm continue to be collapsed into the same offences, and this limits both accountability and recognition for victims.
Next, Bill C-16 appropriately recognizes coercive control as a stand-alone harm in adult intimate partner relationships, but it fails to extend that recognition to children, despite clear research and practice evidence that coercive control is central to child abuse, exploitation and trauma, including cumulative harm and harm to children who witness this control. This omission leaves some of the most common and damaging forms of violence against children legally under-recognized and structurally invisible.
Finally, formalizing consistent trauma-informed frameworks, including the presumptive admissibility of high-quality child forensic interviews that meet national standards, would strengthen evidentiary reliability while reducing retraumatization of children. This approach would better align legal process with what we know from research about child development, memory and disclosure, while improving both fairness and efficiency in prosecutions. These areas for future reform would complement Bill C-16 and further align the justice system with the lived realities of the child victims.
I want to emphasize from this research-informed and practice-informed victims' rights perspective that the real impact of Bill C-16 will be determined not only by what it promises in legislation but also by how it is implemented, enforced and resourced. For children and youth, legal rights that exist in theory but that are applied unevenly offer little protection in reality, particularly when the victim has no independent power or advocate within the system. A trauma-informed justice system requires deliberate implementation, clear accountability and sustained investment, including training for justice actors, infrastructure to support testimonial aids and mechanisms to assess whether the reforms are being realized consistently across jurisdictions.
Importantly, much of this implementation capacity already exists. The national Child and Youth Advocacy Centres network provides coordinated victim-centred and trauma-informed systems whose core mandate is child protection and victim support. Strengthening this network of 51 members across the country is a practical and efficient way to ensure that Bill C-16 translates into real, protective change for children, not just procedural reform on paper.
I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak to this bill on ways that can meaningfully improve safety, participation and outcomes for children across Canada. Thank you.
Bloc
The Vice-Chair (Rhéal Éloi Fortin) Bloc Rhéal Fortin
Thank you, Ms. Parker.
We will now begin the first round of questions.
Ms. Kronis, you have the floor for six minutes.
Conservative
Tamara Kronis Conservative Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Ms. Zille, it's always a pleasure to have someone here from my home province of British Columbia.
I want to pick up on your comments about the justice system not being designed with children in mind and the opportunities you described to build on what's being proposed in Bill C-16 in terms of the importance of ensuring that children feel supported, safe and believed.
In particular, online child sexual exploitation cases in B.C. have risen dramatically, as you know, more than doubling between 2021 and 2023, with the B.C. RCMP reporting almost 16,000 cases in 2023, which is up from 4,600 in 2021.
Bill C-16 does include measures to protect children and address exploitation, but from your perspective, does it prevent repeat harm from known offenders?
Co-Chair of the Board, Child and Youth Advocacy Centres of Canada
Can I ask you to repeat that one more time?
Conservative
Tamara Kronis Conservative Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
I was wondering whether you see anything in Bill C-16 that would help prevent repeat harm from known offenders in the context of the explosion in child sexual exploitation cases that we see in B.C.
Co-Chair of the Board, Child and Youth Advocacy Centres of Canada
I don't know if I have a solid answer to that, but in terms of supporting children, our Child and Youth Advocacy Centres are designed to support those children when they come in through our doors.
Conservative
Tamara Kronis Conservative Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Thank you for that.
Could you speak a bit to what happens to a young or disabled person psychologically when they're targeted multiple times by the same individuals?
Co-Chair of the Board, Child and Youth Advocacy Centres of Canada
When we see children having....
I'm sorry. Just give me one second to organize my thoughts.
Conservative
Tamara Kronis Conservative Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
While you're doing that, I might turn to the witness from Boost.
How easy is it to keep offenders off technology when they're out on bail?
Chief Operating Officer, Boost Child & Youth Advocacy Centre
That's an interesting question but one that I think is outside my scope of expertise. That would be, I think, part of bail conditions, which I'm knowledgeable about, but I'm certainly not an expert in that area.
You asked a question earlier about repeat offenders. Adjustments to the mandatory reporting act seen in Bill C-16 would support that reduction in repeat offenders through law enforcement having access to fulsome materials when they're conducting an exploitation investigation, where they will have full records and the preservation period is extended. I believe that would allow for better evidence collection by providing more information and maybe making it easier to bring that individual to justice. I think that could be related, though I'm not a law enforcement expert. I'm only speaking to my experience working in the child advocacy space.
Conservative
Tamara Kronis Conservative Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Thanks. I'm coming at this from a place where we've seen high recidivism, and I'll give you an example: A Nanaimo man was arrested just a couple of weeks after being released on a child sexual abuse possession charge.
You went into detail about the steps of exploitation. You talked about the grooming and the threats. What I want to ask you about is that every single one of those things is a separate offence. In circumstances when someone, say, shoplifted, was arrested and released, and then stole a car—and we have a lot of situations locally of someone returning to the scene of the crime—what happens is that each one of those counts in terms of trying to decide whether the person will be let out on bail the next time something happens.
In child luring cases and in child sexual exploitation situations, a lot of the time we don't actually find out that four or five crimes have been committed until after the person is arrested. The luring is a crime, the threat is a crime and the distribution of the material is a crime, but they are often characterized as one offence.
One of the things that Bill C-16 would not do is remove the principle of restraint in bail conditions. I'm wondering whether you think it would be important for this bill to recognize each of the crimes that are encapsulated in a single charge as separate crimes for the purposes of bail.
Chief Operating Officer, Boost Child & Youth Advocacy Centre
That's a really big question. Again, I want to say that it's a bit outside of my area of expertise.
I think bail conditions are a really important aspect of the criminal justice system, particularly for our young victims. They are often the only things that are keeping that child safe or allowing that child to have a sense of safety, because so often offenders are released while they're awaiting trial. Though I can't speak specifically to it, I do think that any way we can increase those—
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The Vice-Chair (Rhéal Éloi Fortin) Bloc Rhéal Fortin
Thank you, Ms. Jolie and Ms. Kronis.
Mr. Chang, the floor is yours for six minutes.
Liberal
Wade Chang Liberal Burnaby Central, BC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Ms. Zille, from your perspective, how important are the protections in Bill C-16 for improving outcomes for young victims?
Co-Chair of the Board, Child and Youth Advocacy Centres of Canada
When it comes to things like testimonial aids for children, we're definitely seeing progress in the right direction. However, there are still opportunities within the bill to strengthen those responses for kids.
We know that testimonial aids reduce stress and trauma for children participating in court. They support clear and more complete evidence, and without them, some children are unable or unwilling to testify. This really is about how, when we're strengthening those aids, we're making participation possible. We see a direct difference in how children engage when those supports are in place.
Liberal
Wade Chang Liberal Burnaby Central, BC
Could you please speak to the importance of trauma-informed approaches when prosecuting offences involving children?
Co-Chair of the Board, Child and Youth Advocacy Centres of Canada
Keeping children at the centre is absolutely critical. The goal really is around being able to balance participation in the system and procedural fairness, but that's really ensuring that children have a voice and an opportunity to be heard, and that the system is wrapping around them to reduce stress and support their participation in the process so that they can get on the path to healing.