Mr. Speaker, it is a strange and troubling thing in a country as prosperous and progressive as ours that a woman at risk can do everything she has been told to do, to seek help, speak truth and place her trust in the law, and still find herself dead at the hands of her own partner wielding a bloody weapon, in what can only be considered a completely avoidable murder.
Bailey McCourt is one such story. She was not a statistic. She was a young mother with two young children, right in my community of Cloverdale. To those who loved her, she was not a headline. She was the centre of a home, a woman trying to build a safe life for her family. Like so many others, she found herself in a relationship that became dangerous over time. There were threats. There was violence. At one point, there was strangulation, which is one of the clearest indicators that the risk had escalated to a level that should never be ignored.
On the morning of July 4, Bailey's former partner stood before a court and was convicted of assaulting her. The system had, in that moment, all the pieces in front of it. It had the history, it had the violence, and it had the pattern that had been building over time, yet despite all of that, he was released. There was no requirement to step back and ask whether this was something more than a single offence. There was no mechanism that treated violence against an intimate partner as fundamentally different from any other assault. There was no tool that required the court to fully assess whether Bailey was still in danger even after a conviction had just been entered. This is because under the law as it stands, we do not distinguish in any meaningful way between a violent act against a stranger and a violent act against someone in an intimate relationship, a relationship built on trust, proximity and, in many cases, vulnerability. When we fail to make that distinction, we fail to recognize the very real and documented risk that comes with intimate partner violence, particularly when it escalates.
Just hours later, Bailey was in a parking lot going about what should have been an ordinary part of her day. It was there, in that ordinary place, in broad daylight, that her attacker found her and murdered her. She knew this could happen. She had begged to be protected, but the law, as it is written, ensured that the warning signs were ignored, and the inevitable happened.
When we look back at that day, the question is not simply how this happened, but why there was no legal mechanism strong enough to interrupt it. Why, after a conviction, was there no ability for the court to say that it needed to take a closer look at this individual, needed a proper risk assessment and needed to determine whether releasing this person put a woman's life at risk?
Bailey's case is not just a tragedy. It is a clear example of a gap in our law, a gap between what we know about intimate partner violence and how our system is currently structured to respond to it.
When we step back from Bailey's story, difficult as it is, we are forced to ask ourselves a larger question. Was this truly an isolated failure, or is it part of something that we have been seeing for far too long and are just not willing to make the necessary changes to to protect women at risk?
Dr. Wendy Aujla, assistant professor of criminal justice at Athabasca University, has spent years listening to women, many of them particularly vulnerable as new immigrants, who have walked this very path, not in theory but in lived experiences, in stories that, when placed side by side, begin to look far less like exceptions and far more like a pattern we can no longer ignore. What she hears time and again are stories not of women who failed to act but of women who did exactly what Bailey did. They reported, they sought help, and they tried to leave, but just like with Bailey, risk was not considered in the context of what had already happened and what was increasingly likely to happen next.
For many women in the South Asian community, the path to even reaching that point is far more complex than the system is designed to recognize. Their particular cases are often complicated by family honour, language barriers and coercive control inside the home. A system like ours that is seemingly built to protect the perpetrator of intimate violence is very dangerous, especially for women of vulnerable minorities.
When we consider what happened to Bailey, we cannot look at it in isolation. It fits into a pattern that has already been identified and already been studied. The knowledge is there. Our laws are ignoring that knowledge. While research like Dr. Aujla's helps us understand the pattern, it is often outside the government and in community spaces where we see just how real and immediate this issue is for women living through it.
Last year, I attended a fundraiser on behalf of The Kaur Movement, founded by Gurpreet Kaur and supported by leaders like Manjot Kaur. The Kaur Movement is a survivor-led network that supports women facing abuse by connecting them to real-time help, such as shelters, legal aid and counselling, while also working to break the culture of silence around domestic violence, especially in the South Asian community.
I went to the fundraiser expecting to hear about advocacy, awareness and the kinds of work many organizations are doing in this space to support women. What I heard that evening has stayed with me because it was not abstract or theoretical. It was story after story of women who have lived through violence, who have tried to seek help and who, in many cases, have found themselves navigating systems that were slow or difficult to access at the very moment they needed them the most. What struck me was not just the severity of what women endure but the common thread running through their experiences, which was the sense that they were often left to carry the burden of their safety on their own shoulders while feeling helpless and afraid because their lives were not as valued as those of the men who perpetrated the violence.
The Kaur Movement has built something remarkable in response to this reality. It has created a network that responds in real time, connecting women to shelters, legal help and counselling, often at the very instant that they are reaching out. What The Kaur Movement is seeing day after day reinforces what we know: These are not isolated stories but part of a pattern that continues to unfold in communities across the country. Tragedies are playing out time and again due to a lack of laws that protect these vulnerable women in their moment of need.
We can place these stories side by side: Bailey's life and loss; the careful work of women like Dr. Aujla who study these patterns; and community voices like The Kaur Movement, rising from what they see in reality every day. When we do, it becomes impossible to pretend that we do not understand what is happening.
This bill asks us to finally align our legal response with what we already know to be true. It asks us to recognize in law that violence within an intimate relationship is not the same as violence between strangers, carrying with it a level of risk and proximity that makes it more dangerous, not less. This bill would begin to correct that by naming the reality for what it is. It would create a distinct offence that acknowledges the nature of intimate partner violence.
The bill would go further still. It would recognize that when the ultimate act of violence is committed within a pattern of coercive or controlling conduct, when a life is taken by someone who has used that pattern of control and fear as a weapon, it must be treated with the full weight of the law. To name that act as first-degree murder would be not merely a question of punishment but a statement of clarity and a refusal to look away from what intimate partner homicide truly represents. The law has long recognized that killing in the context of other serious circumstances warrants elevation to first-degree murder. This bill would extend that same principle to the killing of an intimate partner where coercive or controlling conduct is present. That context is not incidental to the crime; it is the crime.
This bill would ensure that when a person has already been convicted of an intimate partner offence within the past five years, or is already at large on a release order related to a prior intimate partner offence, a peace officer could not simply release them at the scene. The decision would have to go before a judge. It would be a safeguard built for moments like Bailey's, where the history is already there, the pattern is already documented and the ordinary process of release is simply not enough to meet the gravity of what is in front of the court.
Bailey McCourt should still be here. That is the simplest, most honest thing that can be said. Her children should still have their mother. Her family should not be carrying this weight, nor should they be the ones who must now stand before us and ask that we do what should have been done already. We cannot give Bailey back to her children, but we can decide here and now that her story will not end in silence and that from it will come a measure of protection for those who are still, even today, waiting for the system to recognize the danger they are living with.
Let us pass this bill. Let us act with the seriousness this moment demands and ensure that when the warning signs are there, as they so often are, we do not look back once again and say that we knew and did not act.
