Justice committee  Perhaps I can take the liberty of adding a few comments to my colleague's. I think your issue relates squarely to the importance of training and risk assessments. Some of that importance appears in the literature that the department will share with the committee for your review.

Justice committee  I do think that probably one of your best sources is the U.K.'s statutory guidance framework for their prosecutors. I will send you that. A few pages in, it has a box with a full list of all of the behaviours they expect law enforcement to be looking for in this type of case. I think that might help.

Justice committee  My colleague may want to speak from a family... [Inaudible--Editor].

Justice committee  I'll answer that question, but I'm afraid I don't have a substantive answer for you, because it is a procedural question and you don't have justice officials before you today who are experts in that area. However, if you'd like, I could follow up with my colleagues on that question.

Justice committee  As part of our work, we are always reviewing case law in terms of implementation of laws that have been enacted in the past to strengthen responses. We're always talking with our colleagues in FPT fora to address issues of common concern. This would be one of those issues that we keep the lines open with them about, including the procedural ones that you mentioned before.

Justice committee  Thank you. That's a great question. My understanding from the statistics is that it was a bit of a slow start, that training was necessary for police officers and that the incidents—I guess they call them “detected incidents”, meaning incidents that have been reported to police for a year—have been increasing each year.

Justice committee  I can't speak to successful prosecutions because I didn't read literature about prosecutions per se. We need to remember that this offence was only enacted in 2015, so there really is limited evidence about it. What I can say is that charges were slow in coming under that offence at first, and I understand that they have been increasing every year.

Justice committee  Peace bonds really do apply any time a person fears on a reasonable ground that another person will cause personal injury, including to their spouse or child, or will damage their property. In cases where there is a pattern of behaviour that indicates certain types of risk, but insufficient evidence, let's say, to support a criminal charge, peace bonds can be a very useful tool.

Justice committee  You're absolutely right. Coercive control, if it were an offence in Canada, we would see significant overlap. Even turning to—and I'll provide this to the committee as well—the U.K. Home Office's statutory guidance framework, it gives you a list of a variety of different conducts that should be considered risk factors or indicative of coercive control.

Justice committee  The scholarship does address that. There are other articles as well that look at the implementation of the offence in the U.K. and talk about difficulties with gathering the evidence, including difficulties with law enforcement even being able to recognize that this is, in fact, what's going on, particularly, for example, when the incident comes to the law enforcement's attention because of one violent episode.

Justice committee  I would be very pleased to do so.

Justice committee  I believe it's on the website. That's what a colleague of mine has communicated to me, but we can look for it, if you like.

Justice committee  I would rather speak to the scholarship I have reviewed rather than my own personal opinions. I think that the scholarship might help the committee in terms of evaluating the advisability of a broad offence that would capture this type of conduct. I would bring your attention to sociologists who have supported the enactment of these types of laws, such as Evan Stark in particular.

Justice committee  Unfortunately, it came into force so recently that we don't have any kind of statistical or other evidence yet, but we are watching its implementation, of course, which is part of our job.

Justice committee  I can't yet speak to any data. We're really just about a year out, which is not sufficient time to be able to do any kind of assessment or evaluation, unfortunately.