Protecting Victims Act needs refinement

In a nutshell

The Canadian Bar Association’s Criminal Justice, Child and Youth Law, and Family Law Sections, with help from the Women Lawyers Section, are expressing some concerns about the clarity and scope of Bill C-16, the Protecting Victims Act. The bill proposes major amendments to the Criminal Code to combat intimate partner violence and child exploitation, including creating new offences for coercive control and femicide, increasing penalties for intimate partner violence and sextortion, criminalizing AI-generated deepfake intimate images, proposing measures to reduce unreasonable judicial delay, preventing the imposition of sentences below statutory minima, and broadening the scope of restorative justice.

The CBA supports the bill’s goals of timely justice, fairness, accountability, and safety, but argues that replacing automatic stays for unreasonable delay with undefined alternative remedies would undermine Charter rights, fail to reduce delay, and risk further systemic strain, urging instead targeted investments to address root causes such as judicial vacancies, disclosure burdens, and court resources.

Key priorities

The CBA highlights the following areas of concern in the bill:

• Ensuring procedural fairness and timely resolution: Strict judicial timelines are creating systemic barriers for victims of crimes, and cases are increasingly being permanently stayed or withdrawn. However, the CBA maintains that permitting the imposition of alternative remedies for section 11(b) Charter violations would fail to better protect victims’ interests, while also undermining the rights of the accused.
• Maintaining proportional sentencing through judicial discretion: C-16 would permit the imposition of a shorter term of imprisonment below the minimum punishment of a specified term of imprisonment, “if, in the circumstances, the minimum punishment would amount to cruel and unusual punishment for that offender.” This mandates a period of imprisonment in all cases in which a minimum term is required and limits the range of sentencing options available to the sentencing judge, specifically eliminating the possibility of a conditional sentence, a suspended sentence, or discharge.
• The CBA has consistently advocated for the maintenance of judicial discretion in sentencing and has long been opposed to mandatory minimum sentences because they disproportionately affect Indigenous and racialized offenders, do not deter crime, remove incentives to resolve matters, add to already overburdened court dockets, and may encourage justice participants to agree to resolutions where the charges pled to do not properly reflect the conduct at issue.
• Safeguarding individuals from coercion, violence, and harmful digital and intimate abuses: C-16 introduces the new offence of “coercion or control of intimate partner.” The CBA sections recognize this as a response to the ongoing crisis of gender-based violence, but are concerned that the offence, as drafted, is vague and overbroad about the intended pattern of conduct. Because coercive control is inherently contextual and nuanced, there is a significant risk that the language used in the provision could be applied in unfair ways, capturing conduct that does not fall under the harm contemplated.

Why this matters

The CBA sections submit that Bill C-16 does not constitute the kind of structural and procedural change required to produce a much-needed shift away from a culture of complacency towards delay. In implementing the proposed reforms of Bill C-16, it is essential that legislative changes not only uphold principled goals but also operate effectively within the realities of day-to-day legal practice.

Read the full submission.