Protecting Victims Bill

Moved second reading of Bill C-16, An Act to amend certain Acts in relation to criminal and correctional matters (child protection, gender-based violence, delays and other measures).

She said: Honourable senators, I am honoured to be sponsoring Bill C-16, the Protecting Victims Act, and to speak to it today.

This is an important bill that I am about to discuss with you, and I would like to sincerely thank the members of the Legal Committee for their diligent work on this bill. Please know, dear colleagues, that I appreciate the work and all the hours you have dedicated to this bill, and I am deeply grateful to you.

Before delving into the details of this bill, I would like to acknowledge the courage of survivors. I also wish to honour the memory of all who have been victims of femicide.

In fact, in Canada, nearly 200 women and girls are victims of femicide or violent homicide each year, according to our most recent data. On average, that represents one woman or girl killed every two days. Think about that: two days.

The number of victims has increased by more than 20% compared to pre-pandemic years.

In Canada, nearly 125,000 people aged 15 and older are victims of intimate partner violence each year, and 80% of them are women.

Physical violence does not always precede femicide committed by a partner, but there are always warning signs. Coercive control is a very important one.

Behind these statistics, numerous lives were cut short, and the lives of many families, children, loved ones, colleagues and friends are affected. They are people for whom life will never be the same again, just like the family of Bailey McCourt, the niece of Debbie Henderson, whom we saw here on Tuesday and who serves as a very real reminder that beyond the terms “domestic violence,” “coercive control” or “femicide,” there are people and lives that are turned upside down. I hope, honourable senators, that we will pass Bill C-225 as soon as possible. Because this issue does not only concern the victims — it concerns all of us.

When we talk about coercive control and femicide, we sometimes tend to think of cases that make the headlines. If we took the time to look around this chamber, I am convinced that almost no one is completely unfamiliar with this reality, and lives have been touched, directly or indirectly, by a story of a family, a mother, a sister, a friend, a co-worker or a neighbour. This violence is never an isolated incident.

As for me, my path crossed with that of an exceptional woman from Quebec City in June 2021. Her name was Nathalie Piché, and her life was tragically lost as a result of femicide. She was a woman with a big heart, whose daughters, Annabelle, Stéphanie and Catherine — all of whom she loved so dearly — would rather have their mother be remembered for the wonderful things she did in her life.

It was five years ago today, on June 15, and I didn’t know that fate would have me delivering my speech today on the anniversary of her death, in loving remembrance of her. Her life should have continued, like so many others, but was cut short by domestic violence. However, her memory continues to live on within me.

Canada continues to face high rates of intimate partner violence, gender-based violence and online child sexual exploitation. According to police-reported data published by Statistics Canada, rates of intimate partner violence and sexual violence have remained at historic highs in recent years, while the Canadian Centre for Child Protection has reported an unprecedented rise in cases of online grooming and child sexual exploitation material involving Canadian children.

Bill C-16 aims to address gaps in the Criminal Code and related laws by updating offences and procedures to better reflect current realities, including the rise of AI-generated deepfakes, online sextortion and coercive control as a form of non-physical violence when exercised repeatedly.

The Protecting Victims Act responds to long-standing recommendations made in the final report of the Mass Casualty Commission, as well as in the report by the Office of the Federal Ombudsman for Victims of Crime entitled Rethinking Justice for Survivors of Sexual Violence: A Systemic Investigation, and in numerous parliamentary committee studies.

Bill C-16 also comes with investments totalling $660.5 million over five years for the Department of Women and Gender Equality, including $44.7 million to strengthen the federal response to gender-based violence.

The bill aims to place victims and survivors at the heart of the criminal justice system, in particular through enhanced rights to information, respect and protection, while ensuring that perpetrators and predators face the full force of the law, in accordance with the constitutional safeguards set out in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The pillars of this bill are as follows: combatting gender-based violence, protecting children, strengthening victims’ rights and reducing court delays. Each of these pillars addresses long-standing demands from victims.

Bill C-16 represents one of the most significant reforms to our criminal justice system in generations.

I will begin by outlining the bill, before highlighting its key provisions and their significant implications.

Bill C-16 is a piece of legislation that addresses important issues and pressing priorities facing our justice system. Indeed, its purpose is to protect victims and survivors of sexual, gender-based and intimate partner violence, as well to safeguard children from sexual exploitation and other forms of victimization.

It proposes to modernize our criminal laws and to address crimes occurring in digital spaces. It includes measures to better meet the needs of victims and survivors of crime by expanding their legal rights and strengthening support mechanisms to assist them in the judicial process.

The significant reforms proposed in this bill are the result of close collaboration with provinces and territories, and they have been guided by the efforts and recommendations of many stakeholders, including those who represent victims and survivors of crime.

The bill has already undergone significant parliamentary oversight. The House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights has heard from several witnesses. This extensive consultation allowed for a multifaceted examination of the bill and a deeper analysis that considers the expertise and experiences shared by witnesses.

Colleagues, the House of Commons’ amendments were introduced following a review by the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights in the other place. That study allowed for significant amendments to be made in order to better achieve the bill’s fundamental objective: to protect victims. The amendments that were adopted remain, on the whole, technical in nature, but they clarify essential elements of the proposed framework, particularly regarding minimum sentences, coercive control and the classification of certain serious murders, including femicide.

These adjustments aim to ensure the consistency of the legislative framework while addressing the concerns raised by experts and stakeholders during the bill’s review. More specifically, the committee has strengthened the provisions related to the new offence of controlling or coercive behaviour. Furthermore, and this is an important element, a five-year review provision has been introduced to assess the implementation of this offence and its application in different relationship contexts.

The committee has also made significant amendments regarding protections against sharing intimate images, including deepfakes. More specifically, it has introduced a harsher maximum penalty for the most serious cases and has also clarified that deepfakes can be created using AI technologies, thus taking technological developments into consideration.

I would now like to highlight five key elements in Bill C-16 that will reform criminal law and better protect victims of crime.

The first elements I will speak to are gender-based violence, coercive control and femicide. They involve reforms proposed in the bill to better equip criminal law to respond to gender-based violence, including intimate partner violence.

Amendments have therefore been proposed to fight femicide. Under Bill C-16, femicide refers to the murder of a woman in specific circumstances that disproportionately affect women. These situations include murders committed by an intimate partner in a context of coercive control, exploitation or sexual violence, and situations motivated by misogyny or gender-based hatred. For legal purposes, this designation proposes treating these crimes as first-degree murder, similar to the murder of a police officer, or as an aggravated form of manslaughter.

Comparable democracies like Spain have already adapted their laws to recognize gender-based violence, while many Latin American countries — like Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Brazil — have created specific offences for femicide or created sentences that are equivalent to the most serious types of murder. Canada would thus be joining an international movement aimed at better identifying and punishing the murders of women that are motivated by gender-based violence.

This recognition is essential for Canada, as it allows us to directly identify and combat the rise in gender-based violence. The statistics show the urgency of taking action. In 2024, close to 200 women were violently killed in Canada. Of these, 50% were killed by a current or former partner, and 28% by another family member. Homicides committed by intimate partners have also risen by 39%.

Femicide is the most extreme expression of gender-based violence, which can take many forms, both physical and psychological.

In the context of intimate partner violence, the abuser may exert control over an intimate partner by engaging in a persistent pattern of behaviour designed to trap the person and strip them of their autonomy and sense of freedom. This may involve isolating them from family and friends, keeping tabs on them, controlling their communications, controlling their finances or the way they dress and making threats against the children.

Bill C-16 proposes to add a new offence to the Criminal Code that would criminalize the act of engaging in a pattern of controlling or coercive behaviour toward an intimate partner. The offence would include repeated violence and threats, as well as coercing an intimate partner to engage in sexual activity and any other conduct that could reasonably be expected to cause the victim to believe that their physical or psychological safety is threatened. This offence would focus on the cumulative effect of abuse over time, rather than on isolated incidents, ensuring that the law reflects the lived experience of survivors.

By adding an offence of coercive control to the Criminal Code, Bill C-16 paves the way for a major overhaul in the way domestic violence is viewed and addressed. There have been calls for this amendment for a very long time. Criminalizing coercive control will make it possible to recognize all aspects of domestic violence beyond isolated events, and thus better protect women and children who are its victims.

This would bring Canada in line with other jurisdictions around the world that have taken this step, such as England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and a few American and Australian states.

In addition to the new offence of coercive control, Bill C-16 would modernize the current offence of criminal harassment, which frequently occurs in cases of intimate partner violence. The bill proposes making the offence easier to prove. It also seeks to prevent survivors from being forced to relive their trauma in court by removing the requirement for the victim to prove they subjectively feared for their safety. Instead, it would be necessary to prove that a reasonable person in the victim’s situation would believe that their own physical or psychological safety, or that of someone they know, is threatened. The bill would clarify that criminal harassment also includes acts committed using modern technology, such as electronic surveillance and other forms of digital surveillance.

Bill C-16 also takes into account the realities faced by different groups. Indigenous women and women of colour, for example, face disproportionate rates of violence and victimization within our society. This reality stems from intersecting factors, such as socio-economic marginalization, and structural factors, such as systemic racism. Statistics show that 61% of Indigenous women and 42% of Black women have experienced intimate partner violence in their lifetime. Furthermore, research has shown that Indigenous women and girls are 12 times more likely to be murdered or go missing than any other woman in the country. Bill C-16 recognizes this heightened vulnerability and sets out an approach to protect these women.

To directly address the violence they disproportionately experience, this bill introduces new criminal tools. By creating the new offence of coercive control and treating femicide as a first-degree murder, the justice system is equipping itself with the necessary means to intervene earlier, before psychological violence escalates into lethal violence. These measures directly target behaviours that threaten the safety of marginalized women and aim to ensure that perpetrators are held accountable for their actions.

A gender-based analysis also reminds us that simply creating new offences can have unintended consequences for these communities, which are already vastly overrepresented in our criminal justice system as accused persons. To counter this risk of over-criminalization, Bill C-16 breaks new ground by creating a new part of the Criminal Code that formally sets out alternative measures and restorative justice processes. The legislation will explicitly require that these measures take into account the personal circumstances of both the offender and the victim. This same commitment to equity is reflected in the amendments to the Youth Criminal Justice Act, which modernize the guiding principles to require the system to pay particular attention to the needs and characteristics of young people from certain groups who are overrepresented in the justice system.

We must also recognize that many Indigenous and racialized women are reluctant to report the abuse they experience due to a historical lack of trust in our institutions. The bill amends the preamble to the Canadian Victims Bill of Rights to formally affirm the importance of adopting victim-centred approaches that are trauma-informed. By enshrining a new fundamental right guaranteeing that every victim is treated with respect, compassion and fairness, the bill aims to ensure that women from these communities are supported with dignity and safety throughout their legal journey.

The second key element of the bill deals with deepfakes and sextortion. One key aspect of the proposed reform that I must highlight relates to the bill’s efforts to improve responses to sexual offences involving visual representation more generally.

It is important to note that Bill C-16 addresses an emerging form of digital sexual violence: sexually explicit deepfakes. Deepfakes are artificial images that have been generated or manipulated using technology, including artificial intelligence. Sexual deepfakes involve manipulating the image of a real person using digital tools to create sexualized images or pornographic videos. These manipulated images are often mistaken for real ones. Technology is evolving at an exponential rate, as are the dangers associated with it. That is why it is essential to act now, while we still can, to address the current gaps in our criminal justice system.

Currently, all child sexual abuse material is criminalized, whether real or fictional. However, the existing offence, the non‑consensual distribution of intimate images involving adult victims, does not explicitly cover AI-generated images that are indistinguishable from real images. To address this gap, Bill C-16 proposes amending the current offence to include sexual deepfakes of identifiable individuals that could be mistaken for authentic recordings of those individuals. The Criminal Code would therefore prohibit the distribution of sexual deepfakes without the consent of the person depicted.

Bill C-16 also address sextortion, a serious problem that disproportionately affects women and young people. This is a form of blackmail in which someone threatens to send a sexual image or video of the person targeted to third parties unless they pay a sum of money or provide further sexual content. To combat this crime, Bill C-16 would make threats to distribute intimate images, including sexually explicit deepfakes, an offence, and would also add an aggravating factor to the offence of extortion when it is of a sexual nature or committed for sexual purposes.

The third element deals with child sexual exploitation. This third element of Bill C-16 that I would like to talk to you about underscores important reforms that provide better protection for children, including measures to counter child sexual exploitation and measures that would restore harsh penalties for those who commit such offences.

Parliament has previously indicated that sexual crimes involving children should be treated more seriously.

The protection of children in Canadian law is based on a fundamental recognition of their inherent vulnerability. The Canadian legal framework was historically designed to protect minors from physical harm and breaches of trust within their immediate environment. The nature of sexual predation is constantly evolving and requires ongoing adaptation of our legislation.

The existing legislation sometimes limits the definition of certain sexual offences to physical contact alone. Bill C-16 addresses that limitation by expanding invitation to sexual touching offences to expressly prohibit inciting a child to expose their sexual organs for sexual purposes.

The bill also expands the existing child-luring offence so it would explicitly apply to those who communicate with children to sextort them. Law enforcement would thus have a tool to intervene in cases of child sextortion before the crime occurs. The bill would also create an offence that would prohibit threatening to distribute child sexual abuse and exploitation material. It also broadens the scope of certain sexual offences against children to protect them from those who might encourage them to expose their own genitals for sexual purposes, even where there is no physical contact.

Bill C-16 would also make it easier to report online sexual abuse and exploitation by amending An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child sexual abuse and exploitation material by persons who provide an Internet service. Enacted in 2011, this act imposes responsibilities on internet service providers, such as notifying the police when their services are used to commit an offence involving child sexual abuse and exploitation material. This bill would improve Canada’s ability to investigate and prosecute such activities. It specifies that the act applies to a wider range of online platforms, requires service providers to retain data for longer periods and extends the limitation period for prosecutions for offences under the act.

The evolution of Canadian law recognizes that the protection of minors cannot be confined to the country’s geographical borders. The exploitation of children transcends physical borders and requires a legal response with an international scope. Bill C-16 extends the extraterritorial jurisdiction of Canadian law so that citizens and permanent residents who commit sexual offences against children abroad can be prosecuted in Canada. At the same time, the legislature is tackling organized crime networks by creating a new offence prohibiting the recruitment of persons under the age of 18 to participate in a crime. This comprehensive approach aims to cut off the sources of victimization and eliminate any sense of impunity among predators.

Finally, recent reports from the police, community advocates and academics indicate an increase in the recruitment of young people for criminal purposes by individuals who are in a position of trust, power or authority over them. Bill C-16 proposes to create a hybrid offence that would offer better protection to vulnerable children by helping to ensure that they are not drawn into criminal activities. The new offence would encompass recruiting, engaging, encouraging or inviting a person under the age of 18 to participate in a criminal offence.

The fourth key element of Bill C-16 includes reforms that would strengthen victims’ rights and aim to improve their experience within the criminal justice system.

The Canadian Victims Bill of Rights is an important piece of legislation that sets out the rights granted at the federal level to victims of crime. Bill C-16 would respond to calls to give more substance to the CVBR by clarifying the rights it guarantees and addressing victims’ needs more closely. The proposed amendments to the bill would set out new rights to information, such as the right to receive information on available protection measures and restorative justice programs. The bill also now grants every victim the right to be treated with respect, courtesy, compassion and fairness by the relevant authorities within the justice system. To take into account the profound impact of delays in the criminal justice system on victims, the bill would also recognize their right to have their need for trials to take place and cases to be resolved in a timely manner taken into consideration.

For many survivors of crime, testifying in court can be a difficult, re-traumatizing experience. To provide them with better support, Bill C-16 proposes a number of amendments promoting the use of measures that facilitate testimony. Among other things, it would make these witness assistance measures available by default to adult victims testifying in proceedings relating to sexual offences, human trafficking, criminal harassment or any offence committed against an intimate partner. Witness assistance measures are currently offered to these victims only on a discretionary basis.

The fifth and final key element of Bill C-16 that I would like to talk about is the series of reforms that would address delays in the criminal justice system. They seek to reduce the number of criminal cases that are stayed because of delays and make criminal proceedings more efficient.

Many senators will likely recall that the Jordan decision, which was handed down by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2016, set strict timelines to ensure that all accused persons are tried within a reasonable time. The data show that, in the years that followed, criminal cases took longer to resolve. A growing number of criminal cases have been stayed or ended without a verdict because they exceeded the time limits set out in the Jordan decision. These procedural stays have had serious consequences for victims and have eroded public confidence in the justice system’s ability to hold people accountable for their actions.

Bill C-16 addresses these challenges by requiring courts to consider remedies other than staying proceedings in cases of unreasonable delay, so that a stay is ordered only as a last resort, after all other options have been explored. It also seeks to reduce the risk of having complex cases suspended due to delays by providing courts with guidelines to determine which cases justify exceeding the applicable time limits established in the Jordan decision. These may include, for example, complex drug or sexual assault cases.

I would also like to point out that, at the end of May, the Supreme Court of Canada issued two new rulings concerning the right to a trial within a reasonable time, namely the Vrbanic and Jacques-Taylor decisions. The court’s reasoning in these decisions is closely aligned with the objectives of Bill C-16 and is fully consistent with the specific measures proposed to reduce court delays.

The court strongly emphasized the enormous societal cost and the loss of public trust that result when trials are halted before the merits of the case are heard. It forcefully reiterated that compliance with constitutional deadlines is a responsibility shared by all participants in the system and that the defence’s delaying tactics must have consequences. Bill C-16 directly addresses this concern by creating a new section in the Criminal Code that would formally require judges to consider appropriate alternative remedies before ordering a stay of proceedings. Staying proceedings becomes a measure of last resort to align with the court’s desire to see as many cases as possible conclude with a substantive verdict. Bill C-16 incorporates this principle of accountability by excluding periods attributable to late motions from the calculation of time limits and by requiring courts to take into account any acts of bad faith. The reform also supports judges in their case management by codifying clear legislative criteria for assessing the complexity of a case, such as the number of preliminary motions or the challenges inherent in joint trials.

Bill C-16 is designed to address some of the underlying reasons for delays by maximizing the justice system’s efficiency. The aim is to facilitate faster access to justice. For example, it addresses delays in the prosecution of sexual offences, which are particularly prone to a stay of proceedings due to failure to meet time limits. These cases involve special proceedings related to the use of highly sensitive evidence, including the complainant’s sexual history or their medical and therapeutic records, and those proceedings can sometimes prolong trials. Bill C-16 aims to clarify and simplify evidence-related proceedings in these cases so as to maintain the necessary protections for victims, without sacrificing the fairness of the trial. These provisions encourage the swift resolution of complex evidential issues, reduce the number of unnecessary hearings and limit the use of highly sensitive evidence to situations where it is truly justified.

It is possible to achieve meaningful efficiency gains within our criminal justice system by diverting offences that do not pose a genuine risk to public safety or by referring offenders to alternative measures. The bill would amend the Criminal Code and the Youth Criminal Justice Act to encourage the use of diversion and restorative justice in appropriate cases, while still protecting public safety. These reforms would allow the formal justice system’s limited resources to be focused on the most serious and harmful offences. The reforms would also respond to growing pressure from experts and stakeholders representing victims of crime to increase the use of restorative justice, with the consent of the victim.

The victims’ loved ones will also feel the effects of this act. Behind every provision of this bill are families who are directly affected. A parent who loses a child at the hands of a violent aggressor experiences a loss that transforms the rest of their lives. They lose the future they had imagined, the birthdays to come and the sounds of voices that will no longer echo throughout their home. This reality accompanies these families in their daily lives and shapes their relationship with the justice system.

The reality experienced by women who are victims of violence must be recognized by our legislation. Coercive control isolates, reduces autonomy and gradually weakens those who are subjected to it. A clear recognition of this behaviour would allow us to better address this reality, since each of these losses affects children, loved ones and entire communities.

Survivors of sexual assault deserve a justice system that inspires confidence. Delays can prolong an already difficult period and leave people in a state of uncertainty for many years. A resolution that doesn’t include a substantive review of the case can have lasting impacts on the sense of justice and the recovery process.

I also want to acknowledge the contribution of senators, and all parliamentarians, who are working to strengthen the protection of victims and improve access to justice. The impacts of these crimes go far beyond the statistics. This commitment is essential to building a fairer and more compassionate system.

There is still a long way to go in reducing these harms and supporting those affected. The challenges faced by victims, survivors, families and communities are complex and require sustained efforts at multiple levels. This bill is a step toward better adapting our justice system and responding to some very real issues.

The reforms set out in Bill C-16 represent one of the most significant legislative updates in generations when it comes to protecting victims and survivors of crime. This is a crucial effort to make our criminal laws more modern, more trauma-informed and better suited to the needs of those who are most profoundly affected by crime. For these reasons, I encourage all honourable senators to support this important bill at second reading. Thank you. Meegwetch.

Honourable senators, this month marks National Indigenous History Month and the seventh anniversary of our collective commitment to meet the Calls for Justice of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

Amid the ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, multiple declarations that violence against women is an epidemic and repeated failures to respond, Bill C-16 is celebrated as a step forward, yet it embodies a dangerous step back from our senatorial duties.

As this bill rushes through the Senate, I speak today to put on record the concerns we have heard from experts, front-line workers and those with lived experience about the negative impacts for survivors of violence against women, in connection with how this bill has proceeded, and to, at the very least, urge amendments to the bill’s provisions on mandatory minimum penalties that will otherwise criminalize survivors, particularly Indigenous women.

The government invokes the moral imperative of addressing crises associated with violence against women to insist on urgent passage of Bill C-16.

If this was so urgent, why did the bill sit undebated in the other place as we implemented a pre-study, not to mention how it stagnated at committee there for nearly two months?

The House committee heard from witnesses for over a month, yet we were expected to complete our parallel work in fewer than four days. Despite the disproportionate impact of this bill on Indigenous communities, the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee heard only one single Indigenous witness.

If we do our job and fix deficits in this bill, we do so not knowing whether our elected officials will even still be in Ottawa to consider them or if the House will rise for the summer.

Why are we acquiescing with increasing frequency to situations that restrain our obligations and commitments to serve Canadians by carrying out meaningful review?

Among the legislation that the government is urging us to pass before the summer, we find not one but two bills riding on the backs of women. Bill C-16 and Bill C-225 contain several near-identical measures, and the Senate has not had time to give either the careful study they should receive.

On a topic as urgent and harmful yet still too often dismissed and discounted as violence against women, this approach risks mirroring the apathy and complicity that have prevented meaningful action for far too long.

Will what we are passing actually work for victims? Do we care? I believe we do care. We also should know that it will not work.

Most witnesses, including the minister and many supporters of Bill C-16, cautioned that the bill focuses on just one tool: the criminal law power.

Criminal law responses do not advance the safety and protection of victims. They are relatively expedient for governments to invoke, but they have proven to be ineffective. Truly addressing intimate partner violence and coercive control means working to dismantle systemic inequalities that embolden and normalize misogyny, racism and violence and building up health, housing, social and income supports that women, children — every one of us — need in order to be safe.

Bill C-16’s entrenchment of mandatory minimum penalties, under the guise of protecting victims, exemplifies and exacerbates ongoing deficits in equality and justice as well as failures to address the way survivors of violence against women — especially Indigenous women — are “invisibilized” and not deemed victims, incarcerated and held responsible for their own victimization, including the violence that others inflict on them.

As senators, we are tasked with representing the interests of those without the power, resources and privilege to make their voices resound within majority-driven spaces, especially in the other place.

In that capacity, I will be proposing at committee a modest amendment to the bill’s provisions on mandatory minimums to ensure that, at the very least, they better reflect Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls commitments as well as Charter principles by ensuring that the “safety valve” extends to all mandatory minimums and allows alternatives to prison sentences.

Nine in ten women in federal prisons experienced physical or sexual abuse before they were criminalized. Each of these women is a victim whom our health, housing, social, economic and legal systems failed to adequately protect and support.

I have previously shared the layers of misinformation and injustice that led to the wrongful manslaughter conviction of Indigenous teenager Jamie Gladue based on her characterization as a “jealous wife,” or, if we apply the terminology of Bill C-16, perhaps, a “coercive or controlling” wife.

This bill entrenches the near certainty of repetitions of such injustice. Nothing in Bill C-16 will ensure that our legal system will recognize another Indigenous victim of intimate partner violence, like Jamie, first and foremost as a victim, let alone protect her. In fact, through expanded approaches to first-degree murder and manslaughter, it will risk more women in her circumstances being induced to plead guilty and result in them being sentenced more harshly.

The safety valve in Bill C-16, in addition to being so narrow as to leave people exposed to near-cruel, unusual and unconstitutional punishment, does not apply at all to mandatory life sentences.

Mandatory life sentences discourage survivors from standing up to the misogyny and racism of our criminal legal system by asserting they acted in self-defence. At committee, witnesses emphasized that, contrary to the government’s intention of ensuring constitutionality of mandatory minimum penalties, mandatory life sentences will remain constitutionally vulnerable, especially in light of obligations to consider Indigenous history and context.

The government’s GBA Plus analysis acknowledges that Bill C-16 will increase the overrepresentation of Black people and Indigenous Peoples in prisons.

When Senator Clement asked the minister about this finding, the minister stressed the importance of using race and culture assessments and Gladue reports to help address overrepresentation. But these measures are the very ones that the safety valve paradoxically prevents judges from fully considering.

The so-called Gladue principles that inform both measures — named for Jamie Gladue, though she never received their protections — appear in section 718.2(e) of the Criminal Code, which requires judges to consider alternatives to prison before sentencing anyone, but especially before sentencing Indigenous Peoples.

The so-called safety valve does not respect this legal requirement. It merely permits judges to impose shorter prison sentences rather than community-based alternatives.

The provision thereby fails to honour the government’s commitment through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Call to Action 32 to:

. . . allow trial judges, upon giving reasons, to depart from mandatory minimum sentences and restrictions on the use of conditional sentences.

Bill C-16 also reinstates mandatory minimums that courts have ruled unconstitutional under this inadequate safety valve. Taken together, the so-called “safety valve” will mean the numbers of Black and Indigenous Peoples in prisons will continue to rise.

It will push Canada farther away from another Truth and Reconciliation Commission commitment, which is that of eliminating the overrepresentation of Indigenous Peoples in prison by 2025 — a now well overdue deadline.

Victoria Perrie of the Indigenous Bar Association — the sole and only Indigenous witness at the Legal Committee — emphasized the need for recognition of Indigenous laws and legal orders, including processes to refer matters:

. . . out of the colonial court system and back into the Indigenous court process or Indigenous restorative process, however that exists within that community and context.

The very limited “safety valve” creates yet another barrier to this vision of greater justice and to our shared obligation as senators to represent minority groups, uphold equality and advance reconciliation.

Senators also have a responsibility — as the Government Representative reminded us during debate on Bill C-9 — to strengthen the government’s duty to lead rather than to follow.

I was heartened when Senator Moreau emphasized the obligation of the government to address misinformation about criminal law through public education. Regrettably, Bill C-16 represents a missed opportunity for such leadership.

Canadians do not benefit when we appease demands for “harsh on crime” measures rooted in misinformation rather than heed and provide empirical evidence. Canadians expect their leaders to give them the facts and develop policies that work.

At committee, government officials acknowledged what the Department of Justice’s research has long recognized — when it comes to mandatory minimum penalties: “There is little evidence on their effectiveness on deterring crime . . . .”

The Supreme Court concluded the same in R. v. Nur: “Empirical evidence suggests that mandatory minimum sentences do not, in fact, deter crimes . . . .”

The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police told Parliament that police services have differing positions regarding mandatory minimums — some support them and some do not.

Even the Canadian Police Association, a police organization supportive of mandatory minimum penalties, noted:

. . . if all we do is sentence people to jail without getting to . . . underlying issues [such as mental health, substance use and poverty], we’re not going to get to better outcomes, ultimately.

The Federal Ombudsperson for Victims of Crime emphasized the following:

. . . access to safe and secure housing is one of the most transformative things that we can be doing in Canada to protect survivors and improve public safety.

Many of you will recall they also support guaranteed livable income for the very same reasons.

The minister acknowledged:

. . . the long-term solution, if it does not include upstream supports to cure social inequities . . . then this will be a failed effort across a generation.

This year, Canada’s federal prison system will cost taxpayers $4 billion. For that investment, we temporarily remove people from the community but do not allow those who are victimized to experience social, economic or health security. Abandoning people to desperate situations in communities, as well as in prisons, increases the risks of both victimization and criminalization.

If we are serious about protecting women and children from violence, we must address the inequalities that too often trap and keep them in unsafe situations.

The government suggests that if mandatory minimum penalties do not actually deter violence against women, they at least send a message.

But what is that message, honourable colleagues?

Most women who survive violence never file a police report. Only a fraction of those reports result in charges; far fewer result in convictions, let alone meaningful accountability. Those who are criminalized and imprisoned are not the only ones causing harm. They are often the easiest to catch.

More powerful and privileged abusers, if ever confronted with their behaviour, hire lawyers and experts, settle cases, insist on non-disclosure agreements, insulate themselves from responsibility and continue on.

What is the message we send through a criminal legal system where those with the least power and privilege who perpetrate violence against women become prisoners while those with the most who commit the same misogynistic violence then become and carry on as podcasters, influencers, professionals, athletes, leaders, CEOs or presidents?

All of us — especially men — in places of relative privilege, including in this chamber and the other place, must step up, redouble efforts and model the behaviour needed from our leaders and role models to uphold equality for all.

In the absence of such leadership, Bill C-16 and other similar adjustments to criminal law will not address the roots of deep-seated colonial and misogynistic inequalities and assumptions that actually fuel violence. Grafted on to existing inequalities, this bill could serve to co-opt and complicitly help to shield those with the most and punish those with the least, including victims themselves.

I hope you will help ensure we fulfill our responsibilities. Colleagues, let’s do better. Meegwetch. Thank you.

Would you agree to a question, senator?

Yes.

First of all, thank you for your very important speech, Senator Pate. I’m well aware that a new law, especially one of this magnitude, can raise concerns.

Thank you for mentioning the significant investment that is required. You are quite right to say that legislation must be accompanied by investment. I highlighted in my introduction that the government has recently committed $660.5 million through Women and Gender Equality Canada. Furthermore, the latest economic update allocates $105 million over five years, including $21 million annually for independent legal advice and redress measures for survivors. There is also $593 million as part of a federal-provincial agreement with each of the provinces.

My question concerns the opening points of your speech regarding the ripple effects of this reform. We can—

I am sorry to interrupt you, senator, but Senator Pate’s speaking time has expired.

Senator Pate, are you asking for more time to answer Senator Oudar’s questions?

Yes, at the pleasure of the house.

Is leave granted, honourable senators?

I apologize, colleagues. I’m still a new senator, and I don’t know all the rules.

Senator Pate, I wanted to hear what you have to say about the provisions introduced in the bill to counter certain effects, including the risk of increased detention and the overcriminalization that you mentioned. The bill strikes a balance by introducing a new approach with restorative justice. The traditional legal system might consider a new way of reducing certain risks.

Do you agree that this bill introduces a form of justice that’s very well accepted by some communities, and that this form of justice must take personal circumstances into account, while paying particular attention to the needs of people from marginalized groups?

Thank you very much, Senator Oudar, for that. If this bill would achieve the objectives, including your very laudable objectives, I would have actually challenged you and I would have wanted to sponsor the bill.

I have worked in this area for many decades, and what we see is, in fact, the opposite of what is promised in this bill. I give you the example of Nicole Doucet, whose case was examined by the Mass Casualty Commission. She’s a woman who did everything that was expected of her. She went to the police, talked about the coercive control and talked about the ways she was being challenged.

The police kept saying they couldn’t intervene until her father suggested that they maybe try and figure out a way to punish her husband, so as soon as she tried to find some way to fight back, the police then kicked into gear and immediately set up an entrapment and basically encouraged her to have her husband killed, and that case went to the Supreme Court of Canada. The Supreme Court of Canada eventually upheld that she should not have been found responsible because she had gone through all of these measures.

In fact, if our systems were accountable in the way this bill promises, we would not be dealing with the incredible numbers of women who are being victimized now.

We heard from many of the witnesses how the men in their lives had been reported and no interventions had occurred, even though the law right now allows that to happen.

My issue is not about intention — yours or anybody else’s. It’s about what the law has shown to be effective. Criminal law addressing these issues has not provided the means for women to escape. It has not challenged all of us to insist on behaviour that doesn’t continue to fortify the racism and misogyny that feed violence against women and intimate partner violence. That’s the reason. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. We need to have those resources in place. It’s why we need to have the appropriate social, economic and health supports that help prevent people from being victimized and provide options for them where they are.

When we talk about Indigenous women, as Jamie Gladue’s case points out, even in situations where women are experiencing violence and the police, the Crown, their own defence lawyer and the judges know what’s happening — that was 30 years ago. She was convicted. She was offered a plea deal after being charged with first-degree murder. In fact, if we fast-forward to Helen Naslund’s case a few years ago, there were the same sorts of biases.

The point is that we’ve had these criminal law supports in place for decades; we have not seen them used in a way that actually protects women.

Honourable senators, I rise today to speak at second reading of Bill C-16, An Act to amend certain Acts in relation to criminal and correctional matters (child protection, gender-based violence, delays and other measures), a long and complex name for a long and complex bill, one that we are being asked to study and pass in a remarkably short period of time. That is most unfortunate because the constitutional issues raised by Bill C-16 deserve serious and profound study.

While the bill has been marketed as creating a new offence of femicide, especially to deal with the murder of women, Bill C-16 doesn’t actually do that. Although the bill uses the word “femicide” in one of its headings, it never defines the term and never actually establishes femicide as a new Criminal Code offence.

Instead, the bill creates several new categories of constructive first-degree murder. If a murder is committed against an intimate partner when there’s been a history of coercive or controlling conduct; if a murder is committed in the context of sexual violence; if a murder is committed in the context of human trafficking; or if a murder is motivated by hate on the basis of race, religion, ethnic identity, sexual orientation, gender, gender expression, age or disability, it automatically becomes a first-degree murder.

It doesn’t matter if the murder was not premeditated or was not planned with malice aforethought. Such homicides, even if they happen in the heat of the moment, would be charged and prosecuted as first-degree murder.

Those found guilty would be sentenced to life in prison with no prospect of parole for 25 years. Let it be noted that this wouldn’t just apply when women are killed by male partners. Despite the use of the word “femicide” in the heading, these new provisions would also apply to women who kill their male partners and to murders within same-sex relationships. They would also apply to the murders of men when the act is motivated by hate.

Constructive first-degree murder is not a new idea. We have long treated the murder of a police officer or corrections officer as first-degree murder, what used to be called “capital murder,” to signal our denunciation of such crimes. Indeed, the last Canadian to be hanged in this country, a burglar named Ronald Turpin, had committed just that kind of murder.

Later, the Criminal Code was amended to add other homicides to the automatic first-degree murder category, including murder committed in the course of a hijacking or sexual assault or in relation to organized crime.

With Bill C-16, however, we are adding many more types of homicide to this special category.

To be certain, the murder of an intimate partner and murder motivated by racial hate, homophobia or misogyny are serious crimes and well worthy of denunciation. But there are real questions of proportionality that arise when we take crimes that are often crimes of passion and redefine them as automatic first-degree murders, the kinds of killing we deem most morally blameworthy.

Bill C-16 doesn’t elevate all homicides of intimate partners to first-degree murder. A manslaughter charge still remains an option open to the Crown; that is absolutely true. However, even then, I have concerns.

In light of all the impassioned rhetoric around femicide, how much pressure might Crown prosecutors feel to prosecute all intimate partner homicides, many of which are more akin to manslaughter, as murders instead?

There’s another separate albeit related concern, which was raised by many of the witnesses we heard in our pre-study and by Senator Pate this evening.

Witnesses raised serious concerns that women who kill their husbands and boyfriends not in immediate self-defence but in response to years of physical, mental or financial abuse could end up charged and sentenced for the very first-degree murders that this act imagines to protect women from — especially if the Crown argues that they were the ones who were coercing or controlling their intimate partners.

Many witnesses also shared concerns that women, especially Indigenous and Black women, would feel especially pressured to plead guilty to manslaughter, even when they might have a legitimate defence, for fear of being convicted of first-degree murder at trial.

All the witnesses we heard from agreed that domestic murders are a scourge. However, many raised concerns that simply ratcheting up the penalties after those deaths occur does very little to protect victims.

What we desperately need is more investment in women’s shelters, not just in cities but also in rural and remote communities. We need more investment in legal aid so that victims seeking legal advice and assistance to leave violent marriages have the support they need.

We need more affordable transitional housing for those leaving abusive homes and more social services and counselling support for those coping with the aftermath of violence and coercive control.

A second very concerning part of the bill is its restoration of a number of mandatory minimum sentencing regimes that have already been struck down by the Supreme Court, most recently last October in the Senneville decision, when the court struck down the mandatory minimum sentence for possession of child pornography. But Bill C-16 dekes around that little inconvenience. The bill tells judges they aren’t obliged to impose mandatory minimum sentences in cases where the sentence would be cruel and unusual punishment for a particular offender, but that is a very high bar.

In Canada, a punishment is generally considered cruel and unusual only if it is “grossly disproportionate,” so severe and excessive that the average Canadian would find it abhorrent, intolerable and an outrage to standards of decency.

In short, Bill C-16 carves out only a modicum of judicial discretion. The narrowness of the language means it is extremely difficult for judges to craft specific sentences for specific defendants based on the specific facts of a case. This will undoubtedly lead to more miscarriages of justice and more constitutional challenges.

Third, and perhaps most alarming, is the way in which Bill C-16 attempts to go around the constraints of the Jordan decision.

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees Canadians the right to a trial within a reasonable time. In 2016, the Supreme Court, frustrated by cases where the accused were kept on remand for unreasonable periods awaiting their day in court, established a time limit of 18 months to get an accused to trial in a provincial court and a 30-month limit for more serious crimes in a Superior or Federal Court, with exceptions and exemptions for certain cases, including those of unusual complexity.

In cases where the Crown failed to meet those deadlines, judges were to issue judicial stays of proceedings as what you might call a mandatory minimum response to the Charter breach.

The court, it should go without saying, didn’t want people accused of serious crimes to be set free; it meant for Jordan to send a clear signal to provincial and federal governments to invest more in the criminal court system, build more courtrooms, appoint more judges, hire more Crown prosecutors, provide better funding for legal aid and invest money in other parts of the criminal justice system to make things go faster.

But whatever successive federal and provincial governments have done, it hasn’t been enough. Court delays are getting worse. New laws, including Bill C-14, Bill C-9 and Bill C-16 itself, will only combine to make those delays more extreme.

Rather than taking the clear message of the Jordan decision seriously, Bill C-16 contains a collection of workarounds, time outs and clock stoppages that will allow Crown prosecutors to avoid running up against Jordan deadlines.

The bill also tells judges to use judicial stays only in extreme measures as a last resort, without providing any other options.

Obviously, we don’t want serious cases being stayed and thrown out and seriously dangerous people to walk away free. But we can’t just hold people on remand awaiting trial for absurd periods because we have failed to make the necessary investments.

Two weeks ago, when the court released reasons in the Vrbanic decision, the Supreme Court justices, yet again, laid out the duty of governments to fix the problem. I’ll quote from Vrbanic; these are the words of the Chief Justice:

. . . **the right to trial within a reasonable time is more than a right to the Crown’s best efforts. If the Crown cannot, by making reasonable efforts, bring cases to trial within a reasonable time, then the state must step in and increase funding to the justice system. . . .

Ultimately, the Charter prevents laying the burden of underfunded courts and Crown offices at the feet of the accused. . . .

My colleagues, we have a crisis in this country. The public has lost confidence in the capacity of the justice system to do its job.

Part of this can be attributed to populist tough-on-crime rhetoric, and canny politicians of all stripes weaponize that fear as a craven political strategy. But our police services don’t just need new crimes to enforce; they need the training and support to deal with domestic violence cases, hate crimes and the interrelated crises of mental health and addiction.

As part of our hearings on Bill C-14 and Bill C-16, we also heard from the organizations representing Crown prosecutors from Ontario and British Columbia. These are people whose whole job it is to be tough on crime, yet they repeatedly warned us, emphatically, that Bill C-14 and Bill C-16 will make trial delays far worse. Without the necessary resources, Crown prosecutors cannot properly prosecute, and defence counsels cannot properly represent their clients. Adding offences to the Criminal Code may make us feel like we’re doing “something” to make our communities safer, when, in fact, we seem to be setting our court system on the path to collapse.

The irony? While our justice system gets slower and slower, we in this chamber are being asked to move faster and faster. We cannot fulfill our constitutional role when we’re asked to pass far-reaching and constitutionally complicated bills in just two days.

Programming motions such as the ones we’re dealing with tonight don’t give Senate clerks enough time to track down and invite a proper range of witnesses, or legal staff enough time to draft amendments, never mind giving us time to debate and pass them.

Such deadlines don’t give our translators enough time to translate observations; they don’t allow enough time for informed debate in this chamber, nor do they create enough time and space for the public to follow and join the discussion or to lobby for changes.

Sober second thought? Increasingly, we are being asked to pass legislation without time for thought at all, not because of authentic urgency but because delays in the other place, not of our making, have forced us to race to meet arbitrary deadlines.

In the case of Bill C-16, we only began second reading debate tonight, yet we have been instructed to conclude clause-by-clause consideration of this bill tomorrow; we start at 9 a.m.

Despite this, we may well read new stories tomorrow that accuse us of holding up the government’s agenda. My caution? Shortcuts make long delays. As we race to pass Bill C-16, without time for meaningful scrutiny, we set the stage for years of court challenges yet to come — more justice delayed; more justice denied; more public confidence lost; and, inevitably, more Canadians’ lives lost, too.

Thank you. Hiy hiy.

Honourable senators, since we’re at second reading, I will briefly discuss the principles of this bill.

I want to begin by acknowledging the very successful speech from our colleague, Senator Oudar, who sponsored a bill for the first time, a rather large one at that, and who was able to explain its five key principles quite skilfully and with remarkable clarity.

I fully support this bill in principle. I sit on the advisory committee of the Regroupement des maisons pour femmes victimes de violence conjugale au Québec, which, several years ago, established an advisory committee on judicial practices regarding the safety of abused women. The committee includes police officers from the Sûreté du Québec, the Montreal police, the Quebec City police, the Gatineau police and the RCMP, as well as representatives from Quebec’s public security ministry — now internal security — Quebec’s justice ministry, Quebec’s judicial services — I’m there as a judge, even though I’m no longer a judge, but it’s a long-term commitment — and representatives from the network of women’s shelters, whose resources are always stretched to the limit, lacking both funding and space. It is a really interesting group of about thirty people who meet several times a year to discuss issues related to domestic violence.

Coercive control is a concept that the group identified several years ago. Today I want to acknowledge Karine Barrette, the lawyer who assists the group and works for the network, who went to England to see what was being done over there. She travelled to Scotland. They are pioneers in this area. She went to Australia to see what was being done in New South Wales and Queensland. She also went to Wales, which now has similar laws on coercive control. She documented her observations.

I also want to commend the work of the Sûreté du Québec, which has begun to educate its police officers on the reality of domestic violence and especially the types of violence that leave no marks — unlike punches to the face — such as coercive control, mental control and control over movements, and which requires documentation.

I want to commend Quebec’s efforts as a pioneer in this area, since Quebec police forces have established a records system where everything is recorded every time there is a 911 call about violence or a complaint regarding disputes between intimate partners. Everything gets documented.

Coercive control is an offence that requires proof of repetitive behaviour, which requires evidence — not evidence of injuries, but of control. All of this information is documented and available to police services across Quebec. An individual can move to a different city, and now we will know whether, six months or two years ago, we received a call from his spouse at the time telling us that she felt threatened. We are putting all that together now; we are pioneers.

Once again, I want to commend everyone at the Sûreté du Québec and the Montreal police service. One of their members came and gave very good testimony before the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee about how the police have evolved and how we need a transition period to ensure that all Quebec police officers and justice system stakeholders, Crown attorneys, defence lawyers and judges are trained, ready to deal with coercive control and equipped to successfully manage these situations. That is exactly what happened in England, where there’s no evidence that any woman has been victimized or made a victim by the system that was created. On the contrary, the system is working, with no boomerang effect against the victims.

That is what I wanted to talk about today.

The last thing I wanted to mention is that a lot is being said about the bill. People are saying that they haven’t had time to read it, for example. It is true that we are moving quickly, but we are now hearing from the tenth group of witnesses who are helping us examine this bill. That adds up to a lot of time, many hours. We heard from four witnesses today and four last Friday. We also heard from two the Wednesday and Thursday before. The committee has heard from a lot of witnesses.

I wanted to say that the bill appears to be quite impressive. It is 160 pages long, so it’s true that it’s big. In the bill, 40 pages deal with the rules surrounding evidence about the victims of sexual assaut presented to judges in criminal matters. As you know, when there are victims of sexual offences, it is often the victim who is put on trial. People want to know about their sexual practices and behaviour, they want access to their records, they produce images that the victim has given them — images that are sometimes intimate — and so on. They try to paint a picture. Judges have been grappling with this for years. The Supreme Court is teaching us lessons. The Criminal Code has provisions. The Law Commission of Canada said that the system had become incomprehensible and overly complex.

This bill is 40 pages long, settings out new rules that will simplify and speed up proceedings on the admissibility of conduct, medical records, and documents in the defendant’s possession concerning the victim. This is extremely important. The same 40 pages are included in the National Defence Act. In these last five minutes, we’ve already covered 50% of the bill.

There are other provisions, including 10 pages of transitional measures at the end, because, as you know, there is another bill moving forward at the same time. There are 10 pages of transitional measures. No one mentioned that in committee either.

There was no debate on what I just told you about the rules of evidence because there’s a consensus that all of this is an improvement. For example, one improvement requires that the person seeking access to the complainant’s medical or therapeutic records must make a written request and provide notice at least 60 days before the trial to prevent this from happening on the morning of the trial, causing an adjournment and leading to unnecessary debates. These are measures that will reduce delays.

Finally, I’d like to mention some other interesting measures that no one talked about in committee, because they’re widely supported. These include allowing a victim or witness who appears in court to have a support person or a pet with them to help them feel more at ease during their testimony. That is what modernizing the justice system is all about.

A second measure that has been approved is that victims will be able to give evidence from behind a screen or from a separate room, while appearing on a monitor in the courtroom in front of the accused. These measures to make the justice system more humane aren’t being discussed, since there is no need, because a consensus has been reached on them. They account for more than half of the bill before us. I invite you to pass this bill now in principle and be ready for the report from the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs tomorrow, after more than 12 hours of deliberation. Thank you.

Honourable senators, I’m pleased to rise on second reading of Bill C-16.

Are you sure, Senator Dalphond, that you’ll be doing clause by clause tomorrow morning in committee? It’s on evenings like this one that I reflect and say that the two former prime ministers in particular — Prime Minister Harper and Prime Minister Trudeau — left Parliament with gifts that keep on giving.

I also want to remind my honourable colleagues that, as Leader of the Opposition, I have unlimited time. I also want to remind my colleagues that today we rise within 28 minutes after my speech of unlimited time; it’s an automatic rising of the chamber.

However, I do rise, after sharing all those wonderful thoughts, as the critic on second reading of Bill C-16, An Act to amend certain Acts in relation to criminal and correctional matters (child protection, gender-based violence, delays and other measures).

Honourable senators, Bill C-16 is being presented to us as legislation intended to better protect victims and to better address certain serious forms of crime. In several respects, it does indeed contain useful and long-awaited measures. It responds to serious and urgent issues: the protection of victims, sexual violence and intimate partner violence. On all these matters, Parliament must act, and Conservatives clearly support those provisions.

However, one thing must also be kept in mind: If we are debating such a broad criminal law bill today, it is in large part because we must correct the effects of 10 years of poor policies on criminal justice. For too long, the government has sent signals of leniency, weakened certain tools of the justice system and too often seemed more concerned with the rights of offenders than with protecting the public and victims. Bill C-16, therefore, contains necessary measures, and several of them have been long awaited.

We also welcome the strengthening of the Canadian Victims Bill of Rights, something that had not been done since 2015, and which victims have sorely lacked. That is why we are prepared to support what genuinely contributes to strengthening public safety and better protecting Canadians.

However, that support is not blind. One important measure in the bill raises a serious problem of principle and criminal policy for us: the “safety valve” mechanism applicable to mandatory minimum penalties.

In our view, this provision moves in the wrong direction. It risks further weakening the coherence of criminal law and undermining the deterrent effect that Parliament expressly intended to recognize for certain serious offences.

It is in that spirit that we approach this debate: by recognizing what the bill usefully brings but without complacency toward provisions that risk weakening the penal response.

To properly understand what is at stake, it is worth briefly recalling what Bill C-16 contains.

First, the bill creates a new offence of controlling or coercive conduct against an intimate partner. It therefore targets patterns of controlling or coercive behaviour in intimate relationships, including where the psychological safety of the victim is at issue.

It also expands the circumstances in which murder is deemed first-degree murder, notably in certain contexts involving coercive control, sexual violence, exploitation or hatred, and it requires the court to consider life imprisonment in certain aggravated cases of manslaughter.

Second, the bill introduces important new protections for victims, especially women and children. Notably, it creates a distinct offence for threatening to distribute an intimate image, which also includes certain manipulated depictions such as sexual “deepfakes.” It also creates a new offence related to recruiting a person under the age of 18 to participate in an offence. These are concrete measures that respond to current criminal realities and deserve support.

The bill also contains several provisions aimed at strengthening the place of victims in the justice system. It expands their right to information, more clearly affirms their right to be treated with respect and fairness, improves the sharing of information in the correctional system and harmonizes certain victims’ rights in the military justice system.

In addition, Bill C-16 proposes a new part of the Criminal Code on unreasonable delay, with a view to structuring applications based on the Jordan decision.

The bill, therefore, seeks to make a stay of proceedings a remedy of last resort and to require the court to undertake a more contextualized analysis of the delay.

Finally, among this set of measures, the government has also inserted a much more questionable reform, namely, the “safety valve” mechanism for mandatory minimum penalties.

Before I return to that more specifically, I should point out that the bill was improved in committee through serious and constructive work by the Conservatives. Several of our amendments strengthened important aspects of the bill.

First, the Conservatives secured an amendment to increase the maximum sentence to 14 years when an intimate image was knowingly created during or immediately following an aggravated sexual assault. This was a significant improvement. It recognizes that creating an intimate image during or immediately after an aggravated sexual assault makes the crime and the harm caused to the victim even worse.

We also expanded the definition of “intimate image” to more clearly include AI-generated content, such as deepfakes and certain sexual images that, while not displaying full nudity, nevertheless cause real harm. This is a necessary update of the criminal law.

The law must keep pace with technological change, especially when these tools are used to humiliate, intimidate or exploit victims, many of them women and young girls.

Finally, the Conservatives also added the Canada Border Services Agency and the Department of Justice to the list of federal entities that victims can contact to request information under the Canadian Victims Bill of Rights. This measure complies with the bill’s stated objective of better supporting victims throughout the process.

Honourable senators, Conservatives did useful and responsible work, and all of that deserves to be underscored. That said, despite these advances, one central issue remains and continues to divide us on this bill: the safety valve for mandatory minimum penalties.

The safety valve proposed by the government draws on an idea already raised by the Supreme Court in its recent jurisprudence on mandatory minimum penalties. In the Lloyd decision, the court contemplated the possibility that Parliament could create a mechanism allowing a mandatory minimum to be set aside where its application would amount to cruel and unusual punishment.

That same idea later resurfaced in other decisions, including Morrison, Bertrand Marchand and Senneville. The government, therefore, chose to write into law an avenue that the court had already hinted at.

The government will say, of course, that this mechanism also responds to one of the concerns raised in section 12 case law, namely, the use of reasonable hypotheticals. That is because the new provision speaks of cruel and unusual punishment for that offender, and, in the circumstances, it will argue that the analysis is now more directly tied to the actual offender before the court.

The real question, then, is this: Has the government merely reproduced what the Supreme Court contemplated or has it gone further?

To answer that, one must return to the way the court framed this idea in the Lloyd decision. In Lloyd, the court spoke of a residual discretion exercised in exceptional cases. The idea was, therefore, that of a very narrow safety valve in law to be used with restraint. Yet, the government did not reproduce that restraint in the same terms.

The new provision does not expressly refer to exceptional circumstances and provides that, once the threshold of cruel and unusual punishment is met, the court imposes a sentence below the mandatory minimum. In other words, once that threshold is crossed, the departure no longer amounts to a residual discretion, strictly speaking. The court must go below the minimum. That scope is broadened further by the fact that this mechanism applies, in practice, to all mandatory minimum penalties, except those where the minimum is life imprisonment.

The government says it wants to make mandatory minimums operative again, which we support, but, at the same time, it creates a general regime that allows them to be overridden in a very wide range of cases. That is where we are in profound disagreement because a mandatory minimum that can be set aside so broadly ceases to be a true sentencing floor; in practice, it becomes a sentence from which the judge may depart through direct application of the mechanism provided by Parliament. Even if the law provides that the sentence so imposed remains for that case, a minimum term of imprisonment does not make the situation any more acceptable. The fact remains that the original minimum adopted by legislators may be lowered by the court itself.

That is why we Conservatives sought to make serious corrections to this approach. We proposed amendments to exclude some of the most serious offences from this safety valve, including child sexual offences, violent sexual offences and extortion. Our objective was simple: to ensure that, for these crimes, Parliament’s message would remain firm and unambiguous.

Those amendments were rejected, colleagues. That is what makes the expansion proposed by the government so troubling. By allowing this safety valve to apply so broadly, the door is open to sentences below those set by Parliament, which could be seen as profoundly unjust, especially in cases involving child sexual offences or violent sexual offences.

For victims and the public, it is extremely difficult to accept that the minimum set by Parliament could be bypassed in this way for crimes of such gravity. The signal being sent is the wrong one. It weakens denunciation, deterrence and confidence in the justice system.

The danger of this approach becomes even clearer in light of the Senneville case. This is precisely where the government’s answer on hypotheticals falls short. In Senneville and Naud, the trial judges had already set aside the mandatory minimums, based on the actual facts of those cases, without even relying on reasonable hypotheticals. That is important to recall because the point here is not only what the Supreme Court ultimately decided but, rather, the fact that mandatory minimums could be set aside in cases of extreme gravity.

The facts underlying those cases were far from minor. In Senneville, there were 475 files, including 317 images constituting child sexual abuse and exploitation material. Roughly 90% of those images depicted very young girls aged three to six. The material had been obtained from specialized websites, kept for 8 months and accessed over 13 months.

In Naud, which was joined to the Senneville case, there were 531 images and 274 videos, mainly depicting children aged 5 to 10. Again, this involved a very large volume of material, obtained and accessed through specialized tools, including software used to erase traces.

In other words, we were not dealing with a marginal or trivial case; we were dealing with cases involving a considerable volume of illegal material, very young victims, repeated conduct over a long period and deliberate means used to access and conceal that material. However, despite the manifest gravity of those facts, the mandatory minimums were set aside at the first instance. That is precisely what is troubling.

With Bill C-16, for a case of that nature, an application seeking a sentence below the minimum would no longer necessarily have to proceed by way of a Charter challenge under section 12; it could be brought directly before the court under the legislative regime set out in the law itself. In other words, the law itself would create the pathway for going below the minimum, including in cases where the facts are exceptionally grave.

That is exactly the kind of result that many Canadians found deeply troubling in Senneville, and it is precisely why we believe the government has gone too far.

For all these reasons, we cannot accept this measure. We support making minimum sentences effective once again.

However, we cannot support a mechanism drafted in such broad, vague terms, which risks, in practice, stripping these minimum sentences of much of their practical effect.

Honourable senators, before I conclude, I would also like to say a word about another important aspect of Bill C-16, namely, its interaction with Bill C-225, known as “Bailey’s Law.” This point deserves to be highlighted because it speaks directly to the courageous fight led by the family of Bailey McCourt. Bailey McCourt was a young mother of two, deeply loved by her family, whose life was brutally taken in a daylight attack in Kelowna. Her death shook her family, her community and far beyond. In the eyes of many Canadians, she quickly became the tragic symbol of a system that failed to protect a victim of intimate partner violence.

As we know, Bill C-16 and Bill C-225 contain similar provisions dealing with coercive control, first-degree murder and manslaughter in the context of intimate partner violence. That is precisely why the order of adoption is not without importance. Bill C-225 expressly contains coordinating amendments with Bill C-16. Those provisions state that, if certain corresponding provisions of Bill C-16 come into force before those in Bill C-225, the central provisions of Bailey’s Law dealing with first-degree murder and manslaughter will be repealed.

In other words, if Bill C-16 passes first, an essential part of Bailey’s Law risks being technically absorbed into another bill.

To some, that may seem like a procedural detail. For the family, it is not. Debbie Henderson, Bailey’s aunt, said clearly at committee that, if those provisions are removed from Bill C-225 because Bill C-16 is passed first, it will no longer truly be Bailey’s Law. She also reminded us that the first-degree murder designation in a coercive control context was included because of Bailey’s case, and it lies at the very heart of her family’s efforts to preserve her legacy.

She also said it was deeply important to her family that Bailey’s Law be completed before July 4, the first anniversary of Bailey’s murder.

What is also important is that the Minister of Justice himself acknowledged at the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee during the pre-study of Bill C-16 that the government would have no issue with Bailey’s Law receiving Royal Assent before Bill C-16. That is to the credit of both the minister and the government. He acknowledged that there was no conflict between the two bills and that, if this represented a meaningful gesture for the family, it would be accommodated. We thank the government and minister for that.

That is why it is important that Bill C-225 pass first. If this measure exists today, it is because of the fight led by Bailey’s family. If it is to enter our law, it should do so first under the name that gave it life: Bailey’s Law.

Honourable senators, I will soon conclude because we are drawing close to midnight, and I don’t want to use my unlimited time this evening, of all times.

Bill C-16 contains important provisions, and several of them deserve to be welcomed. It also includes concrete improvements, some of which were achieved thanks to the serious work of Conservatives and other members in the other house.

It also contains a fundamental legislative choice to which Conservatives cannot subscribe. When a mechanism risks, in practice, weakening the penalties applicable to serious offences, particularly those committed against children and victims of sexual violence, it is the coherence of the law, public confidence and the protection of the most vulnerable that are at stake. We cannot accept a measure that, in our view, departs from the very principle that should inspire this bill: better protection for victims.

That is the issue we sought to bring to light today, and it is the reason we have vociferously worked hard, both in the House and at committee at pre-study. It is because we believe that victims should be the priority of Parliament and government.

On that note, honourable colleagues, I will call the question on second reading.

Are senators ready for the question?

Is it your pleasure, honourable senators, to adopt the motion?

Some Hon. Senators: Agreed.

An Hon. Senator: On division.

(Motion agreed to and bill read second time, on division.)