Criminal Code
Bill to Amend--Second Reading
October 21, 2025
Moved second reading of Bill S-233, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (assault against persons who provide health services and first responders).
He said: Honourable senators, I rise today at second reading of Bill S-233, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (assault against persons who provide health services and first responders), to seek your support for the Senate to adopt this bill without referring it to committee so that it may move directly to third reading and be sent to the other place.
Bill S-233 seeks to add an aggravating circumstance to the Criminal Code for assaults committed against health care workers and first responders while performing their duties. It does not create a new offence but simply clarifies that when a court imposes a sentence for an assault against these professionals, it is required to consider this circumstance as an aggravating factor, while maintaining judicial discretion in determining an appropriate sentence.
It is important to recognize that this bill is not new. The original version, Bill C-321, was first introduced in the House of Commons in the Forty-fourth Parliament by MP Todd Doherty, whom I want to thank for his continued leadership and continued advocacy on this issue.
I also want to pay tribute to and point out that today we have with us here in the gallery Mr. Paul Hills. He is a Saskatchewan paramedic and a representative of the Saskatoon Paramedic Association. He has been the driving force behind this important piece of legislation. His work to highlight the growing violence faced by front-line workers has been essential in moving this mission forward and has laid the groundwork for what we are discussing here today.
Bill S-233 is, therefore, identical to Bill C-321 and corresponds to the version that was amended and unanimously adopted by the House of Commons. After its adoption in the other place, Bill C-321 was referred to the Senate, where it was studied by the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs and reported back to the chamber without amendment. It was unanimously supported by our committee.
Bill C-321 had, therefore, completed all parliamentary stages. The only reason — and I stress the only reason — that this bill did not become law was due to the dissolution of Parliament. It died on the Order Paper when the Forty-fourth Parliament ended. There were no objections to its content, no delays, no controversy and no disagreement. The bill was fully supported, fully vetted and ready for final passage.
Colleagues, this fact is critical to our deliberation today. We are not examining a new or untested legislative proposal. We are resuming consideration of a bill that has already been scrutinized, supported and validated through every stage of the legislative process in both chambers. Its content remains unchanged, and its scope is limited, as it represents a targeted and modest amendment to the Criminal Code.
The Senate has already established clear precedents for fast‑tracking consensus-based bills without referring them to committee when their objectives are focused and not controversial. During the Forty-fourth Parliament, bills such as S-202, S-206, S-214, S-223 and S-245 were passed using this expedited process. More recently, during the Forty‑fifth Parliament, the Senate followed the same procedure for Bill S-210 and Bill S-227. Bill S-233 is fully in line with this parliamentary tradition.
As we consider this legislation, the reality of violence against front-line workers continues to worsen: 75% of Canadian paramedics report having experienced violence at work; 61% of nurses have reported being victims of harassment, threats or assaults; and in 2021, 70% of emergency physicians said that violence in emergency departments had increased over the previous five years.
Just this past Sunday, in Hamilton, Ontario, an ambulance parked outside Hamilton General Hospital was deliberately set on fire moments after paramedics had off-loaded a patient. Police reported that a man had thrown an accelerant into the vehicle before fleeing on foot. Fortunately, no one was injured, but the ambulance was completely torched and destroyed.
The suspect, a 31-year-old man, has since been arrested and charged with arson — disregard for human life. This shocking incident is a stark reminder that these acts of violence are not isolated; they are happening here in our own communities, and they directly endanger those who already risk their lives to save and serve ours.
These figures and recent events illustrate a human and professional crisis to which we can respond today with clear and concrete action by sending a message that Parliament will not tolerate violence against those who protect and care for Canadian citizens.
Bill S-233 reflects a non-partisan effort grounded in respect and recognition for first responders and health care workers alike. Discussions held with many senators, representing all the groups in the Senate, have already shown a shared understanding and a willingness to act swiftly.
In this regard, I would like to highlight the constructive and collegial approach of Senator Yussuff who expressed his support for the bill, recognizing both its necessity and its merit, and I thank him.
I would also be remiss if I didn’t thank Senator Ravalia, who isn’t with us this week because of other Senate duties, for his kind support as the friendly critic of this bill in the previous Parliament.
It should also be noted that Canada would not be alone in taking this step. A number of comparable democracies, including France, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, have already adopted similar measures recognizing the particular vulnerability of first responders and health care professionals, and providing for stiffer penalties when they are victims of violence. Bill S-233 therefore aligns Canada with a clear and consistent international trend.
By adopting this bill now, the Senate will demonstrate that it can act with efficiency and compassion when moral urgency is evident and consensus is strong.
I, therefore, invite you, honourable colleagues, to grant your consent for Bill S-233 to be adopted at second reading without referral to committee and to proceed directly to third reading and transmission to the other place without delay.
The Canadians who depend on these everyday heroes — our first responders and health care workers — deserve to see this legislation completed soon in respect of what they do and how much they do for us Canadians. Thank you.
Honourable senators, I rise today to support Bill S-233, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (assault against persons who provide health services and first responders).
As you know, this is not a new idea. As the friendly critic, I note that this bill is essentially the successor to Bill C-321, which in the Forty-fourth Parliament passed unanimously through the other place and carried the clear mandate of recognition, respect and protection for those who serve, care for and protect us.
As someone who has spent a lifetime advocating for workers’ rights and dignity in the workplace, I can say with confidence that the crisis of violence against health service providers and first responders is real. Across Canada, we’ve heard stories of paramedics assaulted, nurses overwhelmed by abuse and home care workers fearful of coming to work.
When the House of Commons committee heard from union witnesses — people who know this reality first-hand — they made the human cost painfully clear. Linda Silas from the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions told MPs that two thirds of nurses reported incidents of physical assaults over the past year, and 40% of those nurses were physically abused more than once a month while engaged in their duties. Such a high rate of violence would be unthinkable in any other profession, and it needs to be stopped.
This bill is a clear message: To those who answer the call when we are vulnerable, the justice system will stand with you. To those who attack you while you’re working, we say you will be held to account.
I ask my colleagues not to delay. The other place already sent Bill C-321 forward with unanimity in the last Parliament. We didn’t get the job done before it was dissolved. We have the opportunity to do so now. The Senate should act promptly so that this important protection becomes law without undue delay.
The problem we face is not abstract. The Standing Committee on Health in the other place shared this in its 2019 report:
Beyond the numbers, there is the human toll. There is the care aid who is sexually assaulted by a home care client with dementia. There is the nurse who is punched in the jaw by a senior suffering from delirium. There is the personal support worker who doesn’t know how she could possibly face going back to work. . . .
We also know that the pandemic years have magnified the pressure on health care workers and first responders. There are more cases, more stress and more danger.
Paul Hills of the International Association of Fire Fighters, representing more than 27,000 paramedics and firefighters, told the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights in 2023:
. . . we strongly support Bill C-321. . . .
. . . this legislation and the tougher penalties it proposes will build a strong foundation to address the growing trend of violence towards first responders and health care workers across Canada.
We must recognize that when someone serving in an emergency room, in a firetruck or in long-term care is assaulted, we not only injure that person; we injure our system of care, our community trust and our collective sense of safety.
Bill S-233 and Bill C-321 do that. The text of the former Bill C-321 — now mirrored in Bill S-233 — amends the Criminal Code by adding section 269.02:
When a court imposes a sentence for an offence . . . it shall consider as an aggravating circumstance the fact that the victim . . . was . . . a person who provides health services, including personal care services, or a first responder engaged in the performance of their duty.
In simpler terms, if you assault someone who is providing health services or working as a first-line responder in the performance of their duties, that fact becomes a formal aggravating circumstance in sentencing.
This is not about creating new offences; it’s about saying that when our society asks you to risk your safety to serve, the justice system will recognize that. When you are attacked, the courts will treat that as a weighty factor.
That is why the Senate should not delay the passage of this bill.
In the last Parliament, we already saw that the other place gave unanimous support to Bill C-321. That was a powerful bipartisan signal. This bill is ready. The policy rationale has been tested in committees in the two houses of Parliament over the last two years. We must ask what is left to debate. The principle is settled among parliamentarians: We protect those who protect us. The only remaining step is to act. Delaying sends the wrong message to health service providers who face abuse and violence, and to our communities that expect their safety to be upheld.
Moreover, as someone who has dedicated my life to working for fair treatment and respect for working people, whether at the bargaining table or in the legislative chamber, I believe legislation like this reaffirms our basic dignity.
In addressing the potential concerns and underscoring inclusivity, some may ask if this bill goes far enough. Are additional protections needed? Is the scope correct? These are reasonable questions.
The bill’s language was carefully considered in committees during the last Parliament, and amendments in committee in the other place broadened its scope to include persons who provide health services rather than applying a narrower definition of health care professional. It complements, not replaces, occupational health and safety laws. It focuses on sentencing in that when someone assaults a front-line worker, our courts will recognize the victim’s service role as aggravating.
Prevention and workplace safety matter, too, but this bill sends a necessary deterrent and a symbolic message now.
Colleagues, in conclusion, let me restate this: Bill S-233 is the legislative embodiment of a societal promise. It is a promise that those who provide health services, personal care, home care and hospital care, and those first responders who rush toward danger on our behalf, are not forgotten, not expendable and not unprotected.
We have before us a measure that unites parliamentarians, that addresses a pressing real-world problem and that offers a clear, symbolic and practical improvement to our Criminal Code. Let us not delay this bill or study it further. The path is clear. Instead, I ask this chamber to join Senator Housakos and me in sending a message of support, solidarity and respect by supporting this bill and moving it as quickly as possible back to the other place without delay. In doing so, we honour the men and women who serve, we strengthen our justice system and we signal to all Canadians that violence against those who care for us will not be tolerated.
Thank you.
Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to Bill S-233, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (assaults against persons who provide health services and first responders).
As Senators Housakos and Yussuff have pointed out, the bill is relatively straightforward: It would require judges, upon sentencing, to consider an assault on a health worker, health service provider, paramedic, firefighter or other first responder in the course of their duties as an aggravating circumstance.
The original version of this bill, which was then known as Bill C-321, focused specifically on health professionals, but the version that arrived at the Senate, which has now been re‑presented by Senator Housakos, has been expanded to include all those who “provide health services.” That means it could now encompass people, such as health care aides who are providing home health care to seniors, caregivers or nannies who are often trapped in conditions of employment that make it difficult for them to escape from abuse, registered massage therapists who might be at risk of sexual assault by clients and medical staff at abortion clinics who risk being assaulted by anti-abortion activists.
If, indeed, we are not going to hear from witnesses on Bill S-233, with Senator Tannas’s words ringing in my ears, I do want us to know that there is still room for debate and discussion about aspects of this bill. When we were in meetings last year at the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, we heard some truly disturbing testimony from witnesses about the increasing frequency and increasing violence of attacks on health workers and first responders, a situation that has gotten much worse, we were told, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and in parallel with the rising problems of fentanyl addiction and large homeless encampments.
Although the evidence we heard was largely anecdotal, there seems little doubt that the problem is real and intense. According to testimony from the BC Nurses’ Union, 39% of their members report being exposed to weapons on a monthly basis. Half of them report experiencing physical violence at least once a month. A staggering 99% of respondents in British Columbia said they experienced “reportable incidents,” which are assaults and threats that technically rose to the level that they could have been reported to their employers. And yet more than half of the nurses surveyed said they did not report anything to their employer because they lacked faith that anything would be done about it.
Here, we come to the complications and conundrums within Bill S-233. The new sentencing provisions in this legislation only have force and effect once people are arrested, charged and convicted. This bill, in no way, protects nurses or health aides who are so frequently assaulted by patients with dementia, nor does it protect paramedics and firefighters dealing with people in the grips of drug-induced psychosis or a manic episode. If a patient or client lacks mens rea — if they can’t form criminal intent — they are unlikely to be charged or prosecuted. In such cases, the assurances offered by Bill S-233 cannot act as a deterrent or a protection. They can’t safeguard vulnerable health workers or first-line responders in any way.
These new sentencing protocols could certainly be applied to a violent husband who assaulted a paramedic trying to care for his injured wife or to a frustrated patient stuck in a hospital waiting room who attacked a triage nurse. Although, even in those instances, you would have to assume that someone lashing out in anger in one of the worst moments of their lives might not be considering that deterrent effects of a Criminal Code amendment.
Bill S-233 would be of no help in the case of a man with Alzheimer’s who groped a health aide or someone being roused from fentanyl toxicity by a shot of naloxone who lashed out blindly at their rescuer. Tweaking the Criminal Code feels like we are doing something, but after listening to the all the testimony at committee, I fear it is more of a gesture than a solution to the crisis in our health care system. Some of the most powerful testimony we heard at committee came from Erin Ariss, a Registered Nurse and Provincial President of the Ontario Nurses’ Association.
Let me quote from her testimony:
As nurses and health care workers, we are subject to violence and abuse every single day, and it is on the rise. We provide care when someone is in crisis, yet the existing measures in place do not take care of us.
We are on the front lines in the hospitals, nursing homes, clinics and in our communities. When we work in teams, we are most often understaffed. When we work alone, such as in home care, there is no one else around, no one to call on when a situation becomes unsafe. As nurses, we are assaulted, pushed, spat on, sworn at and experience intentional needle-stick injuries.
I worked on the front line as a nurse in an emergency department for 20 years, and while I worked at the bedside, I’ve been assaulted too many times to mention. I had my hand broken by a patient. I’ve been threatened with a gun, a machete, box cutters, knives, and assaulted with the equipment that we use to provide care. I was kicked in the abdomen when I was eight months pregnant with my son.
Her testimony came as a metaphorical gut punch to us too. So I asked her if any of the attacks that she personally endured were ever investigated. Was anyone ever charged or convicted?
I think her answer surprised many of us around the table. “No,” she said. There had never been a single charge laid.
When she was a young nurse, she told us, a patient said to her:
. . . “I will kill you and your two beautiful children, who I noticed are out in the car waiting for you after your shifts every day.”. . .
She tried to report that, she told us, “. . . but nothing was done . . . .”
Senator Prosper then asked her to explain why that was the case. She described working in a culture that taught nurses to downplay their injuries and to expect no support from their managers, a working culture where they were pressured not to report assaults but to accept them as a routine part of the job, on pain of being fired. She testified:
If we don’t care for our patients or residents or clients, depending on the setting, that could be considered patient abandonment and could result in a suspension of our licence to practise.
That is always hanging over our head, and we are taught — it is pervasive within health care but also in school — that you put yourself second, that you care for your patient, no matter what.
The other thing that you will find across all sectors of health care, and particularly for nurses, is that if you are assaulted, or subjected to violence, quite often . . . . You are blamed for the violence or the assault and that it was a delay in care, or it was something that you missed, and, therefore, it is your fault as the nurse.
We heard disturbingly similar testimony from Paul Hills, the President of the Saskatoon Paramedic Association, who is here with us today. Let me quote from Mr. Hills:
In Saskatoon alone, we’ve had ambulance windows smashed while paramedics were attending to patients inside. Medics have been attacked with weapons. This year, an ambulance was stolen with two medics working inside on patients. One person was tossed around inside the vehicle, and both medics sustained injuries resulting in time away from work.
I have had my life, and my family’s lives threatened too many times to count. . . . I don’t have the ability to have anonymity in my job. Any person can find out which attendant was at their call. I’m in the phone book. I’m down the street, and gang members, rival gang members, they can find me. They track me from work. They know where my family lives and where my kids go to school. That’s the kind of thing that really hits home when you get told that in the back of your ambulance. We’ve had bats, machetes and knives pulled on us and removed guns from patients all while trying to provide care.
But just as with nurses, Mr. Hills said there is little or no legal support, much less protection, for paramedics who experience assaults on the job. He told us:
. . . we don’t often report these things. We do and have come to the point where some of this is, supposedly, part of our job, because there have been situations where we’ve been turned away by the legal side, by Crown prosecutors saying, “It is part of your job. You getting pushed down the stairs, it’s not really a big deal.” . . .
He went on to explain that paramedics and firefighters exist in a male-dominated space, a macho space, where they are conditioned to never show emotions and never ask for help, where they are taught not to complain or look like victims.
And this is the central challenge presented by the legislation. It will not work if complaints are not filed and if charges are not laid.
At committee, we heard again and again about a toxic culture of silence, a culture of stoicism, which discourages health workers and first responders from pressing charges, and about a culture of neglect, which discourages police from investigating these complaints and discourages Crown prosecutors from laying charges. Worse than that, we heard heartbreaking testimony about the failure of health care managers and first responder organizations to protect their workers from being assaulted in the first place.
Even at its best, Bill S-233 can only enhance punishment after the fact. And it became more and more obvious, as we heard more and more witnesses, that we need to be far more proactive. We must find better ways of protecting vulnerable workers from being attacked at all. We can’t just shrug our shoulders and write off assaults as part of the job. We can’t expect our health workers and first responders to accept violence as a commonplace cost of doing business.
Bill S-233 may accomplish something — by underlining our national denunciation of violence against the very people who are sacrificing so much to protect and care for us. It can send a message that we, as Canadians, will not tolerate these repeated attacks on some of the most heroic and essential members of our community.
But then we have to back that legal and political symbolism with concrete practical action. We need our health care system to protect and defend workers on the job. We need our paramedics and firefighters to be safe on the streets. We need to break down the walls of silence that prevent people from reporting violence and dismantle workplace cultures that normalize violence as part of the job.
We need to do that not just to protect individual workers on the front lines but to make sure that we still have people willing to serve as nurses and health aides and paramedics and firefighters next year, in 10 years and long after that. Otherwise, we will have just added a line to the Criminal Code to soothe our consciences.
I want to end these remarks by thanking all the brave witnesses who testified for their blunt and powerful testimony. I want to thank every single Canadian health care worker and first responder for their service to their patients, their communities and our nation.
And I personally want to thank especially the nurses, the health care aides and the paramedics who have done so much to care for members of my own family in their times of medical crisis. In those times of stress and fear and grief, I probably did not take the time to thank you enough. But bless you for all that you do. May you be safe and stay safe, and may you have the respect you deserve as you continue in your vital, valued work. Hiy hiy.
Are senators ready for the question?
Is it your pleasure, honourable senators, to adopt the motion?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
(Motion agreed to and bill read second time.)
Honourable senators, when shall this bill be read the third time?
(On motion of Senator Housakos, bill placed on the Orders of the Day for third reading at the next sitting of the Senate.)
