Protecting Victims Act

# The Protecting Victims Act (Bill C-16): Plain-Language Summary

This is a large, wide-ranging bill that changes many federal laws dealing with crime, victims, and corrections. Its core focus is strengthening protections for victims of violence, especially gender-based and intimate partner violence, and children, while also trying to make the criminal justice system run faster and more fairly.

**New crimes and tougher penalties.** The bill creates a new criminal offence for coercive or controlling behaviour toward an intimate partner (things like monitoring someone's movements, controlling their money, or threatening self-harm to manipulate them). It makes murder automatically first-degree ("femicide" when the victim is a woman) if it happens in the context of coercive control of a partner, sexual violence, human trafficking, or hate. Similar rules push judges to consider life sentences for manslaughter in those same circumstances. The bill also expands laws against sharing intimate images (including realistic AI-generated fakes), criminalizes depictions of bestiality, adds a new offence for recruiting minors into crime, and closes gaps in child sexual offence laws.

**Changes for victims and witnesses.** Victims of certain crimes (sexual offences, harassment, trafficking, intimate partner violence) get stronger rights: easier access to testimonial supports like support animals or screens in court, the right to be treated with respect and compassion, automatic information about their rights and available protections without having to ask, and expanded ability to give victim impact statements. The Canadian Victims Bill of Rights is amended to reflect a more "trauma-informed" approach.

**Court process changes.** The bill overhauls rules about when a complainant's past sexual history or private/therapy records can be used in sexual assault trials, aiming to protect complainants while preserving fair trial rights. It creates a new framework requiring courts to actively manage cases to avoid unreasonable delays, and sets out when a case can be thrown out for taking too long (only as a last resort). It also expands the use of alternative measures and restorative justice as options instead of full prosecution, particularly for less serious offences. Judges gain limited power to impose a sentence below a mandatory minimum if that minimum would otherwise be "cruel and unusual" for a particular offender.

**Other changes.** Criminal harassment no longer requires proving the victim actually felt afraid—only that the harassment could reasonably cause fear. The Youth Criminal Justice Act is updated to better reflect victims' rights and to pay particular attention to the needs of Indigenous and Black youth. The Firearms Act is tightened so that anyone whose licence is revoked must hand in their firearms, and people suspected of domestic violence or stalking can be denied a licence. The mandatory internet child-exploitation reporting law is strengthened (longer data retention, longer time to prosecute). The Corrections and Conditional Release Act is amended to share more information with victims and other justice agencies. Finally, Canada's mutual legal assistance law is expanded to allow cooperation with international bodies like the European Public Prosecutor's Office.

Most of these changes

This bill amends the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act, the Canadian Victims Bill of Rights, the National Defence Act, the mandatory internet-reporting Act, the Firearms Act, the Corrections and Conditional Release Act, and the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act to create new offences, sentencing rules, evidentiary procedures, victim-information rights, and information-sharing powers across the criminal and military justice systems.

• New offences and classifications — creates a coercive/controlling-conduct offence against intimate partners (section 264.01), a bestiality-depiction offence, a youth-recruitment offence, and reclassifies certain murders (including "femicide") and manslaughters as first-degree murder or eligible for life imprisonment, with parole ineligibility set by a judge at 10 to 25 years.
• Judicial discretion on sentencing — allows a court to impose a sentence below a mandatory minimum where that minimum "would amount to cruel and unusual punishment," a determination left to the sentencing judge's discretion rather than fixed by the bill.
• Alternative measures and restorative justice framework — creates a new Part in the Criminal Code letting police, prosecutors, and courts divert cases into warnings, referrals, restorative justice processes, or alternative measures instead of prosecution, with eligibility and program design largely left to Attorney General–authorized programs and future Commissioner's Directives or provincial rules rather than set out in full in the bill itself.
• Unreasonable-delay procedure — creates a new framework (Part XV.1) directing courts on what delay periods to exclude and requiring consideration of alternatives before ordering a stay of proceedings, with the underlying "unreasonable delay" standard still defined by reference to the Charter and case law rather than a fixed number of days.
• Expanded record-disclosure and rape-shield procedures — creates detailed court procedures (new sections 278.1–278.38) governing when an accused can obtain a complainant's private or therapeutic records or admit prior sexual-activity evidence, with judges weighing listed factors and issuing publication bans on the proceedings, enforceable by summary conviction.
• Victim information and participation rights — gives victims, under the Canadian Victims Bill of Rights and parallel National Defence Act provisions, rights to receive information about their case, protection measures, and restorative justice options without having to request it, and to submit impact statements to courts, correctional authorities, and the Parole Board.
• Information-sharing powers for corrections and firearms authorities — lets the Correctional Service of Canada disclose offender information (including "historical information" about former inmates) to provincial corrections, police, and other justice-system bodies through arrangements and digital interfaces it administers, and bars a firearms licence to anyone a chief firearms officer "has reasonable grounds to suspect" may have committed domestic violence or stalking — a discretionary threshold not otherwise defined in the bill.
• Oversight — requires parliamentary committee reviews of the new coercive-control offence and the unreasonable-delay Part five years after coming into force, but sets no sunset clause on any of the new offences, disclosure powers, or information-sharing arrangements; some provisions (e.g., the internet-reporting amendments and certain corrections-disclosure sections) take effect only on a future date fixed by order of the Governor in Council (Cabinet), rather than immediately.