Addressing the Continuing Victimization of Homicide Victims' Families Act

This bill, known as the Addressing the Continuing Victimization of Homicide Victims' Families Act, targets situations where someone convicted of a crime causing another person's death knows where the body or remains are located but refuses to tell authorities. It's meant to address the added suffering families experience when they cannot recover a loved one's remains.

The bill changes the Criminal Code so that a judge sentencing someone for a death-related offence must treat this kind of refusal as an aggravating factor, making the sentence harsher, unless the judge explains in writing why they chose not to. It also requires judges to delay full parole eligibility for such offenders to half their sentence or ten years, whichever is shorter, unless the judge is satisfied that a standard parole timeline would still adequately denounce the crime and deter similar conduct.

The bill also updates the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and the Prisons and Reformatories Act so that this refusal to disclose the location of remains becomes a factor that parole boards and correctional authorities must consider. Specifically, parole boards may deny full or day parole, and correctional authorities may deny temporary absences (with or without escort), if they are satisfied the offender has this information and is withholding it.

This bill amends the Criminal Code, the Corrections and Conditional Release Act, and the Prisons and Reformatories Act to make an offender's refusal to disclose the location of a victim's body or remains a factor courts, parole boards, and prison authorities can weigh in sentencing, parole eligibility, and temporary absence decisions.

• Sentencing courts — must treat an offender's refusal to disclose the location of a body or remains as an aggravating circumstance when sentencing for an offence related to a death; if a court finds this refusal exists but chooses not to apply it, the court must give written reasons.
• Parole delay orders — for sentences of two years or more (including life), a court must order that the offender serve one half of the sentence or ten years, whichever is less, before full parole eligibility, if the offender is found to be withholding location information; a court can decline to impose this only if satisfied that denunciation and deterrence would be adequately served under the normal parole rules, and the court can later revoke this order if the circumstances justifying it no longer exist.
• Parole boards' discretion — the Parole Board of Canada and provincial parole boards may (not must) refuse to grant parole to an offender who withholds such information; this is a discretionary power, not a mandatory bar.
• Unescorted absences and temporary release — the Parole Board, and separately the "designated authority" under the Prisons and Reformatories Act, may refuse to authorize unescorted temporary absences or temporary absence permissions on the same basis of withheld information.
• Decision-making criteria expanded — the Corrections and Conditional Release Act's general principles are amended so that any parole-delay order made under the new Criminal Code provision must be considered as relevant information in how sentences are carried out and in parole board decisions generally.
• Oversight — the bill does not create any new reporting body, review mechanism, or sunset clause; the "satisfied" determinations are left to the discretion of courts, parole boards, and correctional authorities, with no specified evidentiary standard or appeal process beyond existing law.