Law360 Canada (June 29, 2026, 8:38 AM EDT) --

Deepa Mattoo

While the Ahluwalia decision solidified a groundbreaking civil framework for addressing coercive control, Parliament simultaneously built a parallel carceral one (Ahluwalia v. Ahluwalia, 2026 SCC 16). The federal intention behind Bill C-16 is well-intentioned — aiming to intervene early, recognize psychological containment as violence, and treat coercive control as a precursor to lethal escalation. However, an intersectional, rights-based lens reveals a stark truth: criminalization has not historically saved marginalized people. When we try to force the fluid, daily reality of coercive control into a punitive, carceral framework, we risk repeating historical failures. The criminal justice system fundamentally demands an incident-based approach — prosecuting specific actions on specific dates beyond a reasonable doubt.

This introduces profound systemic dangers for survivors:

1. The threat of retaliatory cross-charging

Abusers are often highly adept at navigating institutional systems and manipulating the language of victimhood. Because coercive control is subtle and lacks a physical “smoking gun,” frontline police officers responding to a chaotic 911 call frequently struggle to complete accurate, immediate risk screening to identify the primary aggressor.

If an abuser counter-claims that the survivor is the one exercising control — perhaps because the survivor restricted access to a bank account to save rent money, or had a defensive, reactive outburst — police often resort to dual arrests or cross-charging.

The Systemic Trauma: A survivor who is criminally charged faces totalizing disaster. They are immediately stripped of their autonomy, thrust into state surveillance and forced to defend their liberty. Furthermore, a criminal charge completely upends concurrent family law custody disputes and child protection proceedings, weaponizing the state against the victim.

2. The evidentiary chasm and cross-system contamination

Proving a “pattern of behaviour” beyond a reasonable doubt is an exceptionally high bar. Individual tactics — such as monitoring location, regulating dress, or text-message bombardment — can easily be picked apart by defence counsel and presented as mutual relationship dysfunction when cross-examined in isolation.

The danger of this legislative convergence is that our legal systems do not operate in a vacuum; a survivor's reality will be forced to cross these systemic borders. If a pattern of coercive control is prosecuted under Bill C-16 and fails to meet the exacting criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, the resulting acquittal does not just let the abuser go free. It creates a devastating domino effect — legally invalidating the survivor's trauma and handing the abuser an institutional shield to defeat a concurrent civil claim under the Ahluwalia tort in family court.

3. The chilling effect on marginalized communities

For Indigenous, racialized, immigrant and undocumented women, involving law enforcement is never a neutral act. Expanding carceral state power creates a massive chilling effect. Survivors from these communities know that calling the police invites systemic bias, potential child welfare interventions, or the incarceration/deportation of a partner upon whom the family financially relies. If the state's primary tool is a carceral hammer, robust risk screening mechanisms are sidelined, and the most vulnerable survivors will simply choose to suffer in silence.

The two-year activation ramp: A window for structural reform

Recognizing the immense operational challenges of this shift, Parliament embedded a critical safeguard into the legislation: a mandatory two-year implementation ramp. The criminal offence of coercive control will not formally take effect until two years post-enactment (projected for June 2028).

This two-year buffer is an explicit admission that our justice system is currently unequipped to handle non-physical coercion safely. It provides a ticking clock and a vital window for advocates, sector leaders, and legal professionals to construct the protective guardrails and risk screening protocols needed to prevent the law from becoming a weapon of revictimization.

How this redefines legal practice: Intakes and forensic risk screening

This simultaneous convergence of Ahluwalia and Bill C-16 fundamentally changes the operational and diagnostic obligations of family and criminal lawyers. Practitioners can no longer rely on traditional, incident-based intakes.

1. Transforming the client intake

Traditional intakes ask, “On what date did the physical assault occur?” Lawyers must now pivot to open-ended, trauma-informed structural questions designed as proactive risk screening to map out the psychological architecture of the home, such as: 

• “Who manages the access credentials to the bank accounts, phone bills, or immigration portals?”
• “What happens in the house if you attempt to engage with friends or visit family?”
• “Are there implicit rules you have to follow to preserve safety, and what occurs if those rules are broken?”

2. Risk screening as evidentiary foundation

Under Bill C-16 and the Ahluwalia tort, rigorous risk screening is no longer just a secondary safety planning measure; it is a forensic necessity to build the legal record.

Lawyers must collaborate with specialized assessors and frontline sector experts to decode what may seem like minor details. Constant text-messaging or location-tracking apps are not just “annoyances” — in a high-risk relationship, they are the literal bars of the cage. Advanced risk screening flags these patterns as high-predictor lethality indicators for intimate partner homicide.

The systemic pipeline: Legal aid and conduit training

The theoretical brilliance of Ahluwalia and the protective intent of Bill C-16 will remain entirely inaccessible to those who need them most without a massive structural overhaul of the legal pipeline.

• The Legal Aid crisis: Mapping a multi-year pattern of coercive control requires dozens of hours of intensive billable work. The current, rigid caps on family law Legal Aid certificates in Ontario are fundamentally incompatible with this reality. If provincial funding bodies do not drastically expand certificate hours to fund trauma-informed intakes and specialized risk screening, Ahluwalia damages will become an elite remedy reserved only for wealthy litigants.
• Training the conduits: First-contact points in the justice system — duty counsel, legal clinic intake workers, and frontline police — must undergo mandatory training on identifying primary agents of control and executing immediate risk screening. If the conduits of the system do not understand the hidden choreography of coercive control, they will continue to mistake a survivor’s trauma-induced distress for aggression, funneling survivors directly into the criminal justice system as accused parties.

The Ahluwalia decision provides the precise vocabulary and civil judicial validation needed to change how we litigate, support and advocate. As we approach the activation of criminal provisions in 2028, we must ensure that the expansion of criminal law does not dismantle the progress made in the civil sphere. True access to justice is not a static destination; it is an ongoing, deliberate dismantling of rigid legal doctrines to ensure that deep institutional risk screening protects people in the entirety of their lived experiences.

This is the second part of a two-part series. Part one: New era of trauma-informed intakes: What Ahluwalia and Bill C-16 demand of legal professionals.

Deepa Mattoo is the CEO of YWCA Toronto and a licensed barrister and solicitor in Ontario. A recipient of the Law Society Medal, she is the former executive director of the Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic and a deeply experienced human rights advocate who has led systemic law reform and litigation before all levels of court, including the Supreme Court of Canada. Her work centres on intersectional equity, and she frequently provides international expertise and training on trauma-informed legal practice and access to justice for survivors of gender-based violence.

The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the author’s firm, its clients, Law360 Canada, LexisNexis Canada or any of its or their respective affiliates. This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal advice.

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