Law360 Canada (September 30, 2026, 2:42 PM EDT) --
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| Lisa Monchalin |
For the first time, Canadian criminal law names
femicide.
In June 2026, Parliament passed two overlapping reforms addressing intimate partner violence.
Bailey’s Law (Bill C-225), a private member’s bill named for Bailey McCourt, the Kelowna, B.C., mother
killed by her estranged ex-husband in 2025 received royal assent on June 17. The federal government’s broader
Protecting Victims Act (Bill C-16) received royal assent the following day and now provides the principal legislative framework for the new femicide and coercive control provisions. Most of the reforms came into force in July. The new coercive control offence will come into force no later than June 18, 2028, allowing time for training and implementation. A current Department of Justice
funding call is supporting projects to train criminal justice professionals on the new law and improve their ability to identify coercive control.
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The
Protecting Victims Act classifies murder as first degree in several circumstances, including coercive control of an intimate partner, sexual violence, exploitation and hate-motivated killings. When the person killed in these circumstances is female, the
Criminal Code now calls the murder femicide.
This is an important shift.
Naming a harm is one way a society signals that it recognizes the issue. Femicide had gone unnamed in Canadian criminal law for too long, and recognizing it matters.
But there are limits to what law can accomplish. Recognizing femicide after a woman has been killed is not the same as preventing her death.
If the goal is fewer women killed, and it must be, the real test of these reforms will not simply be how many offenders are convicted of first-degree murder. It will be whether fewer women are killed in the first place.
The limits of law
Evidence from countries that adopted femicide laws before Canada offers reason for caution.
A study examining the staggered introduction of femicide laws across Mexican states found no significant reduction in femicides or female homicides attributable to the laws, including laws that increased prison sentences, stating in their conclusion that “femicide laws have not yet provided the intended protection for women.”
Canada’s legal and institutional context is different, so Mexico’s experience does not tell us that Canada’s reforms will fail. But it raises an important question: does increasing punishment after lethal violence change the conditions that produce that violence?
Latin American countries have been grappling with this question for more than a decade. In an analysis of femicide and femicide legislation across 16 countries, researchers
Michelle Carrigan and Myrna Dawson identified a recurring problem. Laws intended to address femicide often remain reactive rather than preventive.
The lesson here is not that criminal law is insignificant. Naming femicide can acknowledge the gendered nature of violence, and communicate society’s denunciation of it. But criminal law mostly intervenes after violence has happened.
Increasing the severity of punishment cannot, by itself, address the conditions that allow violence to develop.
What prevention looks like
If Canada wants femicide rates to go down, criminal law reform needs to be accompanied by what public health researchers call
upstream prevention: interventions designed to reduce the likelihood of violence before it occurs.
The evidence points to a combination of approaches. The World Health Organization’s
framework for preventing violence against women includes strengthening relationship skills, empowering women, ensuring access to services, reducing poverty, creating safer environments, preventing child and adolescent abuse, and transforming harmful attitudes, norms and beliefs.
That means engaging young men in
positive masculinities through educational interventions. Teaching healthy relationship and conflict-resolution skills early.
It also means addressing the
social and economic conditions that increase vulnerability to violence and ensuring that accessible supports and services are available before risks escalate.
Prevention works best when interventions
operate at several levels, including the individual, relationship, community and societal levels. No single program or policy is likely to prevent violence on its own.
Legal reform, education, economic supports, health care and social services therefore need to reinforce one another. Prevention also requires institutions to be capable of recognizing
escalating risk and responding before violence becomes lethal.
Prevention programming may be less evident or less newsworthy than a first-degree murder conviction. Governments may also find it more difficult to claim immediate political credit for violence that never happens.
But preventing violence before it escalates is ultimately what can keep women alive.
Wrongful-conviction risks must not be overlooked
There is another reason these reforms require careful implementation.
One of the circumstances that will make a murder first degree is a finding that an intimate partner was killed while the accused was engaging in, or had engaged in, a pattern of coercive or controlling conduct.
Coercive control is not a single act. The new
Criminal Code offence recognizes that it can consist of repeated or combined behaviours, including violence or threats, sexual coercion, monitoring a partner’s movements, controlling finances, restricting employment or education, controlling access to health care or threatening self-harm.
Recognizing these patterns is important precisely because abusive behaviour can accumulate over time. But determining whether such a pattern existed can also be complex and fact-intensive. In a homicide prosecution, courts may have to reconstruct the dynamics of a relationship after one of the two people at its centre is dead.
Because a finding of coercive control can help elevate a murder to first-degree murder, careful assessment of the evidence and
safeguards against miscarriages of justice are essential.
Canada’s justice system is not immune from wrongful convictions. The
Canadian Registry of Wrongful Convictions currently documents 94 cases. Fifty-six involve homicide. In seven, the victim’s relationship to the wrongfully convicted person is recorded as a spouse or significant other.
Those numbers do not show that the new provisions will produce wrongful convictions. Nor are they an argument against recognizing coercive control. They are a reminder that miscarriages of justice can occur in homicide cases involving intimate relationships.
Justice requires holding perpetrators accountable. It also requires ensuring that the person convicted is actually responsible for the crime.
What success should look like
Canada’s recognition of femicide is significant. But the most meaningful measure will not be the severity of the sentences imposed after women die.
It will be whether fewer women die.
That requires looking beyond the criminal courts. Healthy-relationship education, economic and social supports, effective responses to escalating risk and adequately resourced services all have roles to play in preventing violence.
Criminal law can condemn violence and hold offenders accountable. It can also communicate something important about the harms society chooses to recognize.
What it cannot do on its own is create the conditions that make violence less likely to occur.
Naming femicide in Canadian law is an important beginning. The harder task is ensuring that fewer families ever need that law to be used.
Lisa Monchalin is a Canada Research Chair in Wrongful Convictions, a faculty member in the Department of Criminology, and the director of the Applied Justice Lab at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
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