Liberals Table Bill on Intimate Partner Violence, Child Exploitation

Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada Sean Fraser speaks at a news conference on a new bill aimed to address hate crimes, on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on Sept. 19, 2025. The Canadian Press/Justin Tang

The Liberal government has tabled legislation aiming to protect victims of intimate partner and sexual violence, while expanding measures to protect children from predators.

“We have an opportunity to better protect kids who are at risk of exploitation, and to address very real concerns about violence against women, including violence that could be fatal,” Justice Minister Sean Fraser said during a Dec. 9 press conference.

Bill C-16, also known as the Protecting Victims Act, would treat murders motivated by control, hate, sexual violence, or exploitation as first-degree murder, even if the murder wasn’t planned or deliberated in advance. The justice department said in a press release that such killings “overwhelmingly target women,” and reported that intimate partner homicides rose by 39 percent in 2024.

The bill would also criminalize coercive control to support intervention before intimate partner violence becomes lethal. The justice department said abuse often escalates through patterns of control prior to the onset of physical violence.

The introduction of a new offence would allow the justice system to “intervene before a relationship becomes violent, and before violence becomes fatal,” Fraser said.

The legislation would modify sexual violence protections by prohibiting the distribution of non-consensual sexual ‘deepfakes,’ increasing penalties for distributing intimate images without consent, and increasing penalties for sexual assault on summary conviction.

The legislation also aims to strengthen mandatory minimum penalties of imprisonment for those who possess or access child sexual abuse and exploitation material. This would include restoring roughly a dozen mandatory minimum prison sentences for a range of child sexual offences that were previously struck down by courts. Fraser said the restoration would be executed in accordance with Supreme Court of Canada directives.

The Supreme Court struck down mandatory one-year minimum sentences for child pornography in a case in October after two men pleaded guilty to having hundreds of images of child abuse material. The court ruled the mandatory one-year sentence violated their Charter right of not being subjected to “cruel and unusual treatment or punishment.”

The Supreme Court decision was condemned by Liberal and Conservative MPs. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said in a social media post a Tory government would invoke the notwithstanding clause of the Charter to overrule the decision.

Fraser said the government is “moving forward with a strategy that will not only restore those penalties that have been struck down, but that will protect the remaining mandatory minimums that have not yet been struck down, but which are constitutionally vulnerable.”

Child-Related Offences

The legislation proposes more stringent measures to address online sexual exploitation and child luring, including the criminalization of threats to share child sexual abuse and exploitation materials.

The legislation would also extend the limitation period for the prosecution of offences under the Mandatory Reporting Act from two to five years, thereby enabling authorities to pursue predators who sexually exploit children abroad. Online platforms would also be required to preserve data for one year instead of 21 days.

The legislation would create a new offence of recruiting youth into crime and increase the severity of sentencing laws to prevent them from being exploited into criminal activity.

The legislation would also respond to concerns about court delays under the Jordan framework, which sets limits on how long cases can take before facing dismissal, potentially leaving victims without a resolution. A ruling by the Supreme Court in 2016 determined that criminal cases exceeding 18 months in provincial courts or 30 months in superior courts may be stayed due to unreasonable delays.

Fraser said the bill would streamline the procedure for citing evidence in sexual assault trials, while also encouraging the courts to explore remedies beyond simply staying proceedings.

Fraser said he was not comfortable with the threat of a case being dismissed for delay, “knowing the consequence would be the survivor of sexual violence may have their perpetrator go free despite having committed the crime.”