This House of Commons committee meeting studied section 810 of the Criminal Code and women's safety. Appearing were Julie St-Pierre Gaudreault and Manon Monastesse from the Fédération des maisons d'hébergement pour femmes, Hilda Anderson-Pyrz from the National Family and Survivors Circle Inc., Brian Sauvé from the National Police Federation, and Marie-Claude Richer and Catherine Ahélo from Rebâtir.
St-Pierre Gaudreault and Monastesse said that non-compliance with section 810 peace bond conditions is a major problem, with breaches often not enforced under section 811, and that police sometimes refuse to take reports or encourage victims to apply for peace bonds themselves rather than having police do it. They recommended that breach of conditions should automatically lead to detention, that the Criminal Code should include specific sections for domestic and family violence with concrete conditions, and that risk and dangerousness assessments should be systematic and not dependent on the offender's consent. They argued that section 810 is used too often as an alternative to laying charges for serious offences, creating a false sense of security, and that the federal government should take a leadership role to harmonize enforcement across provinces.
Anderson-Pyrz said that indigenous women face systemic racism and chronic failures across policing, corrections and courts, and that section 810 orders are often protection only on paper due to lack of enforcement and communication failures. She recommended recognizing coercive control in section 810, creating specialized intimate partner violence units for indigenous communities, establishing real-time information sharing with automatic survivor notifications for releases and breaches, allowing trusted third parties to apply for orders, and collecting distinctions-based data led by indigenous organizations under OCAP principles. She stressed that safety requires indigenous-led, community-grounded systems as outlined in the calls for justice from the national inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women and girls.
Sauvé said that section 810's effectiveness depends on adequate resources, timely communication and coordinated enforcement, and that there is no national database tracking peace bonds or conditions. He recommended investments in modern monitoring systems like Ontario's bail compliance dashboard, updating privacy laws to enable information sharing across jurisdictions, and increasing resources and capacity, particularly in rural and remote areas where detachments may have only two members. He noted that while Canada's homicide rate declined in 2024, the proportion of women killed by intimate partners rose from 32% to 42%, and he agreed that training and consistent application of the Criminal Code across provinces are needed.
Richer and Ahélo said that section 810 is almost always used to settle cases where charges have already been laid, not as a preventive measure, and that victims face major obstacles including police refusal to file reports when no criminal offence has occurred, the need to self-represent in court without legal aid, and long delays between service and hearing with no interim safety net. They supported proposals in Bill C-225 to make intimate partner murder first-degree murder, to regulate police discretion to release individuals, and to give courts power to order risk assessments at any stage without requiring the accused's consent. They also called for criminalizing coercive control to allow courts to see the full pattern of behaviour rather than a single incident.
The committee briefly discussed procedural matters, including the possibility of moving in camera, but no formal motion or vote was recorded on that point.
AI-generated summary — may contain errors; verify against the official evidence.