FEWO meeting 28 · 2026-03-10 — Committee Evidence — LegisWatch

Summary

The House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women met to conduct clause-by-clause consideration of Bill C-225, an act to amend the Criminal Code regarding intimate partner violence. Officials from the Department of Justice, including senior counsel Nathalie Levman, were present to answer questions.

Nathalie Levman explained the grammatical differences between two competing amendments, NDP-1 and LIB-1, noting that both achieve the same objective of ensuring that victims who kill their abusers are not automatically treated as having committed first-degree murder, though the Liberal version is clearer and more succinct in English and French. She later confirmed that the adoption of the amendment to clause 2 rendered clauses 3 to 6 redundant, as the new broad intimate partner violence offence covers the same ground, and that adopting both would create inconsistencies in the law.

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Witnesses · 1

Nathalie Levman

Senior Counsel, Criminal Law Policy Section, Department of Justice

Opening remarks

Thank you very much, Chair. First I'll comment on the English version, and then on the French. The committee members who have just spoken are absolutely right. The difference is between the possessive pronoun “their” and the definite article “the”. Just to take the committee through it, starting at line seven of Bill C-225, it has, in English: murder is first degree murder when the victim is that person’s intimate partner. The NDP motion would add “and their death is caused by that person”, whereas the Liberal motion would add “and the death is caused by that person”. Grammatically speaking, the NDP's version requires the reader to do a little extra work to figure out whose death “their” is referring to, because it's preceded by both “victim” and “that person”. The phrase “the death” is a little more clear and succinct: It can only mean the death of the victim. I would say that is the grammatical difference between the two versions in English. There are a few more differences in the French. They are substantively the same. I'm not going to go into a long description of the differences, since I am anglophone, but I can reassure the committee that we have spoken to francophone…

Full testimony ↗

Status of Women

Summary

Witnesses · 1

Bills mentioned