Canadian Supreme Court Recognizes New Tort of Intimate Partner Violence: What This Changes for Victim-Survivors
When Kuldeep Kaur Ahluwalia asked a Canadian court to hold her husband accountable for 16 years of abuse, she wasn't asking for something radical. She was asking the law to catch up with reality.
On Friday, the Supreme Court of Canada did just that.
Following a landmark ruling, the Court has created a new tort of intimate partner violence (IPV), which will allow those who have suffered harm through IPV to seek damages. It’s a civil legal claim that treats coercive control not as a series of isolated incidents, but as the intentional harm that can limit a person’s dignity, autonomy, and equality in a relationship.
For anyone working in gender-based violence (GBV) prevention and response, this isn't surprising. It's overdue.
The law has always been behind
Before this ruling, survivors seeking civil damages had to squeeze their experiences into legal frameworks that were never built for them. They had to point to specific incidents, like a physical assault, or psychological harm serious enough to meet a high legal threshold. Neither was designed to capture the accumulation of control that defines coercive abuse.
It’s the slow erosion of a person's ability to make choices: where they can go, who they can speak to, how they can spend their money, when they can leave. It’s conduct that makes a person unequal in their own relationship.
Existing torts looked at individual acts. Coercive control is calculated, sometimes less visible, and often a repeated pattern of behaviour.
What the Court said
Writing for the majority, Justice Nicholas Kasirer was clear: intimate partner violence is best understood as coercive and controlling conduct, and it is not limited to physical harm. It includes acts of physical and psychological violence, and also encompasses tactics of isolation, manipulation, humiliation, surveillance, financial control, sexual coercion, and intimidation that can control and entrap partners.
The new tort has three requirements:
The wrongful conduct must have occurred during an intimate relationship or after it ended
The person causing harm must have intentionally engaged in abusive conduct
And that conduct, viewed in context, must amount to coercive control
Ms. Ahluwalia established all three. Her former husband’s conduct controlled her, undermined her dignity and autonomy, and made her unequal in the relationship. The Court has awarded her damages accordingly.
What this means for other victim-survivors
What makes this ruling significant isn't just the outcome for Ms. Ahluwalia. It's the framework the Court has now made possible for every victim-survivor after her.
The recognition of this tort sends a message that law has rarely been willing to send directly: coercive control is a harm in itself. Having legal language for this changes what can be said in a courtroom, how advocates frame what they're seeing, and sometimes how survivors make sense of their own experience.
There are still limits
The Ahluwalia decision is a meaningful foundation, but it isn’t a ceiling.
Civil litigation can be expensive, slow, and inaccessible to many survivors. A new tort means nothing if the people who need it most cannot afford to use it. Legal aid funding in Canada remains inadequate. The burden of proof still rests with survivors. The process of litigation can itself become a tool of re-traumatization.
And the ruling does not change what happens in the criminal system, in family courts, or in the daily lived reality of women trying to leave dangerous relationships. Coercive control still isn't a standalone criminal offence in Canada the way it is in England and in some states in Australia. Police still frequently fail to recognise patterns of abuse. Survivors still face systems that respond to incidents rather than the pattern.
How Todaybreak is responding
Todaybreak is a nonprofit organization dedicated to systems-level transformation through scaling technology-enabled responses to GBV, sexual violence, tech-facilitated abuse, modern slavery, and human trafficking.
The Ahluwalia decision names a gap our work is designed to address. Coercive control is a pattern. The systems responding to intimate partner violence are largely built to document incidents, not recognise patterns. Frontline workers are under-resourced. Coordination between services is fragmented. Survivors are asked to repeat their stories across providers that can't easily share information with each other.
Todaybreak’s Safe with Milli Program helps bridge some of the gaps that have made coercive control invisible for too long. Involving over 40 services across Canada and Australia, the Safe with Milli Program provides fit-for-purpose technology to improve coordination, data sharing, and collaboration amongst service providers, government agencies and community organizations. At its core are two tools designed, developed and maintained by Genvis, Todaybreak’s technology partner.
For survivors, that means Milli: a discreet personal safety app developed with frontline providers and people with lived experience. For service providers, Cudo sits alongside it as a case management platform, enabling coordination, risk information sharing, and timely referrals. Together, they build a picture of a survivor's needs and context.
To learn more or get involved, reach out to hello@todaybreak.org
