The new tort of intimate partner violence gives survivors a clearer path to seeking a remedy, and promotes equality, freedom and access to justice.
The Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Ahluwalia v. Ahluwalia marks a major development in Canadian family and tort law: the creation of a new tort of intimate partner violence. The tort allows those who have experienced intimate partner violence to seek damages from their abuser.
The Ahluwalia decision confirms that the law must respond to abuse in intimate relationships, including abuse beyond physical assaults or single incidents. Existing torts such as assault, battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress remain important, but they may not be enough to capture the unique harm caused by long-term patterns of coercion, control, domination, and degradation. Intimate partner violence often happens through a cumulative pattern that takes away victims’ dignity, independence, equality, freedom, and safety.
Why Existing Torts Were Not Enough
The facts in Ahluwalia involved a 16-year marriage in which the husband’s abusive conduct was constant, varied, and controlling. The abuse included physical assaults, humiliation, intimidation, intentional emotional harm, isolation from family members, sexual coercion, and financial control.
Before the matter reached the Supreme Court of Canada, the Ontario Superior Court recognized the tort of family violence. The Ontario Court of Appeal disagreed and found that existing torts could address the harm. In Colenutt v. Colenutt, the Alberta Court of King’s Bench took a similar approach and did not recognize the tort. Instead, the Court directed victims to rely on a patchwork of existing claims such as assault, battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
The Supreme Court of Canada rejected these narrower approaches. The problem with relying only on existing torts is that victims often must present abuse as a series of disconnected events. That approach may capture single assaults or threats, but it misses the way coercive control works over time. The harm often occurs as a pattern of conduct that slowly degrades a person’s independence, confidence, autonomy, and sense of safety.
An abuser may control their partner’s movements, relationships, finances, choices, and sense of security. The victim’s nervous system may become trained to respond to a partner’s calls, moods, threats, demands, silence, or disapproval. This can become a form of captivity that leaves no visible marks and that people outside the relationship rarely see. Victims may not be physically restrained, but they may still be profoundly unfree.
The Legal Test – Three Main Elements
The tort of intimate partner violence has three main elements.
First, the abusive conduct must take place in an intimate partnership or after separation. This is important in family law matters where abuse can continue long after the relationship has ended. The tort does not apply to other relationships, such as those with children or elders, even though similar types of abuse may occur in those relationships.
Second, abuser must have intentionally engaged in the abusive conduct. The victim does not need to prove that the abuser intended to control them. It is enough to show that the person intentionally engaged in the relevant conduct.
Third, the conduct, viewed objectively and as a whole, must amount to coercive control. The court may consider physical violence, sexual violence, emotional and psychological abuse, verbal abuse, harassment, humiliation, denigration, financial control, stalking, surveillance, isolation, denial of access to education or employment, legal abuse, threats to harm or take away children, and threats of suicide.
Overall, the question is whether a reasonable person, fully aware of the facts of the relationship, would see the abuser’s conduct as imposing control over the victim and taking away their dignity, autonomy, or equality within the relationship.
Not Every High-Conflict Relationship Is Coercive Control
The tort does not mean that every argument, insult, poor decision, or hostile separation will count as intimate partner violence. Courts must still distinguish between normal relationship conflict, even serious conflict, and coercive control. Family breakdown can involve anger, poor communication, hurtful behaviour, and stress over the court process. Those realities do not automatically become a tort.
A person who resists their abuser can still be the victim of coercive control. Many victims resist. Many continue parenting, working, attending court, seeking help, communicating calmly, or trying to leave. Resistance does not prove the victim was free from abuse. In many cases, resistance is evidence of survival.
Recognition Matters
A key aspect of this decision is that it gives a legal name to a harm that society has minimized or misunderstood in the past. Increasing damages under existing torts is not the same as recognizing the wrong. Applying a patchwork of existing torts fails to capture the overall harm resulting from a broader pattern of domination, breach of trust between partners, and loss of dignity, autonomy, and equality.
Recognition matters because legal labels shape how courts, lawyers, victims, and society understand harm. When the law names coercive control as a distinct wrong, it helps interrupt the cycle of minimizing the issue. It confirms that non-physical abuse is not lesser abuse simply because the injuries are harder to photograph. Intimidation, isolation, surveillance, financial control, sexual coercion, threats, humiliation, and legal abuse can be just as harmful and destructive to a victim as other forms of abuse.
The Living Tree and the Evolution of the Common Law
The decision reminds us that Canadian common law must be able to grow. It is not meant to be frozen in time. Our approach to the Constitution is often described through the “living tree” doctrine: the idea that legal interpretation must be able to grow and adapt over time. The common law serves a similar purpose. Where existing legal tools cannot address a social harm, courts can and should develop the law to do so.
Intimate partner violence and coercive control are not new. What is new is the law’s willingness to recognize and respond to its destructive patterns.
Access to Justice and Family Violence
This decision also highlights the importance of giving families access to justice. In Alberta, many are concerned that the new Family Focused Protocol may affect a family’s ability to access the public courts. For victims of intimate partner violence, access to court is central to safety, accountability, and legal protection. The Family Focused Protocol requires parties to take various out-of-court steps before seeking help from the court. These steps may include close-quarter mediation, costly and complicated paperwork, and navigation through many out-of-court gatekeepers.
Alternative dispute resolution and procedural barriers to immediate court access may cause little harm and may even be helpful in many family cases. Unfortunately, that is not always the reality in cases of coercive control. Coercive control is often hidden and may not reveal itself to others until evidence is fully presented at a hearing. Forcing victims to navigate private dispute resolution before obtaining meaningful help from a judge risks worsening the power imbalance and causing victims more harm. Victims struggle to make their voices heard when they are victims of coercive control. The law cannot grow and develop to protect these vulnerable groups if the barriers to accessing justice are too high for victims to overcome. This can cause further harm to the victim, while protecting those who cause the harm.
The Gendered Reality of Intimate Partner Violence
This tort shines a spotlight on the gendered character of intimate partner violence. While women and men can both be victims and perpetrators of the violence, women are still disproportionately the victims of it. In Michel v. Graydon, the Supreme Court of Canada noted that women are more likely than men to experience intimate partner violence in relationships. Academic studies support this point. A 2025 research study by Wesenberg, M., Jung, S., and Tedeschini, J. explains that coercive control can be difficult to identify because it often happens through discrete patterns rather than clear isolated incidents. Those patterns may include intimidation, isolation, monitoring, threats, financial control, emotional degradation, history of rules, surveillance, punishment, fear, and other behaviours that limit a victim’s freedom over time. A victim may still be parenting, working, attending court, or communicating calmly, while privately living under a constant threat of retaliation or worsening abuse. As a result, the absence of visible injuries should not be mistaken for the absence of harm.
Wesenberg, M., Jung, S., and Tedeschini, J. note that coercive control causes serious psychological and safety consequences, including post-traumatic stress, depression, heightened fear after separation, increased risk of further abuse, and more severe forms of intimate partner violence. They also observe that controlling behaviours may, in some cases, be a stronger predictor of intimate partner murder than previous physical violence alone.
Therefore, recognizing this tort helps shift the legal focus to the pattern, the context, and the effect of the conduct, particularly where the abuse is cumulative, non-physical, and hidden within the private dynamics of the relationship. That shift is essential if courts are to properly protect and preserve a person’s rights to life, liberty, and security.
A Step Toward Equality, Liberty, and Security
The new tort of intimate partner violence is ultimately about more than damages. It is about recognizing that people in intimate relationships should be equal. Marriage, cohabitation, romance, parenting, dependence, or financial interconnection do not reduce a person’s right to equality, dignity, and security.
An intimate relationship should not become a closed system in which one person’s freedom is slowly taken away by their partner. The law must be able to see that harm, name it, and respond to it. Ahluwalia confirms that intimate partner violence is not always captured by bruises, police reports, or isolated incidents. Sometimes it is seen in the pattern, the fear, the shrinking of a person’s world, and the loss of choices that were once freely available.
By recognizing the tort of intimate partner violence, the Court gives victims a clearer legal pathway to seek a remedy for the harm they have suffered. It sends a broader message: coercive control is not merely a private relationship issue. It is a legal wrong.
Further Reading
- Wesenberg, M., Jung, S., and Tedeschini, J. (2025). Coercive control in the context of partner abuse: behavioural markers, assessment challenges, and interview approaches. Journal of Community Safety and Well-Being, 10(2), 105–116.
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DISCLAIMER The information in this article was correct at time of publishing. The law may have changed since then. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of LawNow or the Centre for Public Legal Education Alberta.
About Mathieu Maillet
