Canada's New Tort of Intimate Partner Violence: A Feminist Analysis of Ahluwalia and the Barriers That Remain

Introduction

On May 15, 2026, the Supreme Court of Canada recognized a new tort of intimate partner violence in Ahluwalia v Ahluwalia, 2026 SCC 16. The decision is a landmark both because of the new remedy and awhat the reasons themselves say about how we should understand coercive control.

A few things to clarify upfront. This tort is specific to intimate partner relationships. It does not extend to other forms of family violence (parent-child abuse, sibling violence, or intrafamilial harm more broadly). The reason is that the tort is grounded in the violation of dignity, autonomy, and equality within a relationship between adult partners who are presumed to stand as equals. That relational premise does not translate to relationships in which hierarchy is inherent.

It is also worth being precise about why existing torts were inadequate. It was not that existing law was blind to IPV entirely. Assault and battery could capture discrete physical acts. Intentional infliction of emotional distress could theoretically address some psychological harm. But coercive control, a significant form of IPV, does not always manifest itself as physical or psychological harm. Existing torts could not recognize the cumulative pattern of coercive control as the harm itself. By contrast, the new tort remedies the systematic deprivation of a partner's autonomy, dignity, and equality.

The Legal Test

The Supreme Court established a three-part test. A plaintiff must prove, on a balance of probabilities:

1. The wrongful conduct occurred during or after an intimate relationship.
2. The wrongful conduct was intentional.
3. The wrongful conduct objectively amounted to coercive control.

One feature of this tort that sets it apart from most others is that harm does not need to be proven separately from the wrong itself. In the usual tort framework, a plaintiff must establish both that the defendant did something wrongful and that it caused them a specific, provable injury. Here, proof of intentional coercive control is proof of the harm. The harm is being subject to coercive control. It is the deprivation of freedom, the conditioning of a partner to subordinate their will, the stripping of autonomy, dignity, and equality. That violation is the injury. A plaintiff who proves the tort is therefore entitled to damages without separately proving consequences.

Intention: What the Defendant Had to Mean to Do

The Court's clarification on intention is one of the most practically significant aspects of the decision.

The plaintiff does not need to prove that the defendant intended to control their partner. They need only prove that the defendant intended to engage in the conduct itself. The defendant's subjective understanding of what they were doing, or their self-serving account of why they did it, is irrelevant to this element.

This is significant because abusers frequently do not acknowledge, or genuinely do not perceive, that their conduct is abusive. Research on abuser cognition documents this consistently. An abuser may rationalize controlling behaviour as a reasonable response to a partner who is "crazy," "lazy," or "difficult." They may frame financial control as responsible household management. They may describe surveillance as concern. They may genuinely believe they are the wronged party. That the relationship is hard on them, that their partner is the source of conflict, that what they are doing is love.

This is part of why the work being done by some social workers and therapists with men who use violence is so important. Helping them see the impact of their conduct on their partners, without collusion, is exactly the kind of intervention that addresses the gap between subjective intent and objective harm that the Court has now formally recognized in civil law.

Objective Coercive Control: The Third Prong

The third element is where the test does its most important feminist work.

The Court asks: would a reasonable person, fully informed of the context of the relationship, perceive the defendant's conduct as amounting to an assertion of control that deprived the plaintiff of their dignity, autonomy, and equality?

Several things about this standard deserve attention.

It is cumulative. No single act needs to constitute coercive control. Isolation, financial control, surveillance, humiliation, and threats each contribute to a pattern that, taken together, may amount to coercive control even where individual incidents would not independently support a legal claim.

A single incident may suffice. The majority also left open the possibility that a single sufficiently serious incident could establish the tort. This is consistent with the understanding that coercive control can be established or reinforced through a single act of severe violence or intimidation that structures the entire relationship going forward.

Context is built into the standard.This is the Court's mechanism for requiring judges to actually understand the dynamics of the specific relationship before them, rather than evaluating incidents in the abstract.

Physical violence is not required. The majority's explicit recognition that coercive control need not involve physical or psychological violence is one of the judgment's most significant feminist contributions. The harms of coercive control (economic abuse, isolation, surveillance, reproductive coercion, micro-regulation of daily life) are real and cognizable even where no blow is ever struck.

Victim resistance is not perpetration. The majority cautioned courts against misreading a survivor's resistance to domination as itself constituting coercive control.

The Self-Defence Parallel

This last point connects to one of the deepest structural problems in how Canadian law has historically treated women survivors of IPV.

In criminal cases where a survivor kills an abusive partner, self-defence generally requires proof that the threat was imminent. That requirement was developed in a legal context imagined around two men engaged in hand-to-hand combat. It fits poorly onto the reality of a woman living under sustained coercive control, where the threat is chronic and pervasive rather than episodic and immediate.

The result is a cruel doctrinal trap: a survivor who acts during a moment of acute violence may have a viable self-defence claim, but the very severity of that moment may make defensive action physically impossible. A survivor who acts when her partner is incapacitated (asleep or impaired) may have been waiting for the only moment in which she could act without being overpowered. But that is precisely the moment at which imminence is hardest to establish.

The Supreme Court began grappling with this in R v Lavallee, [1990] 1 SCR 852, where the Court accepted expert evidence on battered woman syndrome to contextualize the reasonableness of a survivor's belief that she needed to act when she did. Lavallee was an important step. But the framework it established still required translating the survivor's experience into a lens the law could accept, rather than reorienting the law's underlying assumptions.

Ahluwalia does something analogous in civil law: it requires courts to understand coercive control as a pattern. To see the whole relationship rather than isolated incidents. This represents a meaningful, if incremental, reorientation of how Canadian law understands what IPV actually is.

Distinguishing Coercive Control from Antisocial Behaviour

The majority acknowledged a genuine doctrinal challenge: the line between coercive control and conduct that is "just" harmful, unpleasant, or dysfunctional is not always obvious. A relationship can involve neglect, cruelty, mutual dysfunction, or serious bad behaviour without rising to the level of coercive control. Courts will need to distinguish between them.

This is harder than it sounds. Coercive control is contextual, cumulative, and often subtle. It does not announce itself. A trial judge without a developed understanding of what coercive control actually looks like (as distinct from ordinary relationship conflict) risks misclassifying the harm in either direction.

The risk of underinclusion is probably the greater concern here. Courts that misread coercive control as ordinary dysfunction will deny survivors a remedy they are entitled to. Expert evidence will be important in close cases, and we may well see duelling experts in complex litigation. More on that below.

Will Ahluwalia Open the Floodgates?

A concern is trending that Ahluwalia will produce an avalanche of dubious IPV tort claims. Some family lawyers report clients raising IPV allegations for the first time since the decision, which reads as opportunistic. They know their clients. But before extrapolating from those reports, it's worth sitting with why a survivor might not have raised IPV earlier. Shame and trauma are significant. Some survivors do not recognize what happened to them as abuse, particularly where the abuse was non-physical. Some may have feared that raising IPV would be weaponized against them in divorce or custody proceedings.

We also have a broader problem of normalizing and deprioritizing IPV. And approximately a third of Canadians report having experienced IPV at some point in their lives. The numbers are significantly higher for women, and higher still for Indigenous women, 2SLGBTQIA+ women and gender diverse people, and women with disabilities. A substantial proportion of any family law lawyer's clients are survivors. The prior silence is not evidence of prior safety.

Barriers Survivors Will Face

The more pressing concern is that many survivors with legitimate claims will not bring them. The same dynamics that made the abuse possible do not disappear at the courthouse door.

1. Safety

A plaintiff has to be safe enough to sue. For someone still in hiding from a former abuser, that condition may never be met. Post-separation abuse, stalking, threats, and coercive litigation are all established features of abusers' behaviour after separation. Filing a tort claim gives an abuser a legal address (where self-represented) and a formal mechanism to re-engage.

It is worth noting what made Ahluwalia itself possible: Mr. Ahluwalia initiated the divorce proceedings. He wanted out. That fact materially changed the safety calculus for Ms. Ahluwalia in raising a damages claim. Many survivors do not have that structural advantage.

2. Limitation Periods

Ontario's general limitation period is two years. That clock may be running while a survivor is still living under genuine fear, managing post-separation abuse, navigating immigration status her abuser controlled, dealing with housing insecurity or financial dependency that did not resolve at separation.

When a coercive control claim is legally "discoverable" for the purposes of limitations legislation is an open question that courts will eventually have to address. Escape from coercive control is frequently gradual, dangerous, and non-linear. The formal limitation clock does not account for that reality.

3. Retraumatization

Cross-examination on the third prong (objective coercive control) is likely to be brutal, and this barrier probably does the most work against the concern about bad faith claims proliferating. Proving a pattern of coercive control means relitigating years of intimate life in detail, in public, on the record, under oath.

The questioning will be invasive and will probably rely on IPV myths to use survival mechanisms against the plaintiff. A plaintiff should expect to face questions and assertions like:

• He never hit you, so why were you afraid?
• Weren't you the one who initiated sexual activity?
• You came back to him, more than once.
• You defended him when your friends criticized him.
• You apologized and begged him to stay.
• You attacked him while he was asleep.
• He was the only one meeting your disability-related needs. That doesn't sound like abuse.
• You did that in front of your kids?

Each of these is a documented survival mechanism or a feature of living under coercive control. Explaining them, while under pressure, in public, while reliving the events, is itself a form of harm.

Research on sexual assault trials consistently identifies anticipated cross-examination as one of the primary reasons survivors do not come forward. The same deterrence will likely operate here.

4. Reliability

Many survivors develop substance use disorders, sustain brain injuries, or experience PTSD and other mental health consequences as a direct result of the abuse. These conditions can affect memory, coherence, and the ability to recount past events consistently, all of which may result in findings of unreliable evidence.

The defendant does not need to attack the plaintiff's credibility directly. The abuse itself creates the conditions for the attack.

5. Witnesses

Coercive control happens in private. Abusers are frequently skilled at managing public appearances, cultivating credibility, isolating the survivor from potential witnesses, and pre-emptively establishing a narrative in which she is the unstable one, the "crazy" one, the difficult one.

By the time the case reaches trial, the social record may already have been shaped by the defendant's abuse.

6. Expert Evidence and Access to Justice

Expert evidence is not formally required, but the complexity of coercive control, the subtlety of survival responses, and the prevalence of IPV myths in cross-examination may make expert evidence practically necessary in many cases.

Experts may be critical to explaining:

• Why a survivor's behaviour appeared contradictory or inconsistent
• The structural violence the defendant used as tools of control (e.g. poverty, immigration dependency, disability, isolation)
• The difference between coercive control and what a court might otherwise classify as mutual dysfunction or ordinary conflict

Parties with resources will retain experts. Self-represented plaintiffs, particularly those whose abuse included financial control, largely will not. This is where the access to justice gap is sharpest, and where equity-deserving survivors (those whose intersecting vulnerabilities the abuser specifically identified and exploited) are most likely to fall through.

Without judicial expertise in coercive control, and without expert evidence to fill that gap, courts risk doing what they have always done: calling it a bad relationship, mutual dysfunction, or conflict that the law cannot and should not fix.

Conclusion

Ahluwalia is a genuine feminist landmark. The Court was right that coercive control is a distinct harm that existing law could not adequately name or remedy. But the creation of a new tort is the door, not the destination. The barriers in this post are the next problem to solve: for legislatures considering limitation period reform, for courts developing expertise in coercive control, for the legal profession building trauma- and violence-informed practice, and for advocates working to ensure that the remedy the Supreme Court has recognized is actually reachable by the people who need it most.

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If you work in HR, management, or organizational leadership and want to understand how coercive control intersects with the workplace, including how IPV affects employees' safety, performance, and legal rights, I offer training and advisory services at the intersection of gender-based harm and employment law. Contact me to learn more.

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