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Overview and status

The Protecting Victims Act amends criminal, youth justice, victims’ rights, military justice, firearms, corrections and other laws. It affects victims and witnesses, accused persons and offenders, young people, courts, internet service providers and justice authorities.

The source labels the bill “third reading,” but its text also says it received royal assent on June 18, 2026. The legislative text provided is truncated; the overview below also relies on the source’s summary.

Criminal Code

• Intimate-partner abuse: Creates an offence for a pattern of coercive or controlling conduct that meets specified intent, knowledge or recklessness requirements concerning an intimate partner’s safety, including psychological safety. Listed conduct includes threats, monitoring and control of finances, health care or social interactions. The maximum indictable sentence is 10 years.
• Harassment: Replaces the requirement to prove that the victim actually feared for their safety with a test of whether the conduct could reasonably be expected to cause a belief that someone’s safety is threatened. It expressly includes psychological safety, monitoring and threatening conduct involving a known animal.
• Murder and manslaughter: Makes murder first degree in specified circumstances involving coercive control of an intimate partner, sexual violence, exploitation or hate, whether or not the murder was planned and deliberate. The summary calls murder of a female person “femicide.” In corresponding manslaughter cases, courts must consider life imprisonment; if imposed on an adult, parole ineligibility is 10 to 25 years.
• Sexual offences and images: Expands some child sexual offences to cover inviting a child to expose their sexual organs for a sexual purpose. It covers realistic fabricated intimate images, including those made using AI, and creates offences for certain threats to distribute intimate images or child sexual abuse material. It also criminalizes distribution of visual representations of bestiality, subject to a public-good defence.
• Young people recruited into crime: Creates an offence for a person in a position of trust, power or authority who recruits or encourages someone under 18 to participate in an offence, if the young person subsequently participates in that offence or a related one.
• Trials and sentencing: Provides testimonial aids to victims of certain offences and changes the procedures governing sexual-history evidence and private records, including therapeutic records. Courts may sentence below a mandatory minimum only where that minimum would be cruel and unusual punishment for the particular offender.
• Procedure and other powers: Establishes frameworks for alternative measures and restorative justice, and for assessing unreasonable delay. Under the delay framework, a stay is available only if the court is satisfied that no other remedy would be appropriate and just. The bill also permits affidavit evidence in certain identity theft and fraud cases.
• Other provisions in the excerpt: An agreement cannot prevent disclosure of offence-related information to police. A court must order deletion within 48 hours of an intimate image held on a computer system when the specified conditions are met.

Youth justice and victims’ rights

• The Youth Criminal Justice Act changes aim to better reflect victims’ rights and require particular attention to the needs of Aboriginal and Black young people. Youth courts may order a recognizance where there is a reasonable fear that a young person will commit a child sexual offence.
• The Canadian Victims Bill of Rights is amended to provide a right to respectful, courteous, compassionate and fair treatment. Victims may receive information without requesting it, including information about their rights and available protection measures. The changes broaden restorative-justice information and clarify rights to submit statements for sentencing and certain parole or corrections decisions.

Military justice

The National Defence Act changes provide testimonial aids for victims of certain offences, introduce an unreasonable-delay framework for courts martial, and align sexual-offence evidence and private-record procedures with Criminal Code changes. They also add or expand victims’ rights to fair treatment and information, including information provided without a request.

Other laws

• Internet service providers: Clarifies which services are covered by mandatory reporting rules for internet child sexual abuse and exploitation material. It requires transmission data with notifications where material is manifestly such material, and extends data-preservation and prosecution limitation periods. The supplied summary does not give the new periods.
• Firearms: Clarifies that a person whose licence or registration certificate has been revoked must deliver their firearm to a designated officer. A person is ineligible for a