Documentation:Torts/Intimate partner violence
Intimate partner violence
In Ahluwalia v. Ahluwalia,[1] a majority of the Supreme Court of Canada recognised a new tort of coercive control by an intimate partner. The Court provided the following summary of the elements of this tort:
205. To summarize, in making a finding of liability under the tort of intimate partner violence, a trial judge must assess whether the evidence establishes all three elements and evaluate the quantum of damages required to remedy the resulting harm. The burden of proof rests with the plaintiff on the civil standard of balance of probabilities.
206. First, the defendant’s wrongful conduct must have occurred during the course of an intimate partnership or in its aftermath.
207. Second, the defendant must have intentionally engaged in the abusive conduct. The plaintiff need only show that the defendant intended to engage in the impugned conduct, not that they subjectively intended to control their intimate partner. With respect to the abusive conduct itself, the plaintiff must adduce specific evidence to make out the tort claim. However, evidence may show a range of abusive conduct that appears less harmful in isolation but which may, considered cumulatively, form a pattern of coercive control. For guidance, the following are some types of conduct that are capable of constituting coercive control: physical and sexual violence; emotional and psychological abuse, including verbal abuse; harassment, humiliation, and denigration; financial control, stalking, and surveillance; behaviour that isolates a partner from others, or that denies a partner access to educational, employment, and recreational opportunities; litigation abuse; and threatening conduct, including threatening to harm the children or take them away, and threatening to commit suicide (see United Kingdom, Home Office, Controlling or Coercive Behaviour: Statutory Guidance Framework, April 5, 2023 (online), at pp. 15-16; Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, National Framework for Police Intervention in Intimate Partner Coercive Control, July 2025 (online), at pp. 5-7). The foregoing list is merely illustrative and should not be treated as exhaustive.
208. Third, the plaintiff must show the conduct to be, on an objective measure, coercive control. The trial judge must determine whether a reasonable person, fully apprised of the relevant context of the relationship, would have perceived the defendant’s acts, considered cumulatively, as amounting to an assertion of control over the plaintiff that has the effect of depriving them of their dignity, autonomy, and equality in the relationship. The key feature of coercive control is, on an objective measure, the breakdown of the plaintiff’s will, manifested through a diminished power to decide important matters in their own life or to meaningfully take part in decisions that affect the intimate partnership. Neither the timing of the commencement of the claim nor when the plaintiff left the relationship has any necessary bearing on whether the plaintiff can successfully establish this element. The threshold serves an essential limiting function by anchoring the tort in the deprivation of autonomy, but where circumstances show that the reasonable person would conclude that the abusive conduct is incompatible with the intimate partnership, the burden will be readily met. In particular, courts must of course take care not to mischaracterize a victim’s resistance to a partner’s attempt at domination, or all misconduct in a high conflict breakdown, as coercive control under the new tort. Mere dysfunction of an intimate partnership, or a relationship marked by an imbalance between the parties in the absence of coercive control, is not intimate partner violence in this sense. But at the same time, trial judges must be cautious not to “subject evidence of non-physical [intimate partner violence] to heightened suspicion or skepticism, minimize it, or misattribute its harms to a high conflict relationship or post-separation emotionality” ….
209. Proof by the plaintiff of these three elements establishes liability under the tort of intimate partner violence. The plaintiff’s dignitary harm flows from proof of the intentional wrong and does not require proof of other consequential harms. On this basis, the trial judge may then award general compensatory damages to provide redress for the harm to dignity, autonomy, and equality suffered through coercive control, as well as any other harm that flows therefrom.
- ↑ Ahluwalia v. Ahluwalia, 2026 SCC 16.