From the perspective of older women experiencing coercive control, legal distinctions based on relationship type carry far less weight than a proposed law assumes. Often, the central concern is simpler and more urgent: she wants the abuse to stop.
Tabled in December 2025 by the federal Justice Minister, Bill C-16, the Protecting Victims Act, proposes to create a standalone offence of coercive control by intimate partners. Yet this narrow wording tells older women that the law will not recognize their suffering if the abuser is an adult son, daughter, or other family member. The message embedded in that limitation is hard to ignore: a similar pattern of domination, fear, financial restriction, and psychological harm is treated differently depending on who is exerting it.
Some older women have lived with coercive control for decades, within intimate partnerships. Others encounter it for the first time in old age, when illness, widowhood, or cognitive decline increases reliance on adult children and other relatives. In both situations, the experience is entrapment, not legal taxonomy.
With Bill C-16 currently before the justice committee, it has been suggested that any amendment expanding the language beyond intimate partners may be ruled out of order as exceeding the bill’s scope, given its focus on gender-based violence and the prevention of femicide. That interpretation risks becoming a barrier that places abused older mothers and grandmothers outside the protection of the criminal law simply because the person exerting domination is an adult child or grandchild—not an intimate partner.
To be sure, the government should be commended for taking coercive control by intimate partners seriously, given that it is a known precursor to homicide. In the face of these grave crimes against women and children, it is perhaps understandable that elder abuse was an unintentional blind spot for lawmakers, as these cases do not necessarily escalate into a final act of violence in the way domestic abuse can. Older mothers in particular may be less likely to try to escape—the moment in intimate relationships that can trigger a lethal outcome, most often by male perpetrators. Instead, the harm for an older woman abused by adult children and others can persist hidden from view and without a clear endpoint.
If the purpose of Bill C-16 is to address coercive control as a form of gender-based harm, then excluding family-based coercion risks leaving a significant gap in protection for older women. These cases may not always appear in homicide statistics, yet they can still result in serious outcomes, including severe neglect, diminished quality of life, and concerns about undetected pressure toward medical assistance in dying. The absence of a single catastrophic event does not make the coercion less real; it makes it easier to overlook.
The procedural question before government therefore carries substantive consequences. If Bill C-16’s scope is interpreted too narrowly, it risks signalling to Canadians that elder abuse victims are less worthy of criminal law protections—a message the government surely does not intend to convey.
If an amendment protecting elder abuse victims is ruled inadmissible, the result should not be silence. The government should commit to introducing a separate bill to correct this oversight. Elder abuse victims deserve nothing less than immediate legislative action.
Heather Campbell Pope is founder of Dementia Justice Canada and writes on legal issues affecting older adults.
