What Canada’s New Tort of Intimate Partner Violence Means — and How a Saskatchewan Family Lawyer Can Help

Panko Collaborative Law | Saskatoon, SK | May 2026

For years, the hardest part of representing someone in an abusive relationship hasn’t been trying to prove that something happened. It was being heard that the pattern of what happened mattered. A client could describe a marriage organized around control — the money kept out of reach, the friends slowly cut off, the constant low monitoring that never quite rose to a single dramatic incident — and the law would ask, in effect, which specific thing are you complaining about and what do you want done about it? The abuse that did the most damage was often the abuse the law could see least.

That’s the gap we’ve spent years working inside. It’s why we brought Safe & Together training to Saskatchewan, why Charmaine Panko K.C. teaches how to screen for intimate partner violence (IPV) and design processes to address power imbalances, and why we kept making the case that coercive control causes real harm long before a court ever considered putting that word in a judgment.

On May 15, 2026, the Supreme Court of Canada finally did. In Ahluwalia v. Ahluwalia, a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court of Canada recognized a new civil claim: the tort of intimate partner violence. This arose from intentional abusive conduct during or after an intimate relationship, amounting to coercive control. Unlike a criminal charge that can result in jail time if proven beyond a reasonable doubt, this is a civil claim, where a survivor can ask for financial compensation. And where a survivor can be affirmed by the court when it is stated on the record that they lived through a pattern of control that is recognized as wrong. It is no longer a situation where there is a focus on individual physical harm or a specific threat; the law now recognizes the harm underneath the behaviour: the loss of dignity, autonomy, and standing as an equal partner.

For Saskatchewan, this speaks volumes. Saskatchewan is the province with the highest rate of police-reported intimate partner violence in Canada, roughly double the national rate (Statistics Canada, 2024 data) — and the SCC ruling genuinely changes what a family lawyer who handles intimate partner violence can pursue for the person sitting across the table.

What happened in the Ahluwalia case?

Kuldeep Ahluwalia married her husband, Amrit, in India in 1999, and the two of them built a life in Canada. Over sixteen years of marriage she endured physical assaults, but that was never the whole of it. There was also isolation from her family, control over money, humiliation, and intimidation. The incidents were real, but they were symptoms; underneath them ran a steadier project, the slow work of keeping her “in line”.

When the marriage ended Kuldeep found herself in court without a lawyer, representing herself. In an interview with the Globe and Mail on the day the ruling came down, she recalled the moment something in her shifted: “It’s better to fight and lose than not fight at all. That’s when the courage came to me.”

The trial court awarded her $150,000 and, in the process, invented a new tort of “family violence.” The Ontario Court of Appeal reversed that the next year, cut the award to $100,000, and held that the existing laws were enough. They held that there was no need to recognize specific harm arising from intimate partner violence. The Supreme Court of Canada agreed that a new tort was needed but rebuilt it more precisely around coercive control, renaming it the tort of intimate partner violence.

Why couldn’t survivors already sue for this?

They could, but only partway. Survivors have always been able to sue under existing torts like assault, battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. So why did the Court decide that wasn’t enough?

The answer comes down to how those claims are built.

Existing torts are incident-based. The question they ask is always some version of what specific act happened here? Was there a punch, a threat, visible damage? Each act gets examined on its own, as though it could be lifted clean out of the relationship that gave it its meaning and its force.

Intimate partner violence doesn’t behave like that. It works through patterns, through the accumulated weight of small controls and quiet humiliations and financial dependencies and manufactured fears, not one of which looks like much on its own. Put them together and they’re suffocating. Forcing a survivor to chop that experience into separate legal boxes, as the majority put it, misrepresents the nature of the wrong and leaves much of the real harm unaddressed.

This is precisely what Kuldeep Ahluwalia said she had spent years trying to make people understand: that what she lived through was not a series of isolated incidents but a sustained pattern of fear, control, intimidation, and emotional harm that touched every part of her life. The existing torts could see the incidents but not the pattern. The new tort does.

Justice Kasirer put his finger on the real injury. It’s a deprivation of autonomy, dignity, and equality, the slow erosion of a person’s ability to make their own choices about their own life. That is a different kind of harm and one that other torts were simply never designed to measure.

The new tort also removes a barrier that has tripped up survivors for years. Winning on intentional infliction of emotional distress generally requires proving a “visible and provable illness,” which in practice means a clinical diagnosis backed by expert evidence. Plenty of survivors of coercive control don’t present that way, and plenty more can’t access that kind of proof even when they do. The new tort sidesteps the problem: once coercive control is established, the harm is presumed to flow from the conduct, with no separate diagnosis required.

What you have to prove: the three elements

To make out the new tort of intimate partner violence, a survivor has to establish three things:

The conduct arose in an intimate partnership, or in its aftermath. The law recognizes that abuse frequently gets worse, not better, after a separation.
The other person intended the conduct. Note what this doesn’t require: they don’t need to have consciously set out to “control” their partner. They only need to have meant to do the things they did.
On an objective measure, the conduct amounts to coercive control — that is, viewed as a whole rather than incident by incident, an assertion of dominance that strips away the other partner’s dignity, autonomy, and equality.

The range of conduct that can count is deliberately wide. It runs from physical and sexual violence through emotional and psychological abuse, financial control, harassment, humiliation, stalking, and surveillance, to behaviour that isolates a partner from friends and family, and even litigation abuse — using the court process itself as a tool of ongoing control.

All of which is to say this is exactly the kind of case that benefits from experienced counsel. Spotting the pattern, gathering evidence that captures the pattern, and framing a long course of conduct as coercive control is a different skill than proving a single assault. It’s the work our collaborative family law practice has trained to do.

Why this matters specifically in Saskatchewan

Saskatchewan has the highest rate of police-reported intimate partner violence of any province in Canada, roughly double the national rate (Statistics Canada, police-reported data for 2024, released October 2025). Those aren’t abstract numbers. They’re families in Saskatoon, in Regina, and in the smaller rural communities where the danger tends to be greatest of all. And keep in mind these are only the cases that ever reach police, which by some measures is a fraction of the true total. The lived reality is almost certainly worse than the figure suggests. That gap is the point: coercive control is, by its very nature, the kind of abuse that stays invisible.

In a tight-knit rural community, asking for help is rarely simple. Everyone knows everyone. The shelter, the lawyer’s office, the courthouse, none are anonymous places. Privacy is hard to come by, and the fear of being talked about settles in on top of the fear of the partner. So the geographic isolation of rural life ends up compounding the social isolation that is itself a hallmark of coercive control. One feeds the other.

For a rural survivor who can’t point to a single bruise but has spent years being slowly controlled, this ruling opens a door that used to be shut.

That’s what the new claim offers: a broader mechanism to be heard, in a way the law recognizes, without first having to prove a specific bruise or a specific threat or incident. It requires the court look at the whole picture rather than a handful of disconnected moments.

This is the part that connects us back to the beginning: the Safe & Together model — brought to the province and delivered through our partnerships with PATHS SK and the CommonSense Mediation Academy — has been making this particular point for years: a partner who controls the finances, monitors movements, or cuts someone off from their support network is making parenting choices, with real consequences for the children in the home. That was a hard idea to get traction on when the law only recognized discrete incidents. It isn’t anymore. What the model teaches in practice, the Supreme Court has now written into civil law.

What this ruling is — and what it isn’t

A few distinctions are worth keeping straight here, because they change what the ruling actually means in practice:

This isn’t criminal law. Abuse can still be prosecuted criminally, and often is. But this is a parallel civil path, driven by the survivor instead of the Crown, and what it offers at the end is compensation and recognition rather than a jail sentence.
Nor is it a weapon for ordinary conflict. The Court was explicit on this. High-conflict separations and the painful-but-ordinary friction of a relationship coming apart are not coercive control, and judges will have to separate genuine domination from the normal hard edges of a breakup. The majority went out of its way to warn against overreach.
And it doesn’t take away anything you already had. Survivors can still plead assault, battery, and the rest, frequently alongside the new claim. It’s an additional option, not a replacement for the existing ones.

Vindication has real legal value

There’s something in this ruling that goes beyond the dollar figure.

In the statement she released after the decision, Kuldeep Ahluwalia called it “a historic day for survivors”. She was talking about what it meant to have a court of law say, on the record and in a judgment that binds across the country, that what happened to her counted. That it had a name and a remedy. That the legal system saw it. Lawyers have a word for that part of it, the part that isn’t about compensation: vindication, a formal finding that what you suffered was wrong not only in some private moral sense but in the eyes of the law.

For anyone who has spent years being told to be quiet, or being disbelieved, or watching their experience shrunk down to a few discrete “incidents,” that recognition is very nearly the whole point. And for the family lawyers, social workers, educators, and advocates working across this province, it changes the conversation you can now have with the people who come to you. The law has finally caught up in a useful and meaningful way.

Talk to an intimate partner violence lawyer in Saskatchewan

The tort of intimate partner violence is brand new, and exactly how Saskatchewan courts apply it is going to develop case by case over the next few years. If you’re living with control in a relationship, whether or not there’s physical violence in the picture, it’s worth talking to a lawyer who understands these dynamics from the inside.

At Panko Collaborative Law, we come at family conflict with a single goal in mind: reducing harm, and especially harm to children. We work collaboratively, we’re trained in Safe & Together, and we bring both the legal expertise and a real understanding of family-violence dynamics to every file we take on. We’re based in Saskatoon and we work with clients across the province as they navigate separation, divorce, and the hard realities of intimate partner violence.

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Panko Collaborative Law is a family law firm in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, led by Charmaine Panko, K.C., a Collaborative Lawyer and Mediator, who also owns and operates CommonSense Mediation Academy. This article is general information, not legal advice. If you are in immediate danger, call 911.

Intimate Partner Violence Tort Saskatchewan