Why Intimate Partner Violence excites me!

Darnell Smith: “I believe the new tort of Intimate Partner Violence can be a unique tool against coercive control”

Okay, that's a clickbait title. Intimate partner violence is horrible, and historically the law has been clumsy at addressing it. What excites me isn't the violence, it's that on May 15, 2026, the Supreme Court of Canada handed survivors a legal tool actually built for the harm they experience. The case is Ahluwalia v. Ahluwalia, and it created a new tort of intimate partner violence.

So what is a tort? It's a civil wrong that a court can remedy with financial compensation or other orders. Defamation is a tort. So is battery. If someone defames you, the court can order them to pay damages to make you whole. The new tort works the same way, where intimate partner violence is established in court, a judge can now award damages directly to the survivor.

Here's what makes this different from what already existed. Survivors could already sue for assault, battery, or intentional infliction of emotional distress. But those torts are built around discrete incidents, one punch, one threat, one act. They miss the thing that actually defines abusive relationships: the pattern of coercion. The slow erosion of a person's autonomy through isolation, surveillance, financial control, manipulation, and intimidation. The Supreme Court recognized that forcing survivors to chop their experience into individual incidents misrepresents the wrong itself. Coercive control is now its own legal harm.

So how does this benefit survivors? The obvious answer is that survivors can now sue for intimate partner violence and seek compensation. But let's be honest about the limits. Abusers rarely accept responsibility and voluntarily write a cheque, which means the only way to enforce the claim is through court. And it surprises no one that a person who has endured years of abuse is not eager to relive it on the witness stand. That's not a comment on survivors strength; it's an acknowledgement of how much it costs to testify about this kind of harm.

So if a survivor can really only collect by going to court, and going to court is the last thing most survivors want to do, is this tort actually useful to them? Yes!!! And here's where I get genuinely excited. The biggest value of this tort isn't at trial. It's at the negotiating table. It creates leverage. It shifts what counts as a reasonable settlement. An abuser who knows a court can now award substantial damages for coercive control is an abuser with a real reason to come to the table with a fair offer.

The piece I find most promising is this: the Court wisely included ongoing litigation abuse as a form of intimate partner violence. Post-separation coercive control through endless motions, manufactured disputes, and procedural warfare is one of the most damaging things survivors face, and family lawyers see it constantly. Now, that conduct can increase the damages award, I expect counsel will use this as a tool to manage their client’s behaviour. My hope is that this tort meaningfully reduces post-separation litigation abuse.

To summarize: the new tort of intimate partner violence empowers survivors, discourages litigation abuse, and pushes toward faster and fairer resolutions.

If you're navigating a separation and any of this sounds familiar — the pattern, the control, the sense that the litigation itself has become part of the abuse — I'm happy to talk through what this decision might mean for your situation. Set up a free consultation with me or a team member by calling 604-584-0007.