The government says it recognizes femicide, but is it stalling on preventing it?

Canada is witnessing a growing crisis of femicide. Men are killing women at alarming rates, often after escalating patterns of coercive control, threats, and violence against a current or former partner. In many cases, firearms are the weapons that turn abuse into homicide.

And yet, more than two years after Parliament adopted new life-saving measures into the Firearms Act specifically to protect women from intimate partner gun violence, the federal government has still not operationalized them.

This delay is indefensible.

In December 2023, Parliament adopted clear protections stating that individuals subject to protection orders should not be permitted to hold firearms licences. This policy choice is straightforward: if a court has determined that someone poses enough of a danger to require legally binding conditions for another person’s safety, that person should not have access to guns.

Following recommendations from the National Association of Women and the Law, Members of Parliament amended the bill to define protection orders in the broadest possible ways to make sure that all people at risk would be protected.

This is hardly a controversial measure. To bring it into force, it just needed the federal government to confirm this definition in regulations.

We are now 30 months—and 364 femicides—later, and still waiting for that to happen.

It’s not just unconscionable delays on the government’s part that have threatened women’s safety. Draft regulations introduced to coincide with International Women’s Day 2025 proposed to dramatically narrow these protections. Rather than removing guns from all abusers subject to protection orders, the government sought to target only civil orders (for example, within a family law context) and exclude all criminal protection orders (for example, peace bonds). A year later, the new Carney government signalled its intent to extend protections in the case of some—but not all—criminal protection orders. A survivor whose abusive partner is subject to a peace bond might benefit from automatic licence revocation, but a survivor whose abusive partner received no-contact conditions in relation to a bail hearing or probation order would not.

This distinction is arbitrary and dangerous. It makes no sense that some survivors would receive protections while others would not, based not on the level of danger they face, but on procedural technicalities. Violence does not become less lethal because it is dealt with in a different stage of the legal system.

There is irony in the government’s foot-dragging and attempting to narrow protections intended to prevent femicide at the same time as it promotes a bill that purports to recognize femicide in the Criminal Code. Symbolic recognition means little if concrete protections are left sitting idle for years.

Every delay carries consequences. Every narrowing of the law leaves gaps through which women and children can fall. And every failure to remove firearms from dangerous individuals increases the risk that intimate partner violence will become fatal.

The connection between firearms and femicide is well established. Access to a gun is linked to a tenfold increase in the likelihood that intimate partner violence will end in death. Firearms also intensify coercive control long before a trigger is pulled; threats involving guns terrorize women, silence them, and trap them in violent relationships.

This is why robust firearm protections matter. They are not just administrative details or technical regulatory debates. They are life-saving measures.

The federal government should respect democratically adopted legislation and immediately commit to adopting regulations that define protection orders as any protection order, as required by the Firearms Act.

A robust firearm protection regime is a matter of life and death; it can determine whether women survive intimate partner violence or pay with their lives the price of our government’s inaction.

Suzanne Zaccour is the director of legal affairs for the National Association of Women and the Law.

The Hill Times