The Supreme Court Of Canada Just Opened A New Door To Sue Your Ex
A single Supreme Court of Canada decision can quietly change the ground rules for thousands of breakups and this one just did. We unpack the Court’s creation of a new tort tied to intimate partner violence, described in terms of coercive control and coercive and controlling conduct, and we dig into what that really means when the behaviour isn’t limited to physical violence. If you’ve ever wondered how the common law can invent a new civil wrong, this is a live example with immediate consequences for family law and civil litigation in Canada.
We talk plainly about the hard part: definitions and incentives. The ruling points to emotional abuse, economic control, manipulation, isolation, and even improper litigation tactics, with broad language about autonomy, equality, and meaningful life choices. That may capture serious harm, but it also leaves lawyers and judges with little guidance on what crosses the line or how money damages should be measured. We explain why that uncertainty could turn more divorces into longer court battles, especially when property division is on the table and “fault” arguments start creeping back into a system built to avoid them.
Then we shift to a chilling criminal law case out of Victoria: two friends, drinking, cocaine, guns, and a so-called bulletproof vest that proves only bullet resistant. The facts are grim, but the legal lessons are clear, from firearm offences and a polymer 80 type handgun to why you cannot legally consent to grievous bodily harm. We also break down how manslaughter works without an intent to kill, and why a firearm manslaughter conviction triggers a mandatory minimum prison sentence.
If you want more careful legal analysis that connects court decisions to real-world outcomes, subscribe, share this episode with a friend, and leave a review so more listeners can find us.
Legally Speaking with Michael Mulligan is live on CFAX 1070 every Thursday at 12:30 p.m. It’s also available on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Legally Speaking May 21 2026
Adam Stirling [00:00:00] Time for our regular segment, joined as always by Barrister and Solicitor with Mulligan Defence Lawyers. It’s Legally Speaking on CFAX 1070 with Michael Mulligan. Afternoon Michael, how we doing?
Michael T. Mulligan [00:00:10] Hey, good afternoon. I’m doing great. Always good to be here.
Adam Stirling [00:00:13] Reading this, it says, the Supreme Court of Canada has created a new tort of intimate partner violence for, “coercive and controlling conduct that could limit a person’s dignity, autonomy and equality in the relationship”. You and I have talked about the very complicated practice of family law in the past. It would seem that this is even over and above those other concerns.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:00:34] Yes, this decision which just came out from the Supreme Court of Canada is going to have a massive impact in terms of how family law cases proceed. I’m not sure that that’s been fully absorbed in the reporting that’s occurred so far about it. But what the Supreme Court of Canada has done here is create a new tort. And what’s a tort? I guess it’s a dessert. But in this context, there are a list of things which have been established by courts to amount to like civil wrongs, things that you could sue somebody for.
Adam Stirling [00:01:08] mmhmm.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:01:08] And so, common one’s people may be familiar with are things like negligence, right? You can sue somebody for negligence on the basis that they were careless and caused you some harm. Other things would include civil claims for things like an assault or a battery or false imprisonment or there’s even one for the intentional infliction of mental distress, right, or defamation would be another example of it. And many of those things have been sort of incrementally created by common law over many, many years. And courts are generally reluctant to make radical policy changes, leaving those for legislative action, and traditionally have made sort of minor changes over the many years to how those sort of court-created courts worked. Now, with that being said, the courts have said repeatedly, look, there is capacity for courts to create a brand-new tort. And that’s what’s just happened. And this new tort, just like that list of things I mentioned, is a new basis upon which you could sue somebody for money. And it’s been defined either the language they’ve used kind of alternates between this concept of intimate partner violence or coercive and controlling conduct. Now, the concept there of intimate partner violence, and who could be, everyone would of course be against all forms of violence, one would imagine.
Adam Stirling [00:02:40] mmm.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:02:40] One of the challenges here is that it’s one of these circumstances where they’ve defined this thing in a way that doesn’t involve what most people would consider violence. It’s been defined by the Supreme Court of Canada to include a whole host of things that are potentially not clearly defined. And the court talks about it as being things like conduct that could amount to things like emotional abuse, or economic control, or I think one of the pieces of language they used in here was like litigation, like using litigation in some improper way.
Adam Stirling [00:03:19] hmm.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:03:19] And they described it as things which could undermine the person’s ability to make meaningful choices about their life free of coercion or activity that might interfere with the equality of spouses, or whether somebody can be sort of equal and autonomous; as being the things that might be affected by things like economic coercion or interfering with relationships or things of that sort. And as you can probably tell from that kind of language, that is not well-defined. And in fact, the couple of judges from the Supreme Court of Canada who dissented on this decision to create this brand-new tort, the concerns that they expressed was, they said this is just not clear what behaviour would make out this coercive control. And there’s no meaningful guidance in terms for courts about things like, well, how much money should be awarded, on how should that be determined, what behaviour does amount to this kind of coercive control or “intimate partner violence”, which of course doesn’t include violence, in the ordinary English meaning of that term. And so it’s very unclear what is going to be captured. But what is clear, what the minority here, dissenting judges, pointed out is this is likely to lead to a complete change in terms of how family cases are litigated, and it is likely to massively increase the amount of time spent in court litigating these things.
Adam Stirling [00:04:50] Yeah.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:04:51] And it’s a complete change because currently in Canada we have four sort of things like property division in a divorce circumstance. We don’t have fault as one of the things that’s being considered there. It’s not like, oh, you cheated on your husband, therefore you get less money. Or you were a very bad husband in some way or other, you were not very attentive and loving. And so therefore you should get less money for that purpose. We don’t do that, because well, it’s a variety of public policy reasons for that, but you can imagine what that litigation would look like.
Adam Stirling [00:05:21] Yeah.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:05:21] It would go on potentially forever.
Adam Stirling [00:05:24] Yeah.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:05:24] Well, this is going to add that element to many family law cases. And one of the reactions I had to this, just reading this decision and the decision from the dissenting judges, was that in B.C. We got rid of; we’ve introduced no fault for car accidents. Those we talked about before. I think there’s lots of reasons. I think that’s not the best idea. But in terms of how people are treated, but there were a bunch of lawyers who used to spend their time, and still do, because there’s still sort of some of those cases that are still in the system, spend their litigating serious car accidents, you know, who was at fault and was there, as I mentioned, their tort of negligence, right? That was the one that used to apply, although no longer in British Columbia, negligence in the car accident context doesn’t matter anymore. There’s going to be a whole team of lawyers out there who had spent their time litigating those things, who I suspect will almost immediately begin litigating this. In this case, the award originally made by the trial judge who created this tort gave three awards of $50,000 for different tends of damage. I think it was slightly reduced on appeal to $100,000. But there’s potentially a bunch of money there. There’s no guidance in terms of how that should be calculated. And the way this is framed, we’ll come to that in a moment, in terms of the things that might be this are not precisely delineated and there’s no case law in it, because it’s a brand-new thing that’s been made up. And so all of that is going to be a recipe for litigation.
Adam Stirling [00:07:06] wow.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:07:06] I don’t know what else. And the idea is that it sounds like this could be either a free-floating thing, like somebody might bring an action for this coercive, controlling conduct or intimate partner violence as a free floating thing, or the other thing that seems likely, as in this case, is it will get bolted on to, like the divorce process.
Adam Stirling [00:07:29] yeah.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:07:29] Where the court is dealing with the division of property, and usually now as I said, no fault hasn’t been an issue and so the division a property is things like how much is the house worth and was she’ll should this property being brought into the Marriage be considered or how should the business assets be divided, right, but those are sort of economic things. There would be litigation currently over, often children. That can become a focus particularly in sort of high-conflict cases.
Adam Stirling [00:07:56] mm hmm.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:07:57] There’s this language used of like high conflict divorces where the people sort of hate each other and spend their time litigating forever over the wagon wheel coffee table and why somebody was 10 minutes late dropping off Johnny. And so this is going to now add just massive fuel to that fire. And so it is, at least to me and at least to the minority of judges who dissented from the Supreme Court of Canada, clear that there is going to be a need for a significant increase in the number of judges required to hear family law disputes because they are now going to, in all probability, given how broad and ill-defined this is, to have allegations maybe in both directions, claiming, hey, my ex-spouse was coercively controlling me in form of financial abuse or in terms of, you know, they talk about things like undermining the victim’s ability to make meaningful choices about their life. You just think about how broad that is, right? Or the language like a person is deprived of their ability to live free of coercion, as an equal to their spouse, and the autonomous equality of the relationship being violated. Now on one level, you can say, well sure, who could be against the idea of people being free of coercion and equality in relationships, of course, are good things. I don’t think many people disagree with that.
Adam Stirling [00:09:21] Yeah.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:09:21] But you could just imagine how many things could be poured into the bucket of, my life was not free of coercion and it undermined my autonomy and my equality and autonomous capacity to, and a whole list of things like, you know financial autonomy or autonomy to pursue work opportunities or school opportunities. And so this is a very very major change in terms of how these things are going to work. It’s likely to change the lawyers doing that work, many of the people that used to do civil things are likely to get into this.
Adam Stirling [00:09:57] Mm-hmm.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:09:57] And it’s going to get bolted on to just many cases. We see that already and I should say, you know I see this in the context because I practice criminal law. I don’t do family law or sue people for money.
Adam Stirling [00:10:09] Yeah.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:10:09] That’s not what I do, but you will see in some of those through high-conflict family law cases. One of the things which is unfortunately common, is for one or both of the spouses to make criminal allegations about the other. To say, oh my wife hit me.
Adam Stirling [00:10:29] yeah.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:10:29] Or my husband pushed me or whatever it is And then when the criminal justice system gets engaged you then wind up with things like one person gets an order that they get possession of the house and the other person can’t have contact and that means it has an impact on, you know, for example, a custody of children, at least on an interim basis. And so there is already a powerful incentive to do that and some of the allegations of course are true, right? But not all of them are. I mean, that’s I guess the unfortunate reality of things and those of us who spend our days doing this know that the fact that somebody got to the phone and made a complaint of something doesn’t mean that’s what happened.
Adam Stirling [00:11:05] Yeah.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:11:06] Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t and really there’s no other way to sort that out than have a trial and so there’s already that incentive to create those kind of allegations because it does advantage family law cases. Now there’s going to be a direct financial benefit if you’re successful in making it a claim that you are coercively controlled. And so that is likely to lead in addition to an increase in the family law litigation over money and fighting about whether it was coercive controlling, financial behaviour, or whether, what is some of the other language used here. Wrong coercive control. They separated this, I should say, from the existing tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress. They found that that wasn’t enough to capture everything here. They included that this concept of intimate partner, ” violence” can take the form of things including manipulation, isolation, or financial abuse.
Adam Stirling [00:12:06] Hmm.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:12:06] So in addition to the direct fighting over those things in the context of family law cases making them, now we’re going to have trials, rather than settlements, over things. It also, because it can include, it would appear from this decision and bear in mind This is the only decision on this case, which is the other concern that was expressed by the minority. Like many of these things if you ask the lawyer is something or other, Let’s say what let’s pick a tort here a deducing a breach of contract. That’s a tort.
Adam Stirling [00:12:39] Yeah.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:12:39] You would be able to look up previous cases to figure that out. You say, okay, well, there are a thousand cases that have decided that, and he’s been court so very carefully delineated what is and what isn’t, and so your lawyer would be able look at those things and look at your fact pattern and give you an opinion about it. Like, yeah, I think this probably is, or no, this probably is not. But you have this new, very broad concept with no authority for this in the past at all, and you ask a lawyer, could this amount to manipulation, isolation, or financial abuse? The response is likely to be, yeah sure, maybe. Ha!
Adam Stirling [00:13:09] Yeah.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:13:09] And if you say, well, how much money should you get for that? What have previous people got for that? You say I have no idea; there’s only one case about this. And so, off to court we go, and there’s even language here in this case, remembering this is the entirety of the description of what this tort is, because it was just created. There’s even suggestion that a single incident of something or other might qualify for this.
Adam Stirling [00:13:32] hmm.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:13:32] And that it can be something physical, which is what most people would refer to as violence, right, something that might already be captured by the existing torts for things like Assault or battery. You can have that as well, which may lead to police complaints as well now that people are going to pretty quickly recognize there’s a financial incentive to do that. When really what it amounts to is the dividing up of property because that’s the occasion where most people might have, you know, when the house is getting sold and things are being divided up, that’s when there may be a substantial pool of money to be divided in other than an equal way. So it’s a sea change in terms of how these things are going to be sorted out and I hope they are prepared for that and start hiring the requisite family judges with family experience in the BC Supreme Court to start hearing these things because there’s likely to be an absolute flood of them. That is the latest from the Supreme Court of Canada creating a brand-new tort.
Adam Stirling [00:14:31] Michael Mulligan with Mulligan Defence Lawyers. Legally speaking, we’ll continue right after this.
[00:14:35] COMMERCIAL.
Adam Stirling [00:14:35] Back on the air with Legally Speaking on CFAX 1070 with Michael Mulligan with Mulligan Defence Lawyer. A four-year sentence it says for shooting and killing a friend wearing a “bulletproof” quest, or vest, excuse me, what happened?
Michael T. Mulligan [00:14:50] Well, first of all, you should bear in mind that the term bulletproof vest is perhaps not indicative of how, in fact, they operate.
Adam Stirling [00:14:57] Yes.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:14:57] They’re not bulletproof. They are bullet resistant. That better be better named. So, this is a local case, and the fact pattern is that these two friends, who apparently had engaged in this, “game” for some period of time, they, on an evening in question, they first of started at a wrestling show, then they moved on to a brewery, Then they went to the Legion, then a house party, all of where it sounds like there was drinking going on. So they were drinking, clearly drunk, there’s some cocaine use, so then they decided to get in a truck after gathering some guns, ammunition, and bulletproof vests. And they drove out to a logging road near Jordan River to go shooting and as they had apparently done in the past, the game that they had to come up with was shooting each other with bulletproof vests on. And the fellow who got shot and died put on a bulletproof vest and then said to the accused in this case,” don’t be a bitch, fucking do it”. Sorry for the language, that’s a quote. And the accused shot him in the bulletproof best, unfortunately, as we started with, bulletproof vests are not bulletproof, they’re bullet resistant. And the bullet penetrated the vest, and then bits of it went into his chest and sac around his heart, caused massive bleeding, and he fell to the ground. The man who shot him thought he was faking it, and after realizing that wasn’t so, dragged him through the snow, it was snowing, put pressure on the wound, did his best, but he expired. And so, first of all, what a terrible state of affairs in terms of planning and activity. And then, he’s charged with a number of things, and here’s the legal aspect of it.
Adam Stirling [00:16:48] mm hmm.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:16:48] So, one of the things he was charged with, he was charged with a number of thing, he charged with some offences relating to the firearm itself, like being in possession of a firearm without the required license and so on. The firearm in question, the one used to do the shooting, apparently there’s more than one, but the one he had used, because the plan was he would shoot the friend, and then the game in the past was that person would then shoot the other person back with another gun, I guess. The gun was described as a Polymer 80, which is interesting, I did a little bit of reading about what that is.
Adam Stirling [00:17:18] mm hmm.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:17:18] It’s from a company that now has gone bankrupt, it appears to be their business model was selling like 80% complete kits to make guns, like handguns. And so I’m not sure that it’s like a 3d printed thing, but like the company would sell like all the pieces you could use to, well, 80% of them, to put together your own handgun. And so while it’s not specified in the sentencing decision, it sounds like that may be the reason why they wound up with some gun they weren’t prohibited, weren’t permitted to have. Handguns are restricted or prohibited and they need to be registered. You need to have a, you know, kind of training, which would include don’t shoot somebody in the chest wearing a bulletproof vest. And it appears that the gun may be of a sort that none of those things went off for.
Adam Stirling [00:18:03] hmm.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:18:03] There’s a semi-automatic handgun. And so he was charged with offences related to simply possessing that without the proper license or registration, but he was also charged with manslaughter. And the thing about that right for murder most people are familiar with the idea that you have to be, you have to intend to kill the person, which is plainly not the case here. You know they had played this “game” before he thought the best was genuinely bulletproof. And so there was clearly no intent to kill a friend, but The way manslaughter works is you can wind up with a conviction for manslaughter if you kill somebody and you do so in the course of committing some other offence, like, you know, in this case it would be, I guess, possessing this restricted firearm without a license. That would be an offence. It would also be an offence, in fact, of assaulting somebody because you can consent to like a fist fight or something, that makes it not an assault, because an assault has to be like a non-consensual application of force or a threat application of force to somebody else.
Adam Stirling [00:19:12] Yeah.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:19:12] And so you can consent to, like if you say to your friend, let’s go out and punch each other. Well, that’s probably fine, right, at least legally. You can’t consent to grievous bodily harm, like you can’t consent, and this is just a policy decision from the Supreme Court of Canada, you just can’t consent to, you know, having a sword fight or having a duel or something of that sort. Even though you might have agreed to it, we’ve just as a policy decided and concluded we’re not going to recognize consent to Grievous bodily Harm, less we have people engaging in you know sword fights and duels. And so as a result you would also have an underlying offence here of assault because you can’t consent to that kind of grievous bodily harm. And so that’s how you can have a man-slaughter charge when there was no intent to, in fact even harm the other person, let alone kill them. And then under the criminal code if you have a manslaughter involving a firearm carries a mandatory minimum sentence of at least four years imprisonment . And so in this case the man pled guilty to the offences including manslaughter and there was in fact a joint submission for the judge to impose that which is the mandatory minimum of four years in prison. And then he got various other sentences less than that for the various firearms offences and so that’s what was imposed here as a four-year penitentiary term for shooting his friend in the chest, when the friend had asked him to do it right before doing it. And so I thought that was interesting both in terms of the stupidity of the conduct, But also in terms, of how those issues of consent and so on apply in a manslaughter charge when you have as in this case the person egging the person on to, Shoot him, That is the latest sensing decision on manslaughter out of Victoria.
Adam Stirling [00:21:01] Michael Mulligan with Mulligan Defence Lawyers Legally Speaking during the second half of our second hour every Thursday. Thank you so much.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:21:07] Thanks so much always great to be here.
Adam Stirling [00:21:08] Right quick break news next
Automatically Transcribed on May 22, 2026 – MULLIGAN DEFENCE LAWYERS