Victims' rights: the Canadian Victims Bill of Rights and provincial laws

Margaret Liu, the Crown attorney who reviews Port Ardent's charges each week, joins the class for this lesson. She begins with a confession. 'When I started practising, I thought of victims as witnesses,' she says. 'Important witnesses, but witnesses. My client was the public, and the victim was one source of evidence. The law has changed that, and I have had to change with it.' The change, she explains, did not make the victim a party to the prosecution. The case is still the King against the accused, and the prosecutor still decides what charges to pursue. What changed is that victims now have legal rights of their own, and the police, prosecutors, courts and corrections officials have legal duties to respect them.

Why victims' rights laws exist

Liu describes the problem the laws were designed to solve. In the traditional criminal process, the state replaced the victim. The victim reported, testified if called, and otherwise had no formal role. There was no duty to tell them about bail, pleas or sentencing, no right to be present, no right to describe the harm, and often no realistic route to recover their losses. The research on secondary victimization in Lesson 5 showed what that cost. Victims' rights laws give victims a defined place: rights to be informed, to be protected, to participate and to seek repair, while leaving the core decisions of the prosecution with the state.

Brooks adds that rights on paper and rights in practice are different things. A right to information means little if nobody tells the victim it exists. That is why many of these laws place their first duties on police, who are usually the first officials a victim meets.

The Canadian Victims Bill of Rights

The Canadian Victims Bill of Rights came into force on July 23, 2015. It applies while an offence is being investigated or prosecuted, while the offender is in the correctional system or on conditional release, and in some proceedings involving accused persons found not criminally responsible. It gives victims four groups of rights. The right to information includes general information about the justice system and the services and programs available, and, on request, information about the status and outcome of the investigation, the location and timing of proceedings, and, for registered victims, information about the offender's correctional plan, release and conditions. The right to protection includes having one's security and privacy considered by the appropriate authorities, protection from intimidation and retaliation, a request for testimonial aids, and a request that one's identity be protected from public disclosure. The right to participation includes the right to convey one's views about decisions that affect one's rights and to have them considered, and to present a victim impact statement. The right to restitution includes having the court consider a restitution order and having an unpaid order entered as a civil court judgment.

The Act defines a victim broadly, as Lesson 1 showed, and allows family members and others to act for a victim who has died or cannot act. It also sets limits. The rights must be applied reasonably, and in a way that does not interfere with police or prosecutorial discretion, cause excessive delay, compromise an investigation, or endanger anyone's life or safety. Victims do not become parties to the prosecution, and the Act states that it does not create a cause of action, meaning a victim cannot sue for damages because a right was not respected.

Complaints and enforcement

Because the justice system is shared between the federal government and the provinces, the Bill requires every federal department, agency and body involved in the justice system to have a complaint process, and provides that complaints about provincial and territorial bodies, including most police services and Crown prosecutors, are dealt with under provincial or territorial law. A victim who is not satisfied with a federal department's response can complain to the Office of the Federal Ombudsperson for Victims of Crime, an independent office created in 2007. The Ombudsperson's reports have repeatedly found that many victims are never told about their rights, which is why information is often described as the gateway right: without it, victims cannot exercise any of the others.

Ontario also has its own Victims' Bill of Rights, passed in 1995. It sets out principles for how justice officials should treat victims: with courtesy, compassion and respect for their personal dignity and privacy, with access to information about services, the investigation and court proceedings, and with consideration of their views. In 1999, in Vanscoy v. Ontario, an Ontario court held that the Act was a statement of principles that did not create rights victims could enforce in court. Liu tells the class that this is typical: provincial laws set out how victims should be treated and fund services, but their main force comes through policy, training and complaint processes rather than lawsuits. Ontario's policing standards require police services to have procedures for assisting victims, including referrals to victim services.

Rights after sentencing

Victims' rights do not end when the sentence is imposed. For many victims of serious crime, the hardest moments come years later, when the offender becomes eligible for release. Victims of offenders serving federal sentences of two years or more can register with the Correctional Service of Canada or the Parole Board of Canada. Registered victims can receive information about the offender's sentence, eligibility dates, transfers, temporary absences and release decisions, and since the Bill came into force, a current photograph of the offender before release in most cases. They can present a statement at a parole hearing in person, by video or in writing, listen to an audio recording of a hearing they could not attend, and ask the Board to consider conditions such as no contact. Provinces run similar notification programs for offenders serving shorter sentences in provincial jails.

Brooks tells the class that she has sat with victims preparing statements for parole hearings fifteen years after the crime, and that many say the system forgot them long before they forgot what happened. Registration is voluntary, and some victims prefer not to be reminded. But victims cannot choose to register if no one tells them it exists, which brings the class back to the gateway right.

When rights are not respected

Desjardins asks what a victim can do when an officer fails to tell them about their rights or never calls back. The first step is usually the simplest: contact the officer's supervisor or the service's victim liaison and ask. Most failures are oversights, and most are fixed by a phone call. If that does not work, the victim can make a formal complaint. Complaints about a municipal police service in Ontario can go to the service itself or to the province's independent complaints agency, and complaints about federal bodies such as the Correctional Service of Canada go first to that body and then, if needed, to the Federal Ombudsperson. Brooks says she would rather officers never let it get that far. A complaint means a victim was failed twice: once by the offender, and once by the system that was supposed to help.

What the police must do

Liu and Brooks list the duties that fall on police officers in Port Ardent. Officers must give victims information about their rights and about victim services at first contact, usually by handing over a victim information card or pamphlet that includes the file number and a contact name. They must refer victims to victim services, either by giving the agency's number or, with consent, by sending the victim's contact details directly to the agency. They must keep victims informed about the status of the investigation on request, including arrests and charges. They must tell victims about release conditions that affect them, such as an order not to contact them. They must consider victims' safety and privacy in what they disclose, and pass on the victim's views and concerns to the Crown, for example about bail.

The program below shows how the service checks whether victims are getting the information the law requires. It compares the date of each report with the date the victim received the written rights information, and counts how many were informed within the service's target of the same day.

# Did victims receive written rights information on the day they reported?
from datetime import date
files = [
    ("break and enter", date(2026, 3, 14), date(2026, 3, 14)),
    ("assault", date(2026, 4, 2), date(2026, 4, 4)),
    ("fraud", date(2026, 4, 9), date(2026, 4, 9)),
    ("robbery", date(2026, 4, 11), date(2026, 4, 11)),
    ("assault", date(2026, 4, 18), date(2026, 4, 25)),
    ("threats", date(2026, 4, 20), date(2026, 4, 20)),
    ("break and enter", date(2026, 4, 23), date(2026, 4, 24)),
    ("fraud", date(2026, 4, 30), date(2026, 4, 30)),
]
same_day = 0
for kind, reported, informed in files:
    gap = (informed - reported).days
    same_day += gap == 0
    print(f"{kind:16} reported {reported}  informed {informed}  gap {gap} days")
print("informed on the same day:", same_day, "of", len(files))
print("longest gap:", max((i - r).days for k, r, i in files), "days")

break and enter  reported 2026-03-14  informed 2026-03-14  gap 0 days
assault          reported 2026-04-02  informed 2026-04-04  gap 2 days
fraud            reported 2026-04-09  informed 2026-04-09  gap 0 days
robbery          reported 2026-04-11  informed 2026-04-11  gap 0 days
assault          reported 2026-04-18  informed 2026-04-25  gap 7 days
threats          reported 2026-04-20  informed 2026-04-20  gap 0 days
break and enter  reported 2026-04-23  informed 2026-04-24  gap 1 days
fraud            reported 2026-04-30  informed 2026-04-30  gap 0 days
informed on the same day: 5 of 8
longest gap: 7 days

Daniel's assault on April 2 is the file with the two-day gap: he left in an ambulance without any written information, as Malhotra admitted in Lesson 5. The file with the seven-day gap was a man assaulted outside a bar who was arrested at the scene himself for causing a disturbance and was never treated as a victim until a detective reviewed the video. Haddad used both cases in a training bulletin.

Rights and the rights of the accused

Students sometimes ask whether victims' rights take something away from the accused. Liu's answer is that the two sets of rights are meant to coexist, and that in most cases they do. The accused keeps the presumption of innocence, the right to a fair trial, the right to make full answer and defence, and the right to disclosure. A victim's right to information does not entitle them to the Crown's or prosecutor's whole file, and a victim's views about a plea or a sentence are considered but do not bind the court. Where real conflicts arise, such as a defence request for a victim's counselling records, the courts weigh both sets of interests, and the Criminal Code sets out a special procedure in sexual offence cases, in sections 278.1 to 278.98, for deciding when such records must be produced.

Brooks adds a point from the victim's side. Most victims do not want to make the accused's trial unfair. They want to know what is happening, to be safe, to have their harm recognized and to be treated as a person rather than as a piece of evidence. When officers and prosecutors meet those needs, conflicts between the two sets of rights are much rarer than people expect.