New law to strip Canada's military of power to handle sexual assault cases

The progressive authorities is go under to dismantle the canadian river Armed Forces of its power to investigate and prosecute military sexual assault cases after almost 30 years. 

Bill C-11 passed in the House of Commons on Thursday and is expected to receive royal assent in the coming days, enshrining into law that all sexual offences involving military members must be handled exclusively by civilian police and courts.

The move is based on a key recommendation by former Supreme Court justice Louise Arbour, who has since become Governor General.

Arbour's 2022 report called on the government to revoke the military's authority over these crimes because she found its handling of sexual offences over the decades eroded public trust.

The Senate added a caveat to the bill requiring a mandatory external review in three years to decide if the law should be repealed.

Government House Leader Steven MacKinnon said the Liberals passed the bill with the review because of “simplicity."

"Getting it done rather than continuing to ping pong with the Senate," he said Thursday.

Sen. Rebecca Patterson, a retired rear admiral, said on June 11 that the amendment "gives the proper study to have a look at what this is doing to victims."

The government tasked Arbour five years ago with investigating the military's sexual misconduct crisis that saw roughly a dozen current and former military leaders facing allegations.

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Arbour's sweeping report flagged serious concerns with the independence and competence of military investigators, prosecutors and the justice system.

She called on the government to change the law so the civilian justice system has complete control over sexual offences. The military was given concurrent powers to investigate and try cases in 1998.

Military sexual misconduct survivors and advocates raised a range of concerns to MPs and senators studying the bill.

They said the civilian system is overburdened, the military has greater access to evidence and perpetrators involved in less serious acts might not be held accountable in civilian courts.

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Conservative MPs amended the bill to give victims the right to choose if military or civilian authorities handle sexual offence cases, which some had called for.

When the Liberals secured a majority government, they dropped that change and restored the bill to what Arbour intended.

Arbour's report said giving victims the choice between the military or civilian judicial system places them in an "untenable position." They may regret their choice later if there's an acquittal and always wonder if they should have picked the other system, Arbour wrote. 

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The mandatory review must also include statistics about how many offences were prosecuted in civilian courts and the outcomes of those cases.

The federal government hasn't been gathering that data.

The government ordered the military in 2021 to transfer all sexual assault cases to civilian authorities based on an early recommendation by Arbour.

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A 2025 report by an external monitor Jocelyne Therrien tracking the government's progress on Arbour's report found intake information about misconduct complaints is scattered across at least 10 different databases and the outcomes are not being tracked.

The military doesn't know the "scope of the problem," Therrien wrote, or what complaints have been resolved — so it's difficult to figure out whether there's progress in the workplace. 

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Therrien found last year that while the government and military have made "substantive changes," there were still structural issues that could impact culture change moving forward.

The new law, according to the defence minister's office, marks the completion of all of Arbour's 48 recommendations.

Along with highlighting a lack of data on misconduct cases, Therrien called for the end of "never-ending consultations" on policies that end up being too long, unclear and late to come into force.

She also flagged "unsettling findings" from surveys conducted since 2022 that show many military members still aren't reporting sexual misconduct.

A Statistics Canada survey found 64 per cent of victims of sexual assault in the military said they didn't report the incident, often because they didn't think it would make a difference. 

Another internal survey in 2023 found 29 per cent of women and 48 per cent of men in the Canadian Armed Forces believed perpetrators of sexual misconduct are held accountable, her report said.

Senior reporter

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