Femicide is now first-degree murder in Canada, and Gatineau has felt why it matters
Tashi Farmilo
Femicide became first-degree murder across Canada on June 18, when Parliament passed the Protecting Victims Act, the federal government's answer to a rise in intimate partner violence that it says is killing women faster than the justice system can intervene. The law, also known as Bill C-16, received Royal Assent that day and takes force on July 18, and for Gatineau, it lands weeks after the region lost one of its own.
The bill does more than rename a killing. Beyond classifying femicide as the most serious homicide offence in the country, it creates a new offence of coercive control in intimate relationships, targeting patterns of threats, isolation, and manipulation before violence escalates. It makes it a crime to threaten to distribute non-consensual intimate images, including sexual deepfakes, raises maximum penalties for several offences, and strengthens the rights of victims moving through a court process that the government acknowledged can be retraumatizing. Justice Minister Sean Fraser said victims and survivors had called for stronger protections, and that those protections are now law. What the federal government calls one of the most consequential reforms of the Criminal Code in a generation was the third major criminal justice bill it has passed in under a year, alongside stricter bail rules and tougher protections against hate crimes.
In Gatineau, the law's purpose is not theoretical. On May 6, the city recorded what police and the mayor treated as its first femicide of the year. Shannon Jean Hickey, 30, was killed in an apartment in the Hull sector before her partner, 34-year-old Tien Quan Vu, took his own life. Court records in Gatineau showed Vu had a documented history of violence, including a guilty plea for causing bodily harm to a woman and for sharing intimate images of a person without consent. The coercive-control and image-abuse provisions now written into law speak directly to the kind of record he carried.
That death was counted as the tenth femicide in Quebec in 2026, a toll reached in barely four months that already surpassed the total for all of 2025. Louise Riendeau of the Regroupement des maisons pour femmes victimes de violence conjugale told La Presse that, of the year's first nine victims, seven had lived in regions where shelters did not have enough beds. In addition, the shelters turn away roughly 3,000 women and children every year for lack of space. The Outaouais now has eight shelters, but the region needs at least two more.
National research shows how unexceptional that pattern is. The Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability, directed by University of Guelph sociologist Myrna Dawson, counted 147 women and girls killed in Canada in 2025, most of them in a private location such as their own homes, and a current or former partner accused in 34 per cent of cases at the time of reporting. The observatory spent nearly a decade pressing Ottawa to write femicide into the Criminal Code.
The longer view sharpens the contrast. Across Quebec, the Montérégie recorded 26 women killed by a partner over the past decade, the worst in the province, while the Outaouais ranked among the lowest, its last prior femicide dating to 2021. Just across the river, Ottawa police reported three femicides in 2024 alone. Worldwide, the United Nations estimated that 137 women and girls were killed every day in 2024 by a partner or family member, roughly one every ten minutes.
The federal and provincial pieces arrived almost together. Bill C-16 amends the federal Criminal Code, so its femicide and coercive-control provisions apply in Gatineau and everywhere else in the country. One week before it received Royal Assent, Quebec's National Assembly passed its own measure, the Gabie Renaud law, adopted June 11 with support from every party. Named for a woman killed in Saint-Jérôme in September 2025 by a partner with a long record of domestic violence, the law lets a person who fears for their safety ask the Sûreté du Québec for information about an intimate partner's history of violence, with requests kept confidential. It is Quebec's version of Britain's Clare's Law, and it speaks to the gap the Hickey case exposed, since Vu's record existed but was not something she would have had a clear way to check. The Sûreté expects roughly 10,000 requests a year.
That leaves the harder question of whether the new tools reach women in time. Benjamin Roebuck, the Federal Ombudsperson for Victims of Crime, welcomed the federal law but cautioned that its real test will be whether the changes are consistently implemented and accessible to victims across the country. The same doubt shadows the provincial law, which still requires regulations, hiring, and training before the first request can be filed. For Gatineau, where Shannon Jean Hickey was killed weeks before either law took shape, that gap between passage and protection is the one that matters most.
Anyone experiencing intimate partner violence can reach SOS violence conjugale at 1-800-363-9010.
Canada has made femicide first-degree murder under Bill C-16, a reform that arrived just weeks after Shannon Jean Hickey, 30, was killed in Gatineau, and days after Quebec passed its own law letting women check a partner's history of violence. Photo: Shannon Jean Hickey's Facebook page