From: Jack
Enman-Beech <jenmanbeech@gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday
16 May 2026 21:32
Cc: obligations@uwo.ca
Subject: Re: A New
Tort of "Intimate Partner Violence" - Ahluwalia v. Ahluwalia, 2026
SCC 16
I'm not convinced by the need for the new tort -- it seems
like the problem of recognizing a pattern, that a number of individual torts
can add up to something more significant than any one of them, could be dealt
with by a procedural innovation allowing damages for, say, assault, to consider
such cumulative effects. It seems also that the Court of Appeal did just that.
And I'm not sure what's at stake in the insistence that the wrong here is not
just one of extent, magnified by accumulation, but one of kind that sounds
as breach of a distinct right. I would not want a new tort such as this to
obscure the seriousness of existing torts.
That said, I'll tend to defer to the others on this list when it comes to torts
and I'm intrigued to see that, so far at least, there has not been push-back.
Certainly innovative even while, as Stéphane notes, consistent with existing
legal and social trends and thus in accordance with the Supreme Court's stated
approach to incremental changes in the law. The Court might have more clearly
identified (at eg para 173) the distinctiveness of family relationships that
must be the basis for isolating the "intimate partner" part of
intimate partner violence, and that could have been, perhaps for the better,
less innovative.
Yours truly &c.,
Jack