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By LegalMatters Staff • A bill has been sent to the Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs that would repeal s.43 of the Criminal Code, which allows the spanking of children.
That section reads: “Every school teacher, parent or person standing in the place of a parent is justified in using force by way of correction toward a pupil or child, as the case may be, who is under his care if the force does not exceed what is reasonable under the circumstances.”
This passage has been amended 21 times since being drafted in 1892. At that point it allowed husbands to use reasonable force to “correct” a wife.
While she is generally not in favour of spanking, Ottawa criminal lawyer Céline Dostaler says she does not believe that changing the law will make much of a difference.
“In a perfect world, Section 43 as it now stands would only be used as a defence in cases where it could be shown that the force was applied in a trifling manner and not delivered in anger,” Dostaler says.“
That means that if a parent slaps or punches a 10-year-old for talking back to them, they will have no protection under the Code. As the Supreme Court of Canada has stated, the punishment has to be reasonable in the circumstances and minimal,” she adds.
The calls to ban corporal punishment are coming from many corners. In 2015, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged to implement the 94 recommendations made by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, one of which was to abolish s.43.
At least 65 countries have abolished all physical punishment of children. And a meta-analysis published in 2018 from the National Library of Medicine reviewed five decades of research. It concluded that corporal punishment was “associated with increased aggressive and antisocial behaviour like bullying and was linked to the same harms as physical abuse.”
“As the law now stands, you can only physically discipline a child if they are old enough to understand what actions they are being punished for,” says Dostaler. “There needs to be cognitive knowledge on behalf of a child of what they did that resulted in this punishment.”
