For many years, the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board (CICB) had a clear mission: to provide compensation in a compassionate manner to those who have identified themselves as victims of violent crimes. This adjudicative tribunal system required applicants to provide details of the crime(s), the resulting injuries, and the lasting impacts on the person within two years of the incident(s). In cases of injuries sustained as a result of sexual assault and domestic violence, victims could apply for financial compensation when they were ready, facing no limitation period.
Generally, if there was sufficient evidence to corroborate the claim, the documents used to complete the application would be assessed to determine the amount of compensation. If not, a hearing would be scheduled, and an adjudicator would hear testimony from the applicant and determine the award. Through this process, individuals were able to receive compensation of up to $25,000 to cover therapy, lost wages, medical bills, funeral expenses, and intangible costs for pain and suffering.
On May 29, 2019, the Ontario government made amendments to the Compensation for Victims of Crime Act in an attempt to decrease the province’s spending. These changes allowed the CICB to award a maximum lump sum payment of $30,000, which was a $5000 boost to the existing award amount. However, this increase came at a cost: the maximum award for pain and suffering is now capped at $5000. Although the increase to the maximum lump sum payment appeared to be a step forward, the pain and suffering category accounted for 95 percent of the Board’s payments last year, which totaled almost $33 million in compensation, according to the Social Justice Tribunal’s annual budget report. Thus, the cap will dramatically decrease the compensation awarded to victims of violent crimes.
More specifically, the cap aimed to restrict the Board’s consideration to tangible expenses. For instance, these expenses are ones that could be proven with “a receipt” such as lost wages, ambulance bills or counselling services. Regrettably, this disadvantaged many vulnerable groups, most prominently survivors of sexual assault and/or domestic violence. In many of these cases, pain and suffering is the primary injury sustained, and oftentimes there is no paper trail. Individuals in abusive intimate partner relationships, for example, are unlikely to call an ambulance or seek medical attention after experiencing violence. This is likely because they fear what might happen if this abuse becomes public knowledge. Therefore, individuals in these types of situations are less likely to have “receipts” to substantiate their claim.
Unfortunately, the winds of drastic change did not stop there. To make matters worse, on September 6, 2019, the Government of Ontario announced its plan to completely replace the CICB with an upgraded version of the Victims Quick Response Program (VQRP), cleverly dubbed as the “Victim’s Quick Response Program Plus (VQRP+)”. As of October 1, 2019, the adjudicative tribunal system as we know it will cease to exist, and victims of violent crimes will be forced to contend with a new one-window access system to seek compensation for the cost of emergency and essential expenses, funerals and counselling costs.
By now, you are probably thinking that the new system sounds familiar enough, so what are the changes? In a big-picture way, the VQRP+ assistance program resembles the CICB in that it remains a compensatory scheme to provide various financial supports to victims. However, it also comes with an added package of restrictions that limit the ability of support services to respond effectively to the unique needs of victims of crime.
That being said, let’s get into the nuts and bolts. At first glance, eligibility for the new VRQP+ program seems straightforward. In order to qualify for assistance, a person must be a victim of a Criminal Code offence that has occurred in Ontario, has not been charged as a result of the crime, and has no other financial resources to assist with funeral, emergency, crime scene cleanup and counselling expenses. There is a fundamental catch, however. Unlike the CICB, the VRQP+ program requires the victim to apply for compensation for emergency, crime scene cleanup and/or funeral expenses no later than 45 days after the date of the crime, and in case of counselling services and/or transportation costs, within 90 days of the date of the crime.
For all its talk of enhancing better support for victims, such strict limitation periods under the new program fail to grasp the realities facing vulnerable victims within days of a crime. This requirement introduces unreasonable expectations for victims of violent crimes to be in the right state of mind to think about applying for compensation. In the immediate aftermath of a crime, the focus needs to be on providing victims time to come to terms with the impacts of the difficult and traumatic experience. By not being more in tune with this necessary breathing room to reflect and cope with their injuries, the VRQP+ fails to directly address the real needs of victims.
The overbearing barrier to access to justice is even more apparent when one learns about how to apply for VRQP+. Not only does the victim have to meet the stringent eligibility criteria, but they also face an additional pressure of having to report the violent incident to the police within the required timeframe. There is a minor exception to this, as a small degree of flexibility is afforded specifically to victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, human trafficking and hate crimes to report the incident to other agencies providing services to victims in Ontario (i.e. shelters, hospitals, sexual violence centers). Under the existing CICB model, there was no such mandatory requirement, the idea being that reporting the incident to the police and starting a criminal proceeding was treated as a separate and alternate avenue available to the victim. In important ways, the decision to apply for compensation in the first place has come to symbolize the start of a healing process for victims. If victims are required to report the crime to the police in the immediate aftermath, this deprives them of the opportunity to embark upon a sense of closure on their own terms.
In a statement released on September 6, 2019, the Ministry of the Attorney General commended the “Government of Ontario’s commitment to investing in programs that support victims of crime,” but really, there is no “investing” here. The creation of the VQRP+ was yet another way for the province to cut back on spending, while maintaining the illusion that it provides victims with support. However, upon closer inspection, the changes benefit the government more than the victims. For example, the CICB application considered any wages lost as a result of the crime. Whether this is due to hospitalization, or because of a loved one’s involvement in a victim’s funeral and burial arrangements, the CICB compensated for time away from work. The VQRP+, on the other hand, does not extend the same courtesy. Unless an executive decision was made to re-define the word “invest” to mean “take money away”, there is no investing here. An investment necessarily implies some form of return, or some positive result. In this case, however, there will be no positive result since these changes will only decrease the level of support provided to victims.