Planned Legal review required
Rights & pathways
We are not going to publish a summary of your legal rights until a lawyer in the relevant jurisdiction has reviewed it and we can put their name and a review date on the page.
Why we are being slow about this
Rights information is the easiest thing on a site like this to get wrong and the most damaging thing to get wrong. It varies by province and territory, it changes, and a survivor who acts on an out-of-date summary may lose an option that was actually open to them.
So this page will carry, for every statement: the jurisdiction it applies to, the official source, the date it was last reviewed, and who reviewed it. Until it can, it stays empty.
What we will cover
- An overview of victim rights in Canada, labelled federal or provincial as appropriate.
- What actually happens when a report is made to police, step by step, with realistic timelines.
- How to request your own records from institutions, and what to expect.
- Complaints and oversight routes when a service responds badly.
- Where the line between legal information and legal advice sits, and why we stay on one side of it.
Meanwhile, Cybertip.ca's duty-to-report guide, run by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, sets out reporting duties province by province and territory by territory, including what is known about reporter anonymity.