Restraining Order & Peace Bond Statistics Canada [2026]

Only 11% of spousal-violence victims in Canada report a restraining order or peace bond was ever in place against their abuser, according to Statistics Canada’s 2014 General Social Survey. Among stalking victims who had one, 41% say it was violated, per Statistics Canada’s Daily release. This post compiles restraining order and peace bond statistics for Canada: issuance, who obtains them, breach rates, and provincial differences. The abuse research hub covers the wider family-violence data these figures sit inside.

What is a peace bond, and how is it different from a restraining order in Canada

A peace bond is a criminal court order under Section 810 of the Criminal Code, requiring someone to keep the peace for up to 12 months. No guilty plea or finding of guilt is ever registered. A restraining order, by contrast, is a civil order issued under provincial family-law legislation, such as Ontario’s Family Law Act, and is heard in family court rather than criminal court.

Under Section 810 of the Criminal Code, a person who fears being harmed can ask a court to order someone to keep the peace, per the Department of Justice Canada. Ontario’s civil track runs through Section 46 of the Family Law Act, which lets a court restrain someone from contacting an applicant with reasonable grounds to fear for their safety. Breaching a peace bond is itself a new criminal charge under Section 811; breaching a civil restraining order is instead enforced through contempt or provincial-offence mechanisms.

How many peace bonds and restraining orders are issued in Canada

Canada does not centrally publish a national count of peace bonds or restraining orders issued each year. The closest national figures come from victim self-reports collected in Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey on Victimization.

Statistics Canada’s 2014 General Social Survey found 11% of spousal-violence victims reported a restraining or protective order had been enacted against their abuser. That’s little changed from 10% in the 2009 survey cycle. Among stalking victims who contacted police, one in four (25%) said an order had, at some point, been in place, according to Statistics Canada’s Daily release. “Failure to comply with order” was the second most common charge in Canadian adult criminal courts in 2022/23. It accounted for 10.3% of all 215,038 charges (22,152 charges), according to Public Safety Canada.

Who obtains protection orders: victim demographics and relationship to respondent

Whether someone reports obtaining a restraining or protective order tracks closely with gender and injury severity, according to Statistics Canada’s 2014 General Social Survey.

*Statistics Canada flags the men’s figure and the uninjured-victim figure for high sampling variability; use both with that caution attached.

Women were almost four times as likely as men to report an order in place (19% versus 5%), per Statistics Canada’s 2014 profile. Injury severity mattered too: almost a quarter (23%) of physically injured victims obtained an order, compared with 6% of those without an injury, per the same Statistics Canada report.

Peace bond breach and restraining order violation rates

Among stalking victims who had a restraining or protective order in place, just over two in five (41%) told Statistics Canada’s 2014 General Social Survey the order had been violated.

Statistics Canada has not repeated this exact breach-rate cross-tab in a more recent survey cycle. The only other national research on peace bond enforcement, a Department of Justice study, is now more than two decades old.

How restraining orders and peace bonds differ by province

• Federal baseline (all provinces): Peace bonds under Section 810 of the Criminal Code apply the same way across Canada. The 12-month recognizance process is available in every province and territory, regardless of how that province structures its civil restraining-order regime.
• Alberta: Under the Protection Against Family Violence Act, a justice can grant an Emergency Protection Order without notifying the respondent. That option applies when family violence is likely to continue and intervention is urgent. The order lasts up to one year and must be reviewed by the Court of King’s Bench within nine working days.
• Ontario: Ontario has no standalone emergency-protection-order statute. Civil restraining orders run through Section 46 of the Family Law Act, while criminal-track protection runs through the province’s own peace bond process. That splits an Ontario resident’s options across family court, criminal court, and bail conditions, rather than one dedicated regime.

Sentencing and criminal consequences for breaching a court order

Breaching a peace bond is a hybrid offence: prosecutors can pursue it either summarily or by indictment, and the two paths carry very different maximum penalties.

As of July 2015, breaching a peace bond under Section 811 of the Criminal Code carries a maximum sentence of up to 4 years’ imprisonment by indictment. A lesser summary-conviction penalty applies when the Crown proceeds summarily instead.

Administration-of-justice charges include breach of recognizance and failure to comply with a court order. These charges carry a much higher conviction rate than other offences: 76% of those cases ended in a guilty verdict in 2013/14, versus 55% without, per Statistics Canada.

Failure-to-comply cases grew 25% between 2005/06 and 2013/14, and breach-of-probation cases grew 21%. Yet breach-of-probation incidents per capita fell 28% over the same period, according to the same Statistics Canada Juristat report. The gap between rising caseloads and falling incident rates has not been explained in subsequent StatsCan releases.

What these numbers mean for people seeking protection

A Department of Justice Canada study of peace bond enforcement in Halifax, Hamilton, and Winnipeg found that pro-arrest and pro-charge police policies have made Section 810 peace bonds nearly obsolete. The study, per its overall findings, documented this pattern in many domestic-violence situations. Justice-system professionals interviewed for the study said they preferred family-court restraining orders or provincial emergency protection orders instead. Those remedies can take effect immediately, rather than only after a judge hears evidence at a peace bond hearing.

As licensed PIs, we see the gap between paper and enforced protection in client files: an order exists, but proving a breach as it happens is often the harder problem. Domestic violence investigation work documents violations, missed conditions, and contact patterns, so police and family counsel have evidence to act on, not just an unenforced order on file. Reach that work at +1 (888) 680-0036 — Licensed · Insured · Bonded.

Most restraining orders and peace bonds in this data trace back to intimate-partner violence; the domestic abuse statistics page breaks down how often that violence is reported and by whom. Stalking supplied the survey data behind this section’s breach rate; the stalking statistics post adds reporting rates, offender-victim relationships, and criminal-harassment charges. When an order is violated repeatedly, domestic homicide statistics tracks how escalation risk compounds once prior contact or violence has already been documented.