She Was 23 Years Old. He Was Out on Bail. The Senate Just Passed the Bill That Came Too Late.
Bill C-14 passed the Senate with amendments its own sponsor opposed and a minister's admission the evidence was thin. Two women are dead. The bail system failed them both.
Jackie Beisel-Cobb didn’t speak to the Senate directly. She didn’t need to. Senator Denise Batters read her words from a committee transcript, slowly, into the chamber record, so they would be there permanently.
“Take a moment and picture your own daughter, sister or friend,” she began. “Picture them walking into that parkade, not knowing that that was going to be the last breath she would ever take.”
Madisson Cobb was 23. She was shot and killed in a parkade on July 19, 2025. The man who shot her had been released on bail one month earlier. He had a restraining order against him. He had an outstanding warrant for his arrest. Police knew he possessed a firearm. He was released anyway.
On May 28, 2026, the Senate passed Bill C-14, the Carney government’s bail and sentencing reform act. The vote came roughly ten months after Madisson died. It came with four Senate committee amendments, three of which the bill’s own Senate sponsor voted against. It came with a justice minister’s acknowledged confession that the government’s evidence base was thin. And it now heads back to the House of Commons, where the government will decide which of those amendments to accept.
Whether any of it would have saved Madisson is a question no one on the Senate floor answered. Nobody tried.
The bill that arrived after the bodies
Madisson Cobb was not the only victim placed into the Senate record that afternoon. Brett Broadfoot’s daughter Breanna was beaten and strangled by her ex-boyfriend. He was arrested and released the same day. Four months later he attacked her again, stabbing her. She died two days later.
Broadfoot told the Legal Committee: “There is no doubt in my mind that Breanna would still be alive if her abuser had not been immediately released after the first attack. Why was he given the freedom to commit a second crime instantly, easily and without prejudice?”
Senator Batters put those words into her third reading speech as a closing argument against a bill she ultimately voted for, while calling it insufficient. That tension is the story of the entire debate: a piece of legislation that most senators believe is better than nothing, in a Parliament that took years to produce it, passing over the explicit objections of the provinces that say it still doesn’t go far enough.
Manitoba’s Attorney General Matt Wiebe told the committee that approximately 82% of arrests in his province involve people already under some form of supervision. Fifty-two women and girls were killed between 2018 and 2025 while a protection order was in place or the accused was out on bail, according to the Office of the Federal Ombudsperson for Victims of Crime. The Violent Crime Severity Index climbed from 70.7 to 99.9 between 2014 and 2024, a 15% jump in the three years from 2020 to 2023 alone.
Those numbers belonged to the sponsor’s speech. Senator Pierre Dalphond, the ISG senator who carried the government’s bill through the Senate, cited them in support of passing it. He also acknowledged, directly, that he had voted against three of the four amendments his own committee adopted.
When the sponsor votes no
The Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee adopted four amendments before sending Bill C-14 back to the floor. Some passed 8 to 7. Others 9 to 6.
Senator Batters asked Dalphond directly whether he had voted against the amendments. He answered without flinching.
“Yes. The results, I have them with me. You asked the question yesterday to Senator Arnot, and he didn’t have the results. Some of these amendments were carried 8 to 7, 9 to 6 and things like that. I have all the results. They were on division, no doubt about that. I was amongst those who voted against.”
The bill passed anyway, carrying amendments the government’s own representative opposed. It will go to the House, and the government will decide which changes survive. Nothing in the Senate floor debate resolved what the House will do. Justice Minister Sean Fraser, who appeared in Question Period the same day, was asked about Senate timelines and responded with something that was not quite a commitment to anything.
Senator Batters had pressed him on whether the government was treating the Legal Committee as a rubber stamp. The committee had just finished Bill C-14, was being pressured through a pre-study of Bill C-25, still had Bill S-6 waiting, and was now being asked to process Bill C-16 inside two weeks.
Fraser’s answer: gratitude.
“Senator Batters, let me express again my gratitude for members of Senate who have been sitting during non-sitting weeks and beyond normal sitting hours to advance the important work not only of the Justice Department but priorities for the government and for Parliament.”
Thanks, but no answer.
“Not great, to be honest”
The most damaging line of the day came from a transcript, not the chamber floor. Senator Kim Pate, an Independent senator from Ontario who delivered a long, methodical speech against the bill at third reading, quoted Fraser’s own words from an earlier Legal Committee appearance.
“The Minister of Justice, when asked by the Legal Committee about this lack of empirical grounding, admitted, ‘...we have some data in Canada, but it’s not great, to be honest.’”
Pate was not the only one raising the evidentiary problem. She read testimony from Dr. Nicole Myers, a criminologist who told the committee: “I encourage you to pursue empirically supported reforms rather than reforms that will make the problems with the bail system worse, increasing rather than remediating risks to public safety.”
She cited Dr. Anthony Doob, who served as chair of the Minister of Public Safety’s own advisory committee on legislative implementation, and who told the committee that unnecessary pretrial detention may actually increase overall crime after people are released. Over 75% of people in provincial and territorial custody in Canada are awaiting trial, not serving a sentence, according to Aboriginal Legal Services data Pate put into the record.
Pate voted against the bill. Her objection was not that bail reform is wrong. It was that this particular bill expands pretrial detention without the evidence to show it works, and that the people most likely to bear the cost are Indigenous people, people with mental illness, and those who are poor. Fifty percent of women in federal prisons are now Indigenous, up from 35% in 2015.
Batters and Pate landed in opposite corners. Both positions are now in the Senate record, together, permanently appended to the bill they were debating.
What Dalphond and Batters agree on
There is a version of Canadian politics in which a Conservative senator and a government-aligned Independent senator have nothing in common. This was not that day.
Both Batters and Dalphond cited the same crime data. Both acknowledged the bail system has failed victims. Both voted for the bill. Their disagreement was about degree: Batters wanted more, Pate wanted less, Dalphond called the bill a meaningful step forward.
Batters catalogued the decade’s criminal justice record: violent crimes up 55% since 2015, firearm crime up 130%, extortion up 330%, sexual assaults up 76%, homicides up 29%. She placed these alongside Liberal Bills C-5 and C-75, framing them as the legislative origin of the crime surge. Dalphond disagreed, noting that Bill C-75 made it harder, not easier, to grant bail to intimate partner violence offenders, and that Bill C-5 specifically excluded house arrest for serious crimes. Both framings are now in the Senate record. Neither is footnoted with a neutral verdict.
Fraser took the same position in Question Period: C-75 and C-5 were not the problem. That is a direct contradiction of the Conservative critique, entered into the Senate record on the same afternoon the bill passed.
Fraser’s afternoon in the Senate
The justice minister visited for what may be the most packed Question Period of the spring sitting. Senators raised C-14, C-9, C-16, C-22, extortion, HIV non-disclosure, the Black Justice Strategy, outsourced legal services, MAID, and Senate timelines, more or less in sequence.
On extortion: Senator Housakos cited Peel Regional Police charging 17 non-citizens linked to an international extortion ring in the week before QP, one of them reportedly wanted for murder abroad. He challenged Fraser on “safety valve” provisions in Bill C-16 that allow judges to sidestep mandatory minimum sentences. Fraser responded by noting that the Conservative public safety critic, MP Frank Caputo, had himself supported the safety valve in the House, publicly dividing the opposition’s own caucus.
On the Department of Justice outsourcing file: Senator Michael MacDonald cited Hill Times analysis showing that outside legal spending more than doubled since 2015, reaching $36 million this year alone, more than $237 million over the decade, with over 1,000 funded in-house positions sitting vacant. Fraser defended it as appropriate use of specialized expertise. MacDonald’s question and Fraser’s non-answer are both on the record.
On HIV non-disclosure: Senator Cormier raised Manitoba’s active public health emergency and pressed Fraser on why people with undetectable viral loads, who cannot transmit the virus, continue to face criminal prosecution. Fraser told him he’d been looking personally into the options.
“I don’t have a date yet, but I believe we will have the opportunity to advance this discussion very soon.”
No timeline. No commitment. A parliamentary record that now includes a minister confirming a problem he cannot yet fix.
The amendments heading to the House
Four changes emerged from the Senate committee. The government’s own sponsor opposed three of them. What they contain specifically was not detailed on the floor by any senator in the extracts available, but the record shows they passed on division, some by a single vote.
The House will now decide. The government can accept, reject, or propose alternatives to each Senate amendment. Nothing in the floor debate suggested the government’s position on any of them. Fraser did not address the amendments during QP.
What is certain: the bill that cleared the Senate on May 28 is not the same bill the government introduced. The Senate, working under pressure and truncated timelines, used what tools it had.
What the record shows
Madisson Cobb’s mother asked the Senate to picture a daughter. Brett Broadfoot asked why his daughter’s killer was given the freedom to try again. Both of those questions are permanent entries in Canada’s parliamentary record now, attached to a law.
Whether the law would have changed anything for them is the question nobody answered. The Senate passed the bill, and sent it back with changes the sponsor opposed, built on data the minister called “not great,” debated by senators who cited dead women and competing criminologists and Statistics Canada numbers while a minister gave thanks instead of answers.
The record is complete. What happens next is the government’s problem.
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Source Documents
Senate of Canada. (2026, May 28). Debates of the Senate, 45th Parliament, 1st Session, No. 76. Parliament of Canada.
Senate of Canada. (2026, May 27). Debates of the Senate, 45th Parliament, 1st Session, No. 75. Parliament of Canada.
Senate of Canada. (2026, May 26). Debates of the Senate, 45th Parliament, 1st Session, No. 74. Parliament of Canada.
Violence against women. How does the law keep up with the rapid increase of intimate partner violence? How do our education systems address this systemically? Quebec now has a boys and men education policy. "Pate voted against the bill. Her objection was not that bail reform is wrong. It was that this particular bill expands pretrial detention without the evidence to show it works, and that the people most likely to bear the cost are Indigenous people, people with mental illness, and those who are poor. Fifty percent of women in federal prisons are now Indigenous, up from 35% in 2015."
Thank you for this essay. C-14 does not address a major component of the bail problem which is that the provinces are failing to support the justice system. The Federal government makes the justice system laws, the Provinces implement them. To implement them they need crown attorneys, Judges, court space, court support staff, and jail space to hold the accused. If cases cannot be processed in time they are going to be withdrawn, if there is no space in jails, then the accused are going to be released on "own recognizance" or "undertakings". Ontario has been bragging about increasing jail space lately and other fixes to keep the accused (NOT criminals, they haven't been convicted yet) off the streets, which is about time for something to be done about this issue, and about time for Doug Ford to something right for the citizens of this province rather than for his developer buddies.