On a late summer morning inside Province House in Halifax, Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston tells reporters there’s no point in declaring intimate partner violence an epidemic because his government is already working to address the problem. “I don’t think the legislation would change any actions of government,” he said.
Less than an hour later, following an “extraordinary reversal” by the premier, Nova Scotia’s legislative assembly unanimously supported a private member’s bill from NDP leader Claudia Chender calling on the provincial government to declare intimate partner violence an epidemic. MLAs then fast-tracked it through the legislative process and, eight days later, Nova Scotia’s Intimate Partner Violence Epidemic Act became law.
“Once in a while we have a shooting star, these moments [when we] come together that force the government into doing the right thing,” Chender recalls of that day, September 12, 2024.
After overhearing the premier’s remarks about the futility of declaring the epidemic in law, a few women labour organizers confronted Houston in the halls outside the legislature.
“We stopped [Premier Houston] as he was walking out the door and said, ‘No. We’re not pleased with your announcement. We’re not pleased with the work that you’re doing. It’s not enough, and these are the reasons why.’”
“We stopped him as he was walking out the door and said, ‘No. We’re not pleased with your announcement. We’re not pleased with the work that you’re doing. It’s not enough, and these are the reasons why,’” recalls Unifor Atlantic Regional Director Jennifer Murray, one of the women involved in the exchange that morning.
“And literally, he walked away,” Murray continues. “We took a few minutes to gather our thoughts, met with some others to push this in the right direction, and as we were leaving, he caught up to us and said, ‘Okay, you know, let’s talk about this some more. Let’s pass this into legislation today.’
“And that was that.”
Convincing Nova Scotia’s Progressive Conservative government to be Canada’s first province to declare intimate partner violence an epidemic was no small victory.
Less than a year later, in June 2025, Nova Scotia’s Intimate Partner Violence Epidemic Act inspired New Brunswick Progressive Conservative MLA Tammy Scott-Wallace to bring forth a motion calling on her province’s legislature to declare gender-based violence an epidemic.
“Nova Scotia was among the first to respond. We commend Nova Scotia,” Scott-Wallace said in the legislature on June 5, 2025, the same day her motion received unanimous support. “Today, we stand here proudly as New Brunswick joins Nova Scotia. Our province is now part of this national movement, one that clearly says: We will not stand by. We will act.”
Last May, Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Tony Wakeham also declared gender-based violence an epidemic to “demonstrate the severity of this persistent, growing threat – one that affects far too many people throughout our province,” he said.
While Newfoundland and Labrador and New Brunswick have declared gender-based violence an epidemic, Nova Scotia’s declaration zeroed in on intimate partner violence — a form of gender-based violence.
Intimate partner violence – also known as “domestic” violence – is “a pattern of behavior in any relationship that is used to gain or maintain power and control over an intimate partner,” according to the United Nations. It can manifest in “physical, sexual, emotional, economic or psychological actions or threats of actions that influence another person,” including “behaviors that frighten, intimidate, terrorize, manipulate, hurt, humiliate, blame, injure, or wound someone.”
Courtney Clarke, executive director of the St. John’s Status of Women Council, says provinces declaring epidemics of gender-based violence are using a “wider lens [to] acknowledge that violence affects many different groups and can take many different forms. So it’s not just intimate partner violence, it’s sexual violence, elder violence, family violence, cultural violence, and other forms of gender-based harm.”
“By adopting a broader framework, we’re better positioned to really address the full spectrum of gender-based violence and the systemic factors that contribute to it, which often go back to poverty reduction measures.”
Clarke says it’s important that governments understand the “intersecting and overlapping natures of violence,” because “individuals who experience one form of violence are often impacted by others, around the factors of age, gender, disability, socioeconomic status, race, geographic location.
“It all kind of compounds vulnerability,” she adds. “So by adopting a broader framework, we’re better positioned to really address the full spectrum of gender-based violence and the systemic factors that contribute to it, which often go back to poverty reduction measures.”
Seen as part of a decades-long grassroots, women-led feminist movement, however, the declarations mark a significant milestone in the fight for gender equality — one that some believe will finally move governments to respond as they would to other epidemics.
Trudeau’s national action plan to end gender-based violence
The Canadian government defines gender-based violence as “violence based on gender norms and unequal power dynamics, perpetrated against someone based on their gender, gender expression, gender identity, or perceived gender.”
While anyone can be a victim of IPV and gender-based violence, women, girls and gender-diverse individuals are disproportionately impacted, with men as the most common perpetrators of violence.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that globally, in 2023, roughly one-quarter of women and girls between 15-49 who are married or partnered have experienced intimate partner violence. In North America, the WHO puts that number at more than 29 per cent.
In 2025, 49 per cent of women in Canada between 25 and 34 years of age reported having been sexually assaulted in their lifetime, while more than half of Indigenous women in the same age bracket reported having been sexually or physically assaulted. According to Canada’s 2025 Survey of Safety in Public and Private Spaces, violence is also more frequently experienced by queer people and those living with a disability.
The federal government also notes gender-based violence disproportionately impacts women who are Black, racialized, immigrants or refugees, or living in rural and remote northern communities.
In 2008, a United Nations campaign to end violence against women set five goals for governments to achieve by 2015, including the adoption of “adequately resourced” national plans of action. Feminist organizers in Canada began pressuring the Canadian government to answer the call.
In 1995, Canada ranked number one in the world on the UN’s Gender Inequality Index. By 2015, it had fallen to 25th place.
In 2017, the Justin Trudeau government launched It’s Time: Canada’s Strategy to Prevent and Address Gender-Based Violence, a five-year plan with a $100-million investment for federal programs aligned with the strategy’s three pillars: prevention, supporting survivors and their families, and promoting responsive legal and justice system responses.
The plan was criticized for its lack of coherency and consistency around funding and performance tracking. It was also just a precursor to the eventual national action plan, which would involve agreements with provincial and territorial governments on how to achieve mutual goals.
The pandemic hit in early 2020, grinding the economy to a halt and upending daily life for Canadians. Then, on April 18, 2020, after assaulting his common-law partner, a wealthy middle-aged white man went on a shooting rampage in rural Nova Scotia, killing 22 people over a 12-hour period in Canada’s most lethal mass shooting.
Canada and Nova Scotia established the Mass Casualty Commission to determine what happened and to make recommendations that could help prevent similar incidents in the future. In its March 2023 report the commission offered 130 recommendations, including that all levels of government “declare gender-based, intimate partner, and family violence to be an epidemic that warrants a meaningful and sustained society-wide response.”
In December 2020 Women and Gender Equality Canada (WAGE) commissioned Women’s Shelters Canada to engage anti-violence leaders across the country and produce a “roadmap” for the development of the national action plan. The ensuing 400-page Report to Guide the Implementation of a National Action Plan on Violence Against Women and Gender-Based Violence likely represents the most comprehensive collection of data, perspectives and recommendations to confront gender-based violence in this country.
The following year, in 2022, the federal government launched its National Action Plan to End Gender-Based Violence, a 10-year plan with an initial $539-million investment to work with provincial and territorial governments toward “a Canada free from gender-based violence.”
In 2024 Canada signed bilateral agreements with all 13 provinces and territories to outline how the money would be spent. Funding was delivered on the condition that investments must correspond with the national action plan’s five pillars: enhancing support for survivors and their families; improving prevention measures; cultivating a more responsive justice system; implementing Indigenous-led approaches; and developing social infrastructure and enabling environments.
Last month, as federal and provincial ministers responsible for the Status of Women gathered in Moncton for their annual forum, federal Minister of Women and Gender Equality Rechie Valdez announced a new $607-million four-year investment, beginning in 2027-2028, “to continue the implementation” of the national action plan.
But all of this is happening amid growing inequality, rising costs of living and rates of poverty, and rapidly changing social and political conditions in which rates of violence appear to be increasing.
Government action in an age of austerity
Observers have long pointed to the rise of austerity and neoliberalism in Canadian policy-making in recent decades as major factors in the ongoing marginalization of women and gender-diverse people.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, the World Health Organization warned of a “shadow pandemic” women were facing because many were forced to stay at home, “compounding perpetrators’ use of mechanisms of power and control to isolate victims of [violence],” UN-Women Regional Director for the Americas and the Caribbean María-Noel Vaeza said at the time.
The Mass Casualty Commission found that the Nova Scotia mass shooter was “deeply affected” by the pandemic, and that his businesses “had been required to close as part of the public health measures that were then in place.” On the first day of the perpetrator’s rampage, he violently assaulted his partner, leaving her with serious injuries.
“The pattern of escalation from gender-based violence to mass casualties is well established,” the commission noted, adding “the first step in prevention is in recognizing the danger of escalation inherent in all forms of violence.
“As Commissioners, we believe this lesson to be the single most important one to be learned from this mass casualty. Let us not look away again.”
Even as Nova Scotia ramped up its response to gender-based violence, tragedies continued rocking the province. Weeks after the government formally declared the epidemic, six women in the province were killed by their male partners over a three-month period.
Recent data from the RCMP reveals a growing number of police-reported incidents of intimate partner violence across the province since 2021. Of 15,153 reported incidents between 2021 and 2015, just 1,054 led to charges being laid or recommended.
But police-reported incidents of intimate partner violence represent only a small fraction of the abuse happening across Canada. The federal government estimates that in 2019, 80 per cent of people who experienced intimate partner violence did not report it to police.
Government officials in New Brunswick reported a 39 per cent increase in incidents of abuse over the past 12 years, leaving the province with the third-highest rate of intimate partner violence in Canada – behind Saskatchewan and Manitoba – and the highest rate in Atlantic Canada..
Four years into Canada’s National Action Plan to End Gender-based Violence, how are the provinces that declared epidemics faring?
It starts in Nova Scotia
Nova Scotia’s Intimate Partner Violence Epidemic Act received royal assent in the fall of 2024. In June 2025 the provincial government established an “engagement table” of frontline service providers, community groups, survivors, family members and researchers, who are meeting several times each year to discuss policy and legislative reform.
The group has met three times so far, with another meeting scheduled in September. Ideas are being shared, but it’s unclear whether the provincial government’s engagement with experts and advocates is having a tangible impact.
Last year, in response to requests from advocates, the Nova Scotia RCMP began publicly naming intimate partner violence as a factor in death investigations. In 2025, the provincial government also added two additional days of paid leave for workers experiencing domestic violence to “help employees seek the support they need without the added concern of lost income,” Nolan Young, the province’s minister of Labour, Skills and Immigration, said at the time.
But Nova Scotia has also attributed its reforms to recommendations from the 2019 National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls final report, and to the province’s Mass Casualty Commission report.
“When it comes to gender-based violence and intimate partner violence, folks get stuck in those relationships because of wider systemic failures, whether that be poverty, housing instability, or other systemic barriers.”
In report after report, provinces and territories are facing renewed and growing pressure to, in the Mass Casualty Commission’s words, allocate “epidemic-level funding” for gender-based violence prevention.
In Newfoundland and Labrador, the PCs established a task force to guide the province’s Office of Women and Gender Equality in “conducting research, analysis and interdepartmental coordination or support”. The task force, comprised of six government officials and six advocates and people with lived experience, will also lead engagement and consultations toward recommendations for government.
It’s not the first time a provincial government in that province has engaged community members on gender-based violence. In St. John’s, Clarke was part of former Liberal Premier Andrew Furey’s “Premier’s Roundtable on Gender Equity,” which convened government officials, experts and advocates annually from 2020 to 2023.
“We shared our perspectives, our ideas, what we were seeing on the ground,” Clarke recalls, explaining there were around “100 or more of us in the room at randomized tables.
“And we never knew what happened with that information afterwards. So a lot of folks were pretty frustrated by that,” she continues. “We were taking several days out of our difficult work to come to the city to have these conversations – and to not see any action, just to be asked to show up again.”
This time, Clarke says the PC government’s task force is “more action-oriented” compared to the previous government’s roundtable, which she describes as “more conversation-oriented.”
At Unifor, where labour leaders and workers are continuing their campaign to have all provinces and territories declare IPV an epidemic, Murray is also optimistic the developments in the Atlantic regions will lead to meaningful change. But she wants to see labour represented in the engagement and consultation process.
“You can’t have complete, rounded outcomes when you’re missing a very big piece of the puzzle,” she says. “So we are trying to make sure that workers’ voices are at these tables so that they can share their experience and they can share what their needs are in the workplace itself.”
Clarke says organizations supporting women, girls and gender-diverse people experiencing gender-based violence in Newfoundland and Labrador have two distinct but equally urgent needs – the first being better and more stable funding.
“We have to apply for our core funding every single year, whereas it would be far more impactful to have three-to-five-year core funding commitments from the government,” she says. “Having to apply for funding year after year just creates uncertainty that can lead to more annual pauses in our services, and in some cases temporary layoffs. And that really makes it difficult to engage in more meaningful long-term planning.
“Many organizations have ambitious ideas, innovative solutions that can create more lasting change,” Clarke continues. “But when organizations only know what resources they have for the next 12 months, it becomes way too risky to launch a new program or to expand an existing one because […] without confidence that the funding’s going to continue, there’s concerns that that program can’t be sustained or scaled or even given enough time to demonstrate full impact.
“So as a result, organizations are often forced to prioritize shorter-term, more limited reactive initiatives [instead of] being able to invest in real transformative, proactive, longer-term solutions,” she says.
The other greatest need?
“When it comes to gender-based violence and intimate partner violence, folks get stuck in those relationships because of wider systemic failures, whether that be poverty, housing instability, or other systemic barriers,” Clarke says, explaining that any serious efforts at prevention must address major contributing factors.
“We need more focus on housing, on food support, on all of these types of measures that allow people to have the independence to leave vulnerable situations,” she says. “We can provide all the free counseling and support groups and systems navigation in the world, but if they can’t afford to get out of those situations – or if there’s no housing available – we’re just helping them get through the day.
“We can’t give them houses. We can’t give them income support. That is something that the government has to do. And by having those priorities, it’s going to therefore impact the ways in which gender-based violence can be addressed.”
Murray says that, if nothing else, the declarations in Newfoundland and Labrador and the Maritimes are proof that governments are waking up to the public desire for transformative change when it comes to gender equality.
“I think that government has to understand one thing: nobody is going to allow this to fizzle out. This is not symbolic. This means a lot to anyone who needs to know that their government and others are fighting for them, whether they’re living with a tremendous amount of courage in a violent situation, or whether they’re a survivor,” she says.
“We are going to continue this advocacy, this campaign, because I don’t know if the campaign can ever really end. We think that we can stop [IPV], but the only way to do it is for us to confront it together. And we have to keep pushing, and we have to keep recognizing the epidemic that we’re in and the scale that these numbers are at.”
