‘Barbaric—a shelter bed determines whether a woman lives’: Will the next government confront an epidemic of gender-based violence?

The photo showed a mother and her children smiling in front of a fridge stocked with food. 

It came to Andrine Johnson in a text message from a client of her organization, Embrave. The family members were the beneficiaries of a new program launched by the agency that helps women escape gender-based violence. 

“She sent that with a thank-you to Embrave, ‘that my fridge has food,’” Johnson recalls with a smile. “How does that not touch you?”

Stories and photos like these are the lanterns Johnson and other service providers use to guide them through a sector cloaked in the dark realities of abuse. Women are able to flee those who exploit, physically harm and emotionally torture them, in part because of the support these social service providers offer to people during the worst time in their life.

Unfortunately, far too many are forced to remain in these predatory relationships because a lack of investment in these critical programs leaves women across Peel, and the rest of Canada without a safe haven, stuck in dangerous situations with no place to go.

In Peel, complex dynamics tied to cultural stigma and deeply embedded misogyny across the region’s diverse communities, make it even more difficult for stakeholders to reach those in vulnerable situations.  

As the number of people seeking aid has increased and their needs have diversified—requiring more than just shelter, but help with food, mental health and addiction support and immigration-related issues—agencies like Embrave are being forced to make impossible decisions. Its staff try not to think about the consequences. 

“Last year, we had two women who lost their lives in Peel within the span of one month,” Johnson says. “I don’t know if those women reached out to Embrave, and I didn’t have a bed space.” 

Between November 2023 and November 2024, 62 women in Ontario lost their life to intimate partner violence, according to monthly femicide counts from the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses. So far in 2025, nine women have been murdered by an intimate partner. 

Among them was a 42-year-old woman in Brampton who was stabbed to death by her partner in March, her anonymity maintained at the request of her family. Her death marked the first femicide to take place in Peel this year. 

Responding to the devastating news, a statement from the Peel Committee Against Women Abuse revealed there are no emergency beds available for survivors to access immediate support in the region right now, with the limited number of intimate partner violence shelters across Peel at capacity. It’s a chronic issue. 

“Our collective response to gender-based violence is inadequate as a community if there is not an emergency shelter bed available 24/7 in Peel Region. These survivors are in emergency situations, there is no such thing as a waitlist in this case. They need immediate safety and the impact of not having that can be as severe as femicide,” Rebecca Pacheco, a PCAWA coordinator, said. 

Between 2015 and 2020, the number of domestic violence calls increased by 74 percent and between 2016 and 2021, there was a 3.5 percent increase in the rate of intimate partner disputes documented. In recent years, Peel Police have reported the highest number of citizen-initiated calls that come into the force are related to family and intimate partner violence, with the service responding to just over 16,000 incidents of family and intimate partner violence in 2023 (the latest data available). This translates to 44 disputes every day or almost two every hour, and those are only the reported incidents. Experts believe, according to research, this number is a drastic underrepresentation of the actual extent of the problem. 

According to data on the federal government’s website, in 2019, 80 percent of people who had experienced intimate partner violence did not report it to the police and in 34 percent of cases, people who have experienced these forms of violence do not speak to anyone about their experience.

Despite the urgent, life-or-death need for these services, it was announced last month that Brampton’s only sexual assault and rape crisis centre, Revive, could be forced to close due to a $300,000 funding shortfall. Revive’s CEO Aretha McCarthy told council that if the centre shuts down its closure would signal a significant failure of Peel's response to gender-based violence. It would create a gap for survivors who are already struggling to access timely support. 

Data published by the Peel Committee Against Women Abuse showed that between 2022 and 2023, there was a 71 percent increase (8,144 to 13,933) in survivors accessing shelter programs, up dramatically from the 27 percent increase reported the year before.

The centre was asked by The Pointer if they received a response yet from the City of Brampton for the funding request and to confirm if the organization is still operating in the interim, but did not respond ahead of publication.

(Alexis Wright/The Pointer files/Peel Regional Police data)

“Right now as a service provider I have to step outside of that CEO hat and continue to be human,” Johnson said. 

She has been studying her agency’s shelter capacity closely. Embrave operates two emergency facilities in Peel along with a 24-hour crisis line and community support programs, including the food security initiative Hampers for Hope. She is trying to free up space to squeeze in eight additional beds into her shelters. 

“I think it's certainly barbaric,” she says. “The fact that a bed determines whether or not a person lives. It’s very heart wrenching.”

Government funding for emergency shelters is not the only area of this critical sector that remains underfunded. The increasing, troubling overlap of gender-based violence with other pressures Canadians are struggling with has left providers scrambling for additional funding just to stay within reach of those at the precipice of falling into the widening cracks. 

“People do come in with many different intersectionalities. It’s not just they’re coming in as a survivor of human trafficking, but also have precarious immigration status, or are unemployed, children, addiction, mental health concerns, food insecurity,” Johnson explains. “As a service provider you look to the government to say, ‘Hey, here’s a human being, and here’s the multiple needs of this person, how can we help?’...Can we do more as an organization? Absolutely. But we don’t have the funding.”

Data from the Region’s 2024 Point in Time Count found 40 percent of individuals experiencing homelessness were women, a 12 percent increase from 2021, and 27 percent of women specifically identified conflict or abuse at the hands of a partner as the primary reason, highlighting how victims and survivors of intimate partner violence in Peel are increasingly being forced to choose between leaving their abuser and having a roof over their head. 

Andrine Johnson, CEO of Embrave, says politicians need to educate themselves on the struggles of those in the communities they are supposed to represent.

(Embrave) 

In response to the growing numbers, Brampton, Mississauga and the Region of Peel have all declared intimate partner violence an epidemic, but the Province has failed to follow suit, despite the declaration being at the top of the list of 86 recommendations made in a 2022 Coroner’s Inquest into the murder of three women in Renfrew County. Though the move is viewed as more of a performative measure than a tangible action, advocates have said it is a first step in starting important conversations to raise awareness. 

Canada’s National Action Plan to address gender-based violence, launched in 2022, promised $539 million over its first five years. But advocacy groups across the country have said it is not nearly enough to adequately combat the rapidly widening problem. It is only a fraction of the estimated $9 billion that sexual assault and intimate partner violence costs the Canadian economy annually. 

Intimate partner violence puts a severe financial burden on the health, social, and justice systems. In 2009, it was estimated that these forms of violence had an annual economic cost of $7.4 billion and that sexual violence had an annual cost of $4.8 billion, according to reports from the federal government. That does not take into account inflation over the last decade-and-a-half. 

The Mass Casualty Commission Report, written after the 2020 mass murder in Nova Scotia when a gunman killed 22 people, including an attack on his intimate partner, emphasized the need for “epidemic-level funding for gender-based violence prevention and interventions.” 

The Commissioners stressed: “it is critically important that Canadians address the root causes of violence…those who perpetrate mass casualties often have unaddressed histories of gender-based, intimate partner, or family violence – which means that tackling those forms of violence must be an urgent priority.”

The current level of short-term, project-based funding has been labelled as “shameful” and “embarrassing” by prominent advocacy groups, with advocates explaining it prevents organizations from establishing effective, long-term solutions for addressing the root causes of violence against women. 

Despite the repeated need for urgent action, including from the 2019 Calls for Justice in the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, which outlined how violence against Indigenous women and girls is four times higher than it is for non-Indigenous women, there has been no system-wide effort by the federal government to increase funding. 

Voters looking for such commitments from party leaders in the current federal campaign will come up empty handed. 

Mark Carney’s Liberals have pledged to strengthen the Criminal Code and make bail laws stricter for violent and organized crime, particularly for repeat offenders. Carney says the Liberals will “crack down” on sexual and intimate partner violence by making hate-motivated murders including femicide, a constructive-first degree murder offence; raise the penalty for the distribution of intimate images without consent; and make it a criminal offence to distribute non-consensual sexual deepfakes. The Liberals also promise to automatically revoke gun licenses for individuals convicted of violent offences—with a specific reference in their platform to individuals convicted of intimate partner violence offences—and recruit 1,000 more RCMP personnel to “tackle” drug and human trafficking, which overwhelmingly victimizes women, particularly young women and girls. 

Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre says intimate partner violence has been exacerbated by “soft-on-crime, catch-and-release laws” that allow offenders back into the community. He promises to create a new offence of “assault of an intimate partner” to deliver tougher sentences. The Conservatives will require strict bail conditions for anyone accused of intimate partner violence, including GPS ankle bracelet monitoring.

Both Poilievre and Carney have centred their approach on addressing gender-based violence around reactive measures, rather than making investments that address the root cause of the violence so these crimes do not happen. Service providers have said while there needs to be punitive measures when a crime does occur, investments into upstream measures have to be the central strategy.

Johnson acknowledges that tough sentencing for offenders is necessary in certain situations, but only focusing on the punishment side will do nothing to help end the cycle of violence that more and more women get trapped in. 

“The heart of the issue is we need to educate people,” she says. “Change can’t happen without education.”

That education must reach the elected officials who make decisions about how tax dollars are used for a critical social issue that many have no direct experience with. Johnson believes the solution to the lack of funding, the absent political will, rests in getting politicians into the field and exposing them to the realities on the ground. 

“When it comes to that disconnect between the social service, the shelter sector and the government there’s a bit of de-sensitivity from the government. Not because they don’t see us as being human, but when you look at this line of work, if you don’t have the frontline experience and exposure, you just assume,” she says. “I want people to come in and see exactly what is happening on the ground. How are we providing the support? How are we breaking the glass ceiling and preventing this revolving cycle from continuing to occur.”

It remains unclear what those local candidates hoping to sit in the House of Commons, the chamber of the people of Canada, would do if they win on Monday. The Pointer contacted 13 candidates in ridings across Brampton and Mississauga who are running for the Liberals, Conservatives and NDP. None responded. 

The NDP’s Jagmeet Singh is the only leader in the federal race that has acknowledged the need to invest in preventative measures to stop these crimes from happening in the first place.

“There are heinous things that happen and there needs to be severe penalties put in place, but we also need to keep communities safe. And that’s what my focus is: how do we stop crime before it happens?” he said during the English language leaders debate. The Party has not made any campaign announcements or put forward any information on its website to explain what these upstream investments would look like.

Relying on the justice system to respond to intimate partner violence is a reactive measure, advocates point out. It only serves to perpetuate a system that survivors and advocates have said works to “dehumanize” survivors of intimate partner violence, human trafficking and sexual assault. 

The lack of political will is illustrated by the federal government’s anti-human trafficking strategy. The previous plan expired at the end of 2024, with no clarity about when a renewed strategy will be put in place. Government officials have said consultation to inform the renewed strategy is underway. There has been no information released about when it will be completed. 

Julia Drydyk, executive director of the Canadian Centre to End Human Trafficking, fears efforts to address this growing crime are being pushed aside by other government priorities such as the economy, housing and affordability issues. All of these have a direct impact on the circumstances that can place women in harm’s way, as a lack of housing and affordability contribute to the pressures that often lead to violence. Ignoring the consequences of myopic economic policy responses, which do not consider a more holistic approach to the more obvious problems, ends up costing Canadians much more.

“Everyone has something at stake right now. What concerns me is that we’re going to lose sight of those who are most at risk of exploitation and most vulnerable and who are going to be experiencing entrenched forms of violence and oppression as a result of these changes,” she emphasizes. “In a world where we're all scared, how do we make sure Canadians are still thinking with the same values of building a society and a social safety net that is there to support people from really falling through the cracks when things get hard.”

This concern was heightened for many advocates and service providers when Carney, after being appointed prime minister in March, formed his pre-election cabinet without a Minister for Women and Gender Equality. The Ontario Federation of Labour called the move a “regressive step” that “undermines decades of progress toward gender equality and political representation in Canada.”

“The complex nuances, intersections, and expertise required to understand and achieve gender equity, let alone end gender-based violence, requires the careful attention of a dedicated minister and department. This decision compromises the Canadian government’s accountability for women’s rights, gender equity, and gender-based violence rates,” Aura Freedom expressed in a statement. “Without a dedicated WAGE Minister, the federal government risks critical advancements in gender equity – including those around gender-based violence.”

The next government will signal its commitment to confront gender-based violence by either choosing to reinstate the ministry as part of its mandate, or keeping the role out of cabinet.

Julia Drydyk, executive director of the Canadian Centre to End Human Trafficking, fears anti-human trafficking efforts are being pushed down the priority list of political leaders.

(Joel Wittnebel/The Pointer files)

Drydyk has been supportive of the Canadian government recently and its commitment to address gender-based issues, but fears that when the new government is formed, without a dedicated strategy in place, anti-human trafficking efforts could be swept under the same funding umbrella of other gender-based violence issues.

“You’d be putting human trafficking into other funding streams that are already also under-resourced and there’s very specific needs of trafficking survivors given the very acute levels of trauma that are experienced,” she explained. “I think the level of misinformation and the lack of awareness on human trafficking is across the board, and that includes politicians. And so our focus is on making sure that we are there to work in partnership with whatever government comes in to provide them with the best information on the realities of human trafficking and what the most proven and effective policies, but also investment responses could be.”

Johnson often has to disconnect herself from the role as CEO of Embrave. With her “CEO hat” on, decisions are influenced by worries about funding, available space and service levels. Without that hat on, things are simpler. 

It’s not about politics. It’s not about money, or Liberal, or Conservative, or victim or survivor.

It’s about people helping people.

She hopes politicians will help those who elect them. 

“When it comes to doing this work you need to have passion and compassion, and a part of it is you need to have grace and look beyond everything that is loud in front of you…go back to helping that person in front of you. That human nature, that connectedness that is needed among us, is missing, I can definitely tell you,” she says. 

“In life, sometimes you have to be selfless and a part of selflessness requires you to meet people exactly where they’re at…to understand.”

The Pointer's 2025 federal election coverage is partly supported by the Covering Canada: Election 2025 Fund.

Email: [email protected]

Email: [email protected]

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