Advocates say N.S. falling short on treating intimate-partner violence as epidemic

HALIFAX — Senior Nova Scotia officials heard how the government is falling short in its efforts to tackle intimate partner violence at a legislature committee on Tuesday, about one year after government declared such violence an epidemic.

Nicole Johnson-Morrison, the associate deputy minister with the Nova Scotia Advisory Council on the Status of Women, said the unanimous adoption of a bill that declared intimate-partner violence an epidemic on Sept. 12, 2024, was a critical step in acknowledging the severity of the issue.

“We know that intimate-partner violence is an epidemic in our province, and it continues to impact far too many Nova Scotians,” she said in her opening remarks before the committee Tuesday.

Since Oct. 18, there have been seven women killed in Nova Scotia whose deaths are connected to their male partners, and in one case, the father of a victim was also killed.

Johnson-Morrison said the government’s commitment to address such violence “is more than just words and money. It is in our action,” she said, noting that the 2025-26 budget includes more than $100 million for initiatives related to intimate-partner or gender-based violence.

Emma Halpern, the executive director of the Elizabeth Fry Society of Mainland Nova Scotia, told the committee that this year her staff’s experience with gender-based violence “moved from the professional into the personal” as three staff members from different communities were impacted by extreme examples of such violence this year.

“We had one staff whose cousin was killed, one staff whose aunt was killed. And then one staff, who herself was shot by a former domestic partner,” she said.

Halpern said the experience trying to help this colleague after the shooting reinforced to her the “massive gaps” that exist in the province’s support systems for survivors.

“My staff were the ones at the home after there were shots fired cleaning up the blood. My staff were the ones boarding up the windows of that home to make sure that nobody came in ... We saw gaps in medical services ... We found her housing because there wasn’t time to access the housing benefit to get her into new housing,” Halpern said.

She said that those who work in the sector are aware of the gaps that exist and the ways things can be improved, they just need funding and government support to make it happen.

Following Tuesday’s meeting, Johnson-Morrison said “we’re trying our best to find ways to listen to the sector and continue to support it as much as we can.”

However, Johnson-Morrison would not commit to providing groups supporting gender-based violence victims “core” funding, which covers ongoing operation costs.

Meghan Hansford, with the non-profit Adsum for Women and Children, told the committee that instead of core funding, many groups that support survivors of gender-based violence in Nova Scotia are stuck in the stressful and time-consuming cycle of applying for annual funding from the province.

Hansford said the province should ensure these groups can continue their vital work by funding them adequately and on a long-term basis.

“When our government confronted COVID-19, extraordinary funding was immobilized quickly, reflecting the urgency of saving lives. Gender-based violence demands the same approach,” Hansford said.

The final report from the public inquiry into the 2020 Nova Scotia mass shooting that left 22 people dead and began with a violent domestic assault recommended governments provide an “epidemic-level funding” to gender-based violence prevention and intervention.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 2, 2025.

By Lyndsay Armstrong