Content warning: Please be advised that this article contains mentions of the 2020 Nova Scotia Mass Shooting, violence, and femicide.
This Women’s History Month, if we wish to truly better the future of women — we must reckon with the fact that we have failed to protect them. Gender-based violence is the facing of violence, coercion, humiliation, and other means of harm because of the victim’s gender expression or identity. In my home province of Nova Scotia, the issue of gender-based violence has become prevalent in Provincial politics and has become a topic of public concern. Last year, the leader of the Nova Scotia NDP, Claudia Chender introduced Bill No. 482 or the Intimate Partner Violence Epidemic Act. This act declared “that ‘Gender-based, intimate partner, and family violence is an epidemic’ […] ‘gender-based, intimate partner, and family violence continue to be excessively prevalent in Nova Scotia’; [and] over 40 per cent of Canadian women will experience intimate partner violence in their lifetimes”. Moreover, gender-based violence is meant to preserve the current power wielded by its typically male perpetrators in the Canadian patriarchy. Concentrating on women’s futures requires this acknowledgement of the harms we culturally sustain toward women on a daily basis.
In November of 2024, three women in Nova Scotia were killed within three weeks in acts of intimate partner violence. In addition, two of the worst mass violent tragedies in Canadian history — the 2020 Nova Scotia attacks and 1989 École Polytechnique — were influenced by an erratic hatred of women and the culture of male dominance. The Canadian Femicide Observatory indicated that 187 women and girls were killed by acts of gender-based violence within 2024. These acts are all deliberate expressions of power and control, reasoned by an entitlement over a woman’s autonomy and lives. Culture formed and sustained around controlling women may seem radical in a post third wave feminist society. However, the statistics surrounding femicide, the deliberate killing of women because they are women, and the background of our nation’s largest tragedies all paint a different story of how Canadians regard women and their autonomy.
Although gender-based violence and acts similar have been contentious issues within Nova Scotian politics, there has been an immensely consequential failure to act. The Progressive Conservative Government in Nova Scotia, headed by Premier Tim Houston, faced mass backlash in the summer due to the comments made by former justice minister Brad Johns, who remarked that domestic violence was in fact not an epidemic in Nova Scotia. Although the Government enacted the Intimate Partner Violence Epidemic Act, speaking in Halifax on February 19 during the Together We Rise march, Chender described her experiences getting it enacted, “when [the NDP] brought legislation declaring intimate-partner violence an epidemic, we were told, ‘[it is] only symbolic,’ and it was only because a group of advocates and survivors shamed this government into passing that bill that we did”. It has become evident that the Tories only give time to women’s issues when their own reputation is on the line. The fight to even have a government which regards these issues as prevalent and damaging — coupled with judicial and legislative action — should not be unrealistic.
