Mr. Speaker, today we rise on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women's 16 days of action. I honour all survivors of gender-based violence and frontline advocates, who know all too well the urgency of ending this ongoing crisis. Violence against women, girls and gender-diverse people is reprehensible, is shameful and remains all too common today.

As experts point out, gender-based violence is an epidemic in our country. As many as 44% of women who have been in an intimate relationship have experienced some form of intimate partner violence. During this year alone, at least 137 women and girls were killed because of their gender. This violence disproportionately impacts young women and girls, members of the LGBTQ2S+ community, BIPOC folks, indigenous women and the disability community, and let us not forget the rising hate against trans women in this country. Indigenous women and gender-diverse people are more likely to experience intimate partner violence, intimate partner homicide, sexual assault and harassment. Among transgender and gender-diverse people, the rate of violence experienced is as high as 59%.

We need to go beyond partisanship and not use tit-for-tat arguments when we are talking about ending gender-based violence. Political games are resulting in the lives of so many across Canada. We must work together, across party lines, in unity to end the crisis of gender-based violence. This is not a partisan issue; it is a human rights issue that all parties and all levels of government need to come together to meaningfully address.

When it comes to possible solutions to this epidemic, we are not in the dark. Through the hard work of survivors, family members, advocates and researchers, several reports and publications have laid out concrete steps that all leaders, all civil society in fact, can take to stop gender-based violence. This includes the 231 calls for justice from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, the Mass Casualty Commission report and the Renfrew County inquest, to name just a few. We have the research for what is needed.

What we need is real political will and accountability mechanisms to ensure governments commit to solutions and do not marginalize the safety of women, girls and gender-diverse people any longer. We need accountability. For example, it is worth noting that while the national inquiry tabled its final report in 2019, in 2024 the Assembly of First Nations found that only two of the 231 calls for justice had been fully implemented, something that National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak called “unacceptable”. This is why it is so important to fulfill call for justice 1.7: create a national indigenous and human rights ombudsperson and establish a national indigenous and human rights tribunal. It is for similar reasons that women's groups are calling for the establishment of an independent gender-based violence commissioner to halt this epidemic.

We cannot stand by and hope leaders fulfill their obligations to end gender-based violence without being held accountable. We cannot accept any more empty gestures while lives are at risk and women, girls and gender-diverse people continue to die. Consequences of not addressing the crisis are not worth any more suffering. We need real results because we know what the consequence will be if there is no action.

We have seen an alarming rise of dangerous misogynistic hate among extremist groups, producing the same type of rhetoric that inspired the mass femicide at École Polytechnique in 1989. We have also experienced a growth in hateful anti-immigration, which leaders are now capitulating to, when we know newcomers and refugees are especially vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. This type of hate has no place in our society and it is critical that every leader take part in condemning and combatting it to prevent violent tragedies from occurring. We need far-reaching solutions for a far-reaching crisis, but beyond this, ending this epidemic means providing material support to combat violence. It is essential that we appreciate the weight of this epidemic and that we do not settle for half measures taken out of convenience.

According to a recent report by Women's Shelters Canada, over the past year, women have increasingly been forced to leave shelter spaces and been placed in positions of housing insecurity, often being compelled to move back in with an abusive partner. Seriously addressing violence means expanding shelter spaces and building affordable housing with rent geared to income so survivors of violence have safe living spaces to inhabit when they leave abusers. It means supporting the national inquiry's call for justice 4.5, a guaranteed livable basic income to ensure women and girls and gender-diverse people are economically secure and are not vulnerable to economic abuse. It means providing long-term, sustainable funding to frontline women's organizations that are best placed to alleviate violence. An epidemic as widespread as this one requires far-reaching responses.

On the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, I call on all my colleagues to join the fight to ensure that everybody enjoys the right to safety and freedom from violence.

Leah Gazan

$540,427.00