On November 5, 2025, Battered Women’s Support Services Executive Director Angela Marie MacDougall addressed Vancouver City Council on two critical motions:
Ensuring Continuity of the Women’s Equity Strategy Following the Closure of the Equity Office https://council.vancouver.ca/20251105/documents/cfscmotion2.pdf
Advancing a Gender-Based Violence Prevention Strategy https://council.vancouver.ca/20251105/documents/cfscmotion3.pdf
These motions came forward at a time when violence against women and gender-diverse people is rising in Vancouver, across British Columbia, and across Canada.
Fourteen women have been killed in Vancouver since November 2024 and more women have been killed in BC this past year than in previous years. At the same time, we are witnessing a dangerous erosion of women’s equality, rights, and safety infrastructure, locally and nationally.
Gender-based violence most often happens in private spaces, in homes, between people who know each other, where systems are least visible and where survivors are most vulnerable. Yet the consequences are public, intergenerational, and deeply felt across our communities.
This moment is not simply about two motions.
It is about whether our city chooses to:
- treat women’s safety as core public-safety infrastructure
- honour longstanding commitments to gender equity
- prevent femicide rather than grieve it
- build systems of support rather than rely on survivor endurance
- defend hard-won progress rather than allow it to slip away
BWSS’s remarks were delivered not only to Council, but to survivors, girls in our city watching the world form around them, and to history. They reflect the urgency of this time and a clear truth:
Progress is not guaranteed. It is defended, or it disappears.
Below are the full statements delivered to Council.
Ensuring Continuity of the Women’s Equity Strategy Following the Closure of the Equity Office
