Today’s announcement of renewed, multi-year federal investment in Women and Gender Equality Canada (WAGE) marks a necessary and hard-won step toward advancing gender justice across Canada.
It signals a recognition that community-based feminist organizations are essential public infrastructure — and that safety, justice, and equality are foundational to the health and future of this country.
This investment begins to repair the instability created by recent reductions in federal funding, which threatened the continuity of critical services for survivors and communities. It arrives at a time when rates of gender-based violence and femicide continue to rise, including here in British Columbia, and when survivors — particularly Indigenous women, Black women, Two-Spirit people, racialized women, migrant women, and women with precarious housing and status — face escalating threats to their safety.
This Commitment Did Not Happen by Chance
It is the result of coordinated advocacy, sustained organizing, and powerful community mobilization across these lands.
From the Atlantic to the North to the West Coast, survivors, Elders, youth leaders, shelters and transition houses, sexual assault centres, Indigenous women-led programs, legal advocates, service providers, feminist economists, grassroots collectives, and national networks spoke with clarity and urgency: gender justice is nation-building work.
We honour the strength, discipline, and persistence of partners and movement leaders across the country who held the line, meeting with parliamentarians, sharing research and lived experience, mobilizing public voices, and refusing to allow gender-based violence to be sidelined or minimized.
We especially acknowledge Indigenous advocates whose leadership continues to ground this movement in sovereignty, safety, self-determination, and the Calls for Justice of the National Inquiry into MMIWG2S+.
BWSS is proud to stay in solidarity and alongside our provincial and national feminist partners in this collective effort and to have brought survivor realities, data, and public-safety analysis directly to federal decision-makers throughout this year. This moment reflects the power of community and the truth that progress comes when survivors and their advocates are organized, strategic, and unified.
This summer BWSS had the privilege to convene leaders from across British Columbia for a provincial roundtable on gender justice and ending violence, including Indigenous women-led organizations, rural and northern advocates, Black and immigrant women’s leaders, anti-violence service providers, legal experts, youth organizers, and representatives from housing, health, and child-care sectors. This gathering ensured that frontline expertise and survivor wisdom from communities across the province were heard directly by federal leadership. Our message was clear: gender-based violence work is public-safety infrastructure, and lasting progress requires sustained, core investment in community-based organizations and the systems that allow survivors not only to be safe, but to thrive.
“Safety is public infrastructure. Gender justice is nation-building work.”
With Celebration Comes Vigilance
This investment is meaningful, and we welcome it.
Lasting progress requires more than one announcement. It requires long-term core funding, equitable distribution, and a coordinated national strategy to fully implement the National Action Plan on Gender-Based Violence so that communities, particularly those most impacted by violence, are not left behind.
BWSS will continue to call for transparency, urgency, and survivor-centred delivery of these funds, and for alignment across federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal jurisdictions.
Our Commitment
BWSS stays ready to work with the federal government and all levels of leadership to:
- Ensure funding reaches frontline organizations equitably and quickly
- Strengthen the National Action Plan on GBV with clear timelines and accountability
- Advance Indigenous-led safety and healing grounded in the Calls for Justice
- Protect and expand community-based supports, not carceral responses
- Ensure survivors’ voices guide policy, priorities, and investment
Because as we note through #DesignedWithSurvivors, safety is infrastructure. And gender justice is essential to a future where all people can live with dignity, autonomy, and opportunity.
Forward — Together
We celebrate this win, one built through solidarity, vision, and collective courage. And tomorrow, we continue. We will hold governments accountable to their commitments, and we will keep mobilizing across these lands to ensure every policy, every dollar, and every decision moves us toward a Canada where safety is a right, not a privilege, and where survivors are not asked to do the impossible alone.
Safety changes everything. And together, as communities, as movements, and as survivors, we are reshaping what safety means in this country.
