As temperatures rise across Canada, so too does the risk to women, girls, and gender-diverse people living with violence. This isn’t speculation—it’s a well-documented and increasingly urgent reality. A recent feature in The Narwhal (August 2025), titled “As temperatures spike, so do reports of domestic violence in Canada,”  (hyperlink) makes a timely intervention by connecting climate change with gender-based violence (GBV). It’s a link that has long been ignored in Canadian policy but one that frontline workers have seen for years.

The article highlights how climate stress, especially extreme heat, is not just an environmental or infrastructure issue. It is a public safety crisis, with real consequences for survivors of intimate partner violence, especially those already marginalized by poverty, racism, or housing insecurity.

BWSS was one of the organizations interviewed for the article, and we welcome the opportunity to build on its insights. But we also see space for a deeper and more systemic analysis, one that names misogyny and patriarchy as the root causes of violence and recognizes the climate crisis not only as an ecological disaster, but as a gendered one.

Below, we offer a critical reflection on the article and explore how climate change intensifies the structural conditions that allow gender-based violence to thrive.

Strengths of the Article

Timely and Intersectional Framing

The Narwhal’s piece does important work by bridging two urgent crises, climate change and intimate partner violence and naming the connection between them as both a public safety and a public health issue. This framing helps move the conversation beyond individual “incidents” toward understanding GBV as part of a larger social and political pattern, one that is being exacerbated by environmental collapse.

By doing so, the article joins a growing movement of scholars, advocates, and survivors who understand that gender-based violence is not separate from climate change, economic inequality, or colonial displacement. These crises are interlocking and so must be our solutions.

Data-Backed Storytelling

One of the strengths of the article is its blend of statistical data with stories from the front lines. National trends showing seasonal spikes in domestic violence are paired with insights from shelters like SOFIA House and BWSS, grounding the findings in lived experience. This combination makes the issue legible both to policymakers and to the broader public.

Importantly, the article does not rely on vague notions of “tension” or “conflict.” Instead, it links heatwaves to real-world outcomes: increased calls for help, greater control by abusers, and rising femicides. This clarity matters.

Intersectional Awareness of Vulnerability

The article makes clear that heat does not affect everyone equally. Women living in unsafe housing, without air conditioning or financial autonomy, are especially vulnerable. Survivors who face multiple forms of oppression—Indigenous women, Black and racialized women, women with precarious immigration status—face greater risks and fewer options.

This is not just a story about heat. It’s a story about power: about who holds it, who abuses it, and how our systems repeatedly fail to intervene.

Areas for Deepening

While the article is a welcome contribution, there are critical dimensions that deserve more attention—especially if we are to meaningfully act on what it reveals.

From Correlation to Causality

The article notes the statistical correlation between rising temperatures and domestic violence but stops short of interrogating the deeper mechanisms. Does heat biologically increase aggression? Or is it simply the trigger that activates violence already embedded in patriarchal systems?

From a feminist perspective, we must be cautious not to suggest that heat causes abuse. Misogyny and patriarchy are root causes. What heat does is intensify existing risk factors: economic pressure, emotional volatility, housing stress, and the entitlements bred by misogyny. When an abuser feels loss of control whether because of finances, climate stress, or ego it is women and children who pay the price. Climate is not the cause of violence. Patriarchy is.

Regional and Structural Specificity

The article gestures to differences across provinces, but a deeper analysis of BC, for example, would have been instructive. In BC, we’ve seen fatal outcomes in urban centres like Kelowna, but also in rural areas where services are virtually inaccessible. Northern regions face both extreme weather and a lack of safe housing, police accountability, or Indigenous-led response systems.

The same heatwave in Vancouver looks very different in Bella Coola, Prince George, or Fort St. John. Yet too often, public policy treats GBV and climate as “urban” problems, ignoring regional inequities in infrastructure, funding, and political attention.

Constraints on Frontline Services

BWSS and others were consulted for the article, but the piece could have gone further in naming how underfunding, fragmented planning, and systemic neglect limit our ability to respond to heat-related violence. Some shelters do not have air conditioning. Others cannot relocate survivors during wildfires. Mobile units often lack staff and funding. And the core funding we rely on has not been adjusted to reflect new climate realities.

Emergency management frameworks rarely consider survivors’ needs in evacuation plans or cooling centre design. This is not just an oversight—it is a political choice that reflects how gender-based violence continues to be treated as secondary, even in a crisis.

Naming the Root: Misogyny and Patriarchy

What’s missing from most mainstream analyses—including this one is an explicit naming of the cultural and institutional conditions that allow violence to flourish in the first place. At its core, intimate partner violence is not about heat. It is about male entitlement. It is about the belief that women are property. It is about the systems, legal, economic, social, that reinforce and excuse that belief.

The climate crisis doesn’t invent those dynamics. It magnifies them. It isolates survivors, increases financial strain, disrupts support systems, and gives abusers more power. And in a country where the majority of survivors never report to police, and where only a fraction of cases are prosecuted, the message remains clear: violence against women is tolerated.

If we want to end that tolerance, we must confront the whole system and not just its symptoms.

Climate Crisis as a Product of Patriarchy and Colonialism

The climate crisis is not a natural disaster, it is a man-made one, driven by centuries of extractive capitalism, colonial land theft, and patriarchal domination. The same logic that treats women’s lives as disposable treats ecosystems as expendable. Corporations profit while communities are displaced, just as abusers maintain control while systems look the other way. Fossil fuel expansion, unsustainable development, and the criminalization of land and water defenders many of them Indigenous women are not separate from gender-based violence. They are parallel expressions of the same violent systems. To confront one without the other is to miss the full picture of harm and the full scope of resistance.

What Needs to Change – Urgent Actions

• Risk Assessment Must Be Mandated
  Governments must require risk assessments across all sectors—police, Crown, MCFD, shelters—so that heat, housing, and coercive control are understood as part of a larger pattern of escalating risk.
• Disaster Planning Must Centre Survivors
  Emergency response systems must include gender-based violence protocols, including safe shelter options during evacuations and public alerts that do not endanger women trying to flee.
• Frontline Services Must Be Climate-Resilient
  That means cooling infrastructure, flexible emergency funding, mobile outreach, and staffing plans that recognize the dual impact of violence and environmental strain.
• Housing and Utility Policy Must Be Survivor-Centred
  Survivors need access to affordable housing that can withstand heatwaves and wildfires—and protection from abusers who use utility bills and housing insecurity as tools of control.

The Narwhal has opened the door to a necessary conversation. It’s now up to policymakers, funders, and all levels of government to walk through it and to recognize that public safety, climate justice, and gender justice are inseparable.

When the heat rises, it reveals the cracks in our systems. But the root cause is not the weather. It’s the violence that patriarchy makes possible—and the political will to look away.

It’s time we stopped looking away.

Read – As temperatures spike, so do reports of domestic violence in Canada 

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Canada has a National Action Plan to End Gender-Based Violence.
Most people have never heard of it. Even fewer know it’s in danger of collapsing before it ever really began.

In 2022, the Government of Canada launched the National Action Plan—a 10-year strategy built on decades of advocacy by survivors, feminist organizations, and frontline workers. It promised coordinated, sustained action on the crisis of violence that impacts women, girls, and gender-diverse people in every province and territory.

But in 2025, in the middle of escalating violence against women and femicide, the federal government is slashing the department responsible for implementing the plan by 80%.

What do you call a plan with no budget, no oversight, and no urgency?

A press release.

What the Plan Was Supposed to Do

The National Action Plan was designed to:

• Support survivors and their families
• Prevent violence before it starts
• Build a responsive justice system
• Advance Indigenous-led approaches
• Strengthen housing, healthcare, and social infrastructure

And for the first time, it came with federal funding—coordinated through Women and Gender Equality Canada (WAGE) and delivered through bilateral agreements with provinces and territories, including British Columbia.

But now, with WAGE facing an 80% budget cut by 2027, the Plan is no longer national, no longer coordinated, and no longer credible.

British Columbia: One Year from Expiry, with No Path Forward

In 2023, British Columbia signed a bilateral agreement under the National Action Plan, backed by federal funding. That agreement expires in 2026. That gives us one year left to act.

Despite rising femicides and public commitments to a safer province, there is currently no plan—and no funding—to continue this work beyond next year.

The provincial strategy, Safe and Supported, was launched with strong language about equity, prevention, and accountability. But language doesn’t protect women. Funding, enforcement, and political will do.

Right now:

• No new core funding has been committed to frontline services.
• Risk assessments remain voluntary, inconsistently applied, and unenforced.
• Crown Counsel continues to deny or drop charges in high-risk IPV cases.
• There is no independent oversight to ensure that BC delivers on the promises it made.

Without renewed federal investment—and without concrete action from the province—Safe and Supported risks becoming just another government announcement.

This is not a planning phase. This is the moment to deliver.

Read our open letter https://www.criaw-icref.ca/statements/statement-on-wages-budget/

Send your own letter here: https://win.newmode.net/actioncanadaforsexualhealthrights/protectgenderequality

In the wake of a recent high-profile trial that resulted in the acquittal of five men accused of gang sexual assault, Julie Lalonde—a respected advocate, educator, and author—spoke plainly about what many survivors and feminist advocates have long known: the legal system in Canada continues to fail survivors of sexual violence. Her televised interview offers not only a searing critique of the ruling but also a broader call to action for justice that recognizes the realities of trauma.

“Unfortunately, as someone who’s been doing this work in Canada for over 20 years, I was not surprised that all five of the men were acquitted,” Lalonde begins.

She goes on to express disappointment not just in the outcome, but in the way the verdict was delivered. The judge took more than five hours to read her ruling, which Lalonde describes as “really smearing of the complainant.” The complainant—known publicly as EM—was dismissed as neither credible nor reliable. But as Lalonde points out, this dismissal was grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding of how trauma affects memory and perception.

When the Legal System Ignores the Science of Trauma

During a traumatic event, memory does not function like a recording device. Fear and panic can overwhelm the brain, causing a fragmented recall of events. Survivors may remember certain details vividly while struggling to recount timelines or peripheral facts. This is not a sign of dishonesty; it is how the brain survives trauma.

“It really seems to us that this is a justice that does not understand how fear can manifest itself and how trauma can impact memory,” Lalonde says.

This gap in understanding—between what trauma experts know and what judges apply in their rulings—continues to result in survivors being discredited in court. It also highlights how judicial training, even after initiatives like Rona Ambrose’s push for better education on sexual assault, remains deeply insufficient.

Disbelief as Institutional Violence

For many survivors, the legal process is itself a source of harm. EM, through her lawyer, released a statement expressing that she had “never experienced not being believed like this before.” Her experience reflects what countless survivors in Canada already know too well: reporting sexual violence can result in not only disbelief but public scrutiny, character assassination, and retraumatization.

“When your trauma is not acknowledged, you kind of get stuck in that memory,” Lalonde explains. “You get stuck in that space, and it’s harder for you to move through it and move past it.”

And when a ruling actively discredits a survivor’s account without a trauma-informed lens, it compounds the original harm—this time with the authority and weight of the courts behind it.

A System Designed to Fail

This case is not an outlier. Lalonde connects it to a wider pattern seen in cases like Jian Ghomeshi’s and Harvey Weinstein’s. Across jurisdictions and countries, sexual assault trials are often reduced to credibility contests shaped by unrealistic expectations of how a survivor should behave or recall details.

“If you were to experience a car accident and then have to go and recreate, beat for beat, what happened chances are you wouldn’t be able to, because you were in shock,” Lalonde notes. “That is a well-researched, well understood phenomenon in psychology, but it seems to be completely absent from legal analysis.”

When courts disregard this evidence, they uphold a version of justice that is fundamentally hostile to the lived experience of survivors.

The Chilling Effect

Perhaps the most disturbing consequence of this verdict, Lalonde argues, is the ripple effect it will have across the country. In the days following the trial, sexual assault centers reported a spike in calls—many from people who had planned to report but now felt that doing so would be futile.

“We’re going to see a really profound chill effect of people just throwing their hands up and saying, there’s no point in me ever reporting this,” she warns.

This isn’t just a tragedy for survivors—it’s a public safety crisis. When survivors stop reporting, perpetrators remain unaccountable, and communities remain unsafe.

“We should all be concerned about that chill effect,” Lalonde says in closing.

Where Do We Go From Here?

This trial and its outcome raise critical questions: What kind of justice system do we want? One that silences, discredits, and retraumatizes survivors? Or one that listens, understands, and responds based on evidence—not myths, not stereotypes, and not outdated assumptions about how people “should” behave in the face of violence?

Until the legal system is reformed to incorporate a trauma and violence-informed, survivor-centred approach, we will continue to see verdicts like this one—and continue to lose the trust of those who need justice the most.