Introduction
We want to begin by acknowledging the positive: Budget 2025’s stabilization of core funding to Women and Gender Equality Canada (WAGE) and continued investment in gender equity programming are meaningful wins for survivors, and a testament to the feminist sector’s sustained advocacy.
At the same time, women are still absorbing the economic and social fallout of violence in Canada – and Budget 2025 does not mention ongoing funding for the National Action Plan to End GBV. When prevention and safety are underfunded, the costs do not disappear; they simply shift onto women and girls through unpaid caregiving, interrupted earnings, long-term health impacts, and intergenerational poverty.
Budget 2025 arrives at a time when gender-based violence, sexual violence, trafficking, and femicide remain at crisis levels in Canada. Yet, despite conversations and discourse labelling Budget 2025 as a “generational budget” that focuses on “generational investments”, ending violence is still not named as a core economic driver, even though GBV is one of the most costly and preventable drains on our economy.
And because the federal government is positioning spending through an economic growth framework, it is strategically crucial that we demonstrate GBV prevention not only as a moral imperative, but also as a fiscally rational one. This analysis, therefore, examines Budget 2025 through a feminist economic lens: assessing whether these investments match the scale of the crisis.
Generations are carried – physically, emotionally, economically – by women. A budget that claims to be generational must invest in the ones doing the carrying. When looking at a budget that purports to be “generational”, we must ask the simple question:
Are we investing in the women who carry these generations?
The Staggering Economic Cost of Gender-Based Violence
Gender-based violence (GBV) is not only a human rights crisis – it is one of the largest silent economic drains in this country.
Fifteen years ago, the Department of Justice estimated that spousal violence alone cost Canadians $7.4 billion/year, and sexual assault added another $4–5 billion/year in health care, legal response, and lost productivity (DOJ, 2009 Cost of Spousal Violence; DOJ, 2009 Cost of Violent Crime).
These figures are now considered conservative because they exclude inflation, the spike in femicides, the rise in online sexual violence, the trafficking economy, and the compounding economic impacts on women over time. Recent feminist economic analysis places the actual annual cost of GBV closer to $10–$ 12 billion (CWF 2024; ESVA Canada sector analysis, 2025, pre-Budget advocacy).
And critically: ~80% of the economic cost of GBV is borne by survivors themselves – predominantly women – through lost income, long-term health impacts, debt, costs of fleeing, homelessness risk, and involuntary career interruption (DOJ, “Who Pays” distribution table).
In other words: GBV is being subsidized by women’s bodies, time, mental health, and lifetime earning power – and in far too many cases, its ultimate cost is women’s lives.
Investing in Prevention: The ROI of Ending GBV
Under an economically framed government, we must demonstrate that investing in ending GBV is not a donation – it is a strategic capital investment in our communities.
When GBV is prevented early, the fiscal return is immediate. Evidence from violence prevention cost-benefit studies shows that every $1 invested can return $2 to $20 in avoided downstream expenses (Public Health ROI meta-studies; WHO and feminist economic modelling referenced in Canadian Women’s Foundation leadership pieces, 2023–2024).
Further, preventing just one IPV incident is estimated to save over $11,000 in acute public costs, including healthcare, police response, shelter nights, and court processing (Canadian DV Prevention ROI model, 2021).
While Budget 2025 puts ~$44.7 million/year into GBV action through WAGE, we know that the cost of violence is billions. And still, we continue to see the gender-based violence funding that is available overlook critical investments into primary prevention.
Right now, Canada is still spending most of its money pulling people out of the river after the harm has already happened – instead of looking upstream, before women and girls ever fall in, and developing the necessary guardrails to prevent them from ever doing so.
That gap is not just a policy gap; it is an unstrategic fiscal posture.
We know that when we invest in GBV prevention, the return is not only on reduced crisis spending – it is a generational dividend, focused on safer communities, stronger economic participation, and healthier futures for the next generation.
A Call to Action: Sustained Funding for Long-Term Change
If Canada is serious about making generational investments, then we must invest in what women carry across generations. Women have always been the backbone of Canada’s social fabric — holding the emotional, cultural, and caregiving labour that sustains families and communities, often absorbing the costs that public policy fails to prevent.
As other feminist organizations have also recognized, including the Canadian Women’s Foundation, YWCA Canada, ESVA Canada, and Battered Women’s Support Services, the stabilization of WAGE funding is certainly welcome, but our movement to eradicate gender-based violence will not be able to deliver the National Action Plan to End GBV (NAP) without adequate and sustained investment.
We know the long-term impacts of the omissions in Budget 2025 are not minor:
- No dedicated funding for human trafficking, sexual exploitation, or sexual violence.
- No explicit Budget allocation tied to MMIWG2S Calls for Justice.
- There are almost no new federal investments in primary prevention of GBV.
- No mention of the National Action Plan to End GBV, when we know that the NAP requires dedicated funding beyond WAGE to function as intended.
A feminist budget must center GBV eradication.
We will also be monitoring how grassroots and community-based feminist organizations will have access to this funding. We know that the groundbreaking prevention, survivor support, and culture-shift work often occurs at the community level, not exclusively within larger, national institutions.
Ending GBV is one of the most fiscally rational investments Canada can make — because violence suppresses GDP, suppresses labour force participation, suppresses women’s economic agency, and forces generations of women to absorb the costs of public policy failure privately.
Prevention is not a cost centre.
Prevention is savings.
Prevention is nation-building.
While this section outlines the economic costs and returns of GBV investments at a national level, it is equally critical to examine the broader social and economic conditions that shape women’s and survivors’ daily safety, stability, and ability to rebuild their lives and fully participate in the economy.
Social and Economic Conditions that Shape Safety
Budget 2025 includes several strong and necessary investments in housing, affordability, employment, and community infrastructure. These are welcome steps that can contribute to greater economic stability and overall well-being, which in turn directly affects the safety and recovery of survivors of gender-based violence (GBV). When survivors have secure housing, a stable income, and access to essential services, they are better equipped to leave unsafe situations, rebuild their lives, and fully participate in their communities. Embedding prevention within these priority areas is equally critical – because the same economic factors that help survivors rebuild and heal play essential roles in interrupting the cycle of violence before it even begins. Strengthening affordability, housing, employment, youth services, etc., through a GBV-informed lens not only supports survivors but actively reduces the conditions and systems that put women, girls, and gender-diverse people most at risk of violence.
At present, the budget once again fails to meaningfully connect these economic measures to gender-based violence (GBV) and the lived realities of survivors and victims of abuse, trafficking, and exploitation. While the investments are solid, they are fall short without targeted funding for specialized services and supports for women, gender diverse people, and children fleeing violence.
Housing and Cost of Living
The government’s $130 billion housing investment, creation of Build Canada Homes, and $1 billion for transitional and supportive housing are significant commitments that recognize the scale of Canada’s housing crisis. Yet, we remind the government that dedicated funding for GBV survivor-specific housing is essential, as housing is one of the most significant safety challenges for women and families fleeing violence. With most single-parent households led by women, this gap leaves survivors vulnerable to homelessness or returning to unsafe homes. We encourage the government to ensure that part of the $1 billion commitment for supportive and transitional housing reaches the gender-based violence sector, addressing the urgent need for safe, stable housing for survivors and their children, as well as for all women and gender-diverse people in need of safe homes and spaces.
Immigration and Safety
New immigration measures — including the 2026–2028 Immigration Levels Plan and a one-time program for people unable to return home due to conflict or violence — are positive steps toward stability. We encourage the government to ensure that women, girls, or gender-diverse migrants fleeing and/or experiencing abuse have access to the neccessary supports in the communities they find themselves in, as well as settlement supports that newcomers need to find jobs, housing, and safety.
Economic Abuse
The recognition that economic abuse is a form of gender-based violence and the creation of a voluntary code of conduct for financial institutions are welcome steps. What’s needed now is funding to turn these acknowledgements into meaningful, tangible action. Critical issues such as recovery from coerced debt remain crucial to the health, wellness, autonomy and economic stability of GBV survivors and their families.
Indigenous Communities
Investments of $2.8 billion in Indigenous housing and infrastructure, and $2.3 billion in water and wastewater programs, are essential and welcomed. However, there is no direct funding for Indigenous-led safety or anti-violence initiatives, despite the ongoing genocide of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people. Infrastructure investment must go hand in hand with safety, healing, and prevention to fulfill the Calls for Justice. This must be prioritized.
These structural conditions do not exist separately from Canada’s public safety systems; in fact, they directly influence how safety is understood, funded, enforced, and experienced on the ground. In addition to many other avenues, Canada must also be financially and economically accountable for the ongoing genocide of Indigenous women, girls and Two-Spirit peoples today, ensuring that the priorities reflect justice, and Indigenous-led collaboration and solutions.
Public Safety
The 2025 federal budget makes it clear that policing and enforcement remain at the center of Canada’s public safety strategy. The government is investing heavily in the RCMP and Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), providing over $617.7 million over five years to strengthen core operations and hire 1,000 new officers, alongside the $1.3 billion Border Plan announced in 2024.
The budget also introduces new enforcement-focused initiatives, including the establishment of a Canadian Financial Crimes Agency and a compensation program for assault-style firearms. The firearms section explicitly recognizes that women and girls make up one-third of victims of assault-style firearm violence, and make up 67% of assault-style firearm cases that are related to intimate partner violence (IPV). This acknowledgment is important, and measures to reduce access to firearms are indeed life-saving for women and families experiencing abuse.
However, this budget presents a narrow and incomplete vision of public safety. Most concerning is that the entire Public Safety section does not once mention gender-based violence (GBV), femicide, human trafficking (HT), sexual violence (SV), or intimate partner violence (IPV), despite all of these being an epidemic in Canada. Violence against women, girls, and gender-diverse people continues to escalate, with femicide and violence rates reaching highs. Yet, rather than addressing these realities as urgent public safety and human rights issues, the budget confines its response to policing structures and internal efficiencies. This highlights that the focus remains on perpetrators, rather than on survivors, further prioritizing a reactive approach over prevention and long-term healing. There is no recognition of the essential role played by frontline and community-based organizations, which provide prevention, crisis response, and long-term healing — the very work that seeks to prevent violence and keep survivors safe.
Public safety cannot solely be achieved through enforcement. Overwhelmingly, survivors who have experienced violence will not go to police for many valid reasons, including that policing often fails to meet their needs, particularly for those from marginalized communities who experience discrimination, disbelief, or retraumatization from legal systems and representatives themselves – as well as the fact that many survivors are often criminalized themselves by those same systems. Without investment in community-led prevention, housing, mental health, and culturally informed supports, law enforcement becomes the only safety net, one that many cannot or will not access. A survivor-centred and trauma-informed approach to safety recognizes that prevention, not punishment, is the foundation of justice.
Given the scale of investment in policing, accountability must accompany funding. The RCMP and CBSA have a responsibility to ensure that the new resources they receive are used to transform harmful internal cultures and improve their response to survivors. This means investing in mandatory trauma-informed and culturally grounded training, addressing bias and systemic racism, and reforming policies that retraumatize survivors or fail to protect those most at risk. Police forces must be held accountable for how they handle cases of gender-based violence, ensuring that survivors are treated with dignity and that their safety is prioritized over procedural convenience. In addition, enforcement agencies should utilize their budget to collaborate meaningfully with the community, survivors and organizations that have long provided leadership on violence prevention and survivor support.
The omission of any new investment in GBV and prevention work within the area of “public safety” sends a troubling message: that violence against women and gender-diverse people remains a secondary concern, not meaningfully understood as deeply tied to public safety. This gap undermines Canada’s commitments under the National Action Plan to End Gender-Based Violence, the MMIWG Calls for Justice, and its international human rights obligations, including CEDAW, UNDRIP and the Palermo Protocol. Enforcement agencies cannot meet these obligations alone; they require a whole-of-society response centred on equity, healing, and prevention. Without sustained investment in those who work every day to prevent violence and support survivors, Canada’s public safety strategy will remain incomplete, strong on control but weak on compassion.
Conclusion
Budget 2025 makes essential progress on housing, affordability, enforcement and the dedication of ongoing WAGE funding. Yet without sustained, dedicated funding for gender-based violence prevention and survivor supports, these efforts remain incomplete. Violence is one of Canada’s most costly and preventable crises, and its burden continues to fall disproportionately on women, girls, and gender diverse people who are the glue of families, communities and economies.
The National Action Plan to End Gender-Based Violence (NAP) cannot be absent from fiscal commitments. True public safety cannot rest solely on policing and enforcement; it must be reframed around prevention, community infrastructure, wraparound supports, grassroots organizational support, and the frontline organizations that carry out this critical work every single day.
A generational budget must integrate GBV considerations across every sector, from housing and health to immigration, employment, and economic policy, and ensure that funding reaches the community and organizations leading prevention and healing on the ground. Prevention, equity, and safety are not peripheral issues; they are the foundation of resilience and well-being. Until Canada fully funds the systems that keep women, girls, and gender-diverse people safe, the promise of fairness across generations will not be fulfilled.
Women carry generations; it is time our budgets—and our government—carried them, too.