Ford Government Blocks Intimate Partner Violence Epidemic Declaration

The Renfrew County inquest jury spent weeks in 2022 examining how Nathalie Warmerdam, Carol Culleton, and Anastasia Kuzyk were murdered by the same man in a single morning in 2015, and issued 86 recommendations meant to prevent it happening again — including that Ontario formally recognize intimate partner violence as an epidemic. The province rejected that recommendation, arguing intimate partner violence "was not an infectious or communicable disease" (Global News).

NDP MPP Kristyn Wong-Tam, joined by co-sponsors Lisa Gretzky and Peggy Sattler, introduced the Intimate Partner Violence Epidemic Act as Bill 173 in 2024 and re-tabled it as Bill 55 after the 2025 election. Rather than pass it, the government sent Bill 173 to the Standing Committee on Justice Policy, which heard from nearly 90 experts and survivors before the study was cut short when the province headed into an early election. On June 6, 2025, Wong-Tam sought unanimous consent to make the epidemic declaration outright; the Ford government's benches responded with shouts of "No." Wong-Tam noted at the time that "this government has heard loud and clear from survivors and their families, law enforcement and 100 municipalities that they must immediately declare intimate partner violence an epidemic" (Global News). New Brunswick's legislature passed an identical motion the same day.

Nova Scotia had already made the epidemic declaration in September 2024. Ontario held out for more than a year longer. In November 2025, Charmaine Williams, Associate Minister of Women's Social and Economic Opportunity, told reporters it would be "disingenuous" to declare IPV an epidemic because the word "would not go far enough" to capture a "systemic" and "deep-rooted" problem — instead arguing "endemic" was the more accurate term (Global News).

On November 5, 2025, the legislature unanimously passed a motion recognizing IPV as "endemic" rather than "epidemic" — a compromise advocacy group WomanACT welcomed as a milestone but immediately cautioned was not itself an outcome: "words" needed to be matched with "meaningful, sustained commitments" (WomanACT). Bill 55 itself — including the Renfrew County Inquest Implementation Committee that would track annual progress against the 86 recommendations — remained unpassed.

The years-long delay over a one-word declaration mattered because advocates say the "epidemic" designation was never symbolic on its own — it was meant to trigger the kind of emergency-footing response, dedicated funding, and cross-ministry coordination that governments reserve for public health crises. By settling on "endemic" instead, the government adopted language that frames intimate partner violence as a permanent, ongoing condition to be managed rather than an urgent crisis to be reversed.

The Renfrew County Inquest Implementation Committee proposed in Bill 55 — which would require the Attorney General to report annually on the government's progress against the inquest's 86 recommendations — has not been established. Without it, there is no standing mechanism forcing the government to publicly account for what it has and hasn't done since 2022.

The episode also illustrates a pattern: the government backed an earlier version of the bill into a study process in 2024, let that study lapse with an early election call, and then blocked a low-cost, symbolic unanimous consent motion in 2025 before ultimately accepting a softer version of the ask six months later. Each step delayed the substantive question — funding, shelter capacity, coordinated policing and court responses — that survivors' families and frontline organizations say the declaration was supposed to unlock.