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Tessa McFadzean, director of Good Shepherd Women’s Services, at Martha House in Hamilton, Ont., on Dec. 11.Laura Proctor/The Globe and Mail
In October, staff at a women’s shelter in Hamilton had to turn away 67 women seeking refuge. The next month, they turned away 51.
With only 40 funded beds, Martha House, for women and children fleeing violence, would need to quadruple its capacity to accommodate all of this demand. The shelter is simply too full – and has been for as long as staff can remember.
Across Canada, a woman is killed by an intimate partner roughly every week. The most dangerous place for a woman, statistically, is in her own home. But as femicide rates continue to rise during a national housing and affordability crisis, emergency violence shelter stays have also grown longer than ever – creating what advocates say is a potentially lethal bottleneck in the system, leaving women at risk with nowhere to turn.
In 2019, the average stay at Martha House was around 10 weeks. Now, families are staying in the shelter upwards of 32 weeks, according to Tessa McFadzean, director of women’s services for Good Shepherd Hamilton, which runs Martha House. Larger families are often staying more than a year.
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On a recent December morning at the shelter, Ms. McFadzean pointed down the hallway, where holiday wrapping paper covered up a window on the shelter’s communal playroom; a festive attempt at privacy while they use the room as an overflow space for a family to live in – likely for months.
She said stable housing has come to feel like “a distant aspiration” for many of their shelter clients.
“It does not feel attainable, it does not feel realistic for a family. So, we hear people say: ‘I’m just going to stay [with my abuser], because what is my other option?’” Ms. McFadzean said.
“In the meantime, while we wait for a robust solution, people are dying.”
It’s a concern that’s echoed by advocates and anti-violence sector workers across the country.
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More than 60,000 people were taken in by about 560 emergency and second-stage shelters across the country in 2022-23, according to the most recent report from Statistics Canada in 2024.
“The housing continuum is broken,” said Cat Champagne, executive director of the Alberta Council of Women’s Shelters.
In her province, children now make up 40 per cent of those being turned away from shelters, according to a 2024 ACWS report. About 8,140 Albertans, including 3,170 children, were admitted to its shelters during 2023-24.
Crystal Giesbrecht, director of research at the Provincial Association of Transition Houses and Services of Saskatchewan (PATHS), said housing is the main concern raised from every shelter in her network.
“Every single agency – whether they’re north, south, rural, urban – is talking about housing, the lack of available housing,” she said. “Housing just continues to be top of the list for issues and concerns for shelter workers in this province.”
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In the month of October alone, Martha House had to turn away 67 women seeking refuge. In November, they turned away 51.Laura Proctor/The Globe and Mail
In a recent interview with The Globe and Mail, the federal Women and Gender Equality Minister Rechie Valdez said her government is committed to providing consistent, stable funding to the anti-violence sector. The 2025 budget allocated $223.4-million over five years, beginning in 2026-27, specifically for gender-based violence programs and organizations.
This is separate from the government’s national action plan on gender-based violence, which was announced in 2022 with $525-million committed over four years to provinces and territories, including to support front-line organizations. (That four-year funding phase will end next year.)
When it comes to housing specifically, she pointed to the federal government’s Build Canada Homes initiative, which was announced in September, and includes a dedicated $1-billion commitment toward new transitional and supportive housing units. The minister said emergency shelters, too, would be eligible for funding as part of that investment.
But those on the front lines – and the agencies who work with them – say in the meantime, the sector remains overstretched and under-resourced.
Marc Hull-Jacquin, founder of Shelter Movers, a non-profit organization that offers free moving and storage services to women fleeing domestic violence, received $3-million from the federal government in 2022 to expand services into the Prairie provinces.
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Marci Ien, who was the women and gender equality minister at the time, hailed the organization’s “proven track record of success.”
“We know that they’re changing lives,” she said.
However, that funding is now set to run out in March, and Mr. Hull-Jacquin said the government told them it will not be renewed – that ongoing operational funding is not in their mandate, and that he should take it up with the provinces.
But the point of launching a national action plan, Mr. Hull-Jacquin argues, was to provide national cohesion so that access to resources does not depend on a woman’s postal code.
“I don’t know what else they want from us. We’re doing the thing we promised we’d do,” Mr. Hull-Jacquin said. “This is not a test case. This is not a proof of concept. We are an established, decade-old organization that has completed 10,000 moves.”
Ms. Champagne said she was disappointed to learn of Shelter Movers’ funding cut, because of the assistance they provide to shelters in Alberta. “Nobody else is doing that work. When you close that gap or don’t fund those agencies, someone else doesn’t always pick up the slack.”
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While there have been some boosts to the anti-violence sector at provincial levels, they have been inconsistent and, those on the front lines say, they are nowhere near enough.
In New Brunswick, for example, the provincial government announced $9.1-million in funding for the domestic violence sector last year, which Maureen Levangie, executive director of the Domestic Violence Association of New Brunswick, called “the first really substantial increase in over a decade.”
It was overdue and really needed, but New Brunswick is still catching up, she said.
“We’re really not seeing the rates of violence reflected in the financial response from the provincial government,” she said.
In Ontario, the province recently pledged $26.7-million over two years “in shelter spaces to protect survivors of gender-based violence and to strengthen the family court support worker program.”
But the ask from Ontario shelters had been for more than twice that – just to meet the gaps in current funding, said Ms. McFadzean, who sits on the board of the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses.
“We are in a very pinnacle crisis point where women and children’s lives are at stake,” she said.
