How Gender-Based Violence Reduction Funds are Spent
Everyone here will agree that the crimes these days referred to as gender-based violence (GBV) are an evil that should be fought. And I’d imagine even the most hard-core libertarian will agree that it’s within the mandate of a responsible government to do its part to help that happen.
But as taxpayers and voters, it is our job to assess the government’s specific plans to ensure they’re reasonable, effective, and represent an efficient use of public funds. To that end, this post will explore the federal Liberal’s 2023 national action plan to end gender-based violence.
Since the program covers what are technically provincial areas of authority, the government transferred a total of $552 million to the 10 provinces and three territories. Well, except for Quebec. Being Quebec, their agreement included this delicious only-in-Canada-you-say disclaimer:
Although it supports the overall objectives of the National Action Plan to End Gender-Based Violence, the Government of Québec cannot adhere to it because it intends to retain its full responsibility in this area on its territory. Through an agreement that respects its autonomy, the Government of Québec expects to receive its fair share of federal funding to support the programs, initiatives, and services to end gender-based violence that it puts in place based on the needs of its territory.
On the one hand, they’re quite right. The federal government has no constitutional business getting involved here. Although just for consistency, I guess Quebec should have opted out altogether in favor of funding their own program through local tax revenue.
In the event, Quebec graciously agreed to accept $97 million to spend as they saw fit. Is there a nation more generously blessed than ours?
Ok. The program itself is poorly named. Besides the fact that, sadly, there’s no way they’re going to actually “end” gender-based violence, many of the measures are focused on important but tangential objectives like supporting victims and survivors and promoting a responsive justice system.
Beyond the marketing, though, it’s really the practical details that determine success and failure. For this article I’m going to focus on just those measures within the program that aim to directly reduce GBV. Those would be the second and fifth program pillars:
Prevention programs including public awareness campaigns, engaging men and boys in challenging harmful gender norms, and GBV prevention education in schools and communities
Strengthening social infrastructure to address socio-economic determinants such as poverty, housing, and employment disparities with a focus on affordable childcare, healthcare, and technology access
Is there empirical evidence associating those two approaches to actual real-world crime reduction? I'm aware of no meaningful evidence that, for instance, "engaging men and boys in challenging harmful gender norms" has ever been successful in actually reducing GBV rates. Until such evidence is found, we’re probably not ready to devote hundreds of millions of dollars in the hope that it might work.1
What about that fifth pillar: addressing “poverty, housing and employment disparities”? It’s true that studies have shown an association between lower income and higher GBV rates. But no one has yet demonstrated a clear causal relationship - especially considering contemporary and historical societies where extreme poverty is common but violence is rare.
Also, poverty reduction is the official focus of countless existing government programs. Besides income-based tax credits, here are just some of the federal programs that already exist to combat poverty and housing and employment disparities:
Canada Child Benefit
Canada Workers Benefit
Old Age Security
Guaranteed Income Supplement
Canada Disability Benefit
Canada Student Grants and Loans
National School Food Program
Child Care Expansion Loan Program
Canada Student Loan Forgiveness Program
Canada Learning Bond
Canada Student Grants
Youth Mental Health Fund
National Housing Strategy
Service duplication and overlap is not the hallmark of a well-designed program.
The bottom line is that I couldn’t find any measures in the national action plan containing mechanisms that would demonstrably impact GBV rates. That’s not to say there’s nothing of value in the program, but that it would be hard to justify the scope of the expense in terms of its stated goals.
It also means that, ten years down the line, we’re likely to look back at the initiative as another statistical failure. And by “statistical failure” I mean that a statistically quantifiable number of real human beings will have suffered real violence despite the massive program costs.
Of course, that won’t stop governments from lying about the results. The Liberals’ 2024 federal budget document contained this whopper:
In 2015…the Canada Child Benefit was introduced, which has helped cut the child poverty rate by more than half.
It’s true that pandemic benefits did temporarily impact poverty rates. But the most recent available data (2022) shows that the lasting effect was negligible.
Between 2016 (when the program was actually implemented) and 2022, the percentage of one-child families classified as low income dropped from 14.6 percent to 13 percent. The two-child family rate went from 11.4 percent to 10.2 percent, and three-child family rates fell from 17.9 percent to 16.8 percent. In other words, Canada Child Benefit has had an incremental impact - nothing close to “more than half”.
To be fair, there’s more than one relevant Statistics Canada dataset measuring poverty. But even using the persons under 18 years in economic families metric, the drop still wasn’t even close to half: in fact, that measure fell from 13.8 percent in 2016 to 9.8 percent in 2022.
Data had been available months before the budget document was published in April 2024. This left plenty of time for the budget drafters to realize that they’d missed their targets and things were moving in the wrong direction.
Of course, no educator should ever be shy about forcefully condemning all violence. But politically-charged hectoring and nagging is unlikely to change hearts and minds. And demonizing boys just for being boys doesn't seem particularly productive in terms of achieving mission-level social objectives.
UBC psychology professor Don Dutton's 40 years of study of domestic violence says that the whole premis of men always being the perpetrators and women always being the victims is false and this has led to a skewing of support, money, programs, public awareness with the end result that men, who are the victims of domestic abuse 50 percent of the time (according to Dutton's large cohort 20 year study) have little to no support of any kind. "Large peer-reviewed surveys have repeatedly found, he said, “the most common form of domestic violence, 50 per cent, is bilateral, matched for severity by each party (male and female).” The author of Rethinking Domestic Violence and The Domestic Assault of Women (both published by UBC Press) told Clark the second most common form of domestic violence, accounting for 35 per cent of all cases, is perpetrated by women against non-violent men. The third-most common (15 per cent) is male violence against females.” Dutton and counsellors at Nanaimo’s Men’s Centre maintain the vast majority of the tens of millions of dollars the B.C. government spends on domestic violence goes to women, with little going to directly support males." Even those "GBV" is supposed to be one of those catch-all terms designed to, maybe, offend no one and include everyone, just by reading this substack post it's obvious that public consciousness automatically assumes males are never the victims. We've gone so far down the rabbit hole, what with the woefully skewed and inaccurate MMIW report and all that that it's difficult to stand back and admit that this doesn't really reflect reality and maybe programs need to be (hate to use the word) more inclusive.
So yet another Trudeau initiative that, under the hood, is the usual mix of virtue signalling, grift for Quebec, and ineffectiveness.