Why BC Cities Can’t Afford to Ignore Domestic Violence

In recent months, British Columbia has witnessed more than isolated tragedies. These are alarms exposing the lie that violence in the home is a private matter. Its costs are public and its consequences are everywhere.

The summer of 2025 alone saw horrific incidents of gender-based violence across B.C. At the end of June, an elderly couple died in a murder-suicide involving intimate partner violence in their Abbotsford home.

On Friday of that same week, in a Kelowna parking lot, a young mother named Bailey McCourt was allegedly killed by her ex.

Three days later, a woman in her 60s was fatally attacked by her partner in their Surrey home; the man was then shot by police.

The following week, on July 13, 40-year-old Ivy Michelle Bell was fatally stabbed in Gastown.

Then on July 20, a 33-year-old man killed his girlfriend in Richmond.

At the end of the summer, on Aug. 26, police discovered the remains of Jessica Cunningham in her home in Maple Ridge; her partner was charged the same day.

These are not isolated tragedies or outliers.

They are the human toll of gender-based violence in our province today.

And they reflect a chilling pattern of escalating gender-based violence across British Columbia, violence rooted in misogyny, sustained by systemic failure and playing out in homes, in neighbourhoods, in city systems across the province.

Violent crime is going down. But not violence against women

While Canada’s overall homicide rate declined in 2024, women did not share in that trend. Twenty-eight more women were killed than the year before. Nearly half of all women murdered were killed by a current or former partner.

In B.C., while most violent crime is going down, violence against women is rising.

Municipal leaders have pointed to declining crime in neighbourhoods like Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Unfortunately, this obscures a deeper truth that for many women, the most dangerous place isn’t the street; it is the home.

And cities are doing little to intervene before it’s too late.

When cities talk about public safety, the conversation often focuses on graffiti, break-ins or the visible fallout of addiction and housing instability.

I’m the executive director of Battered Women’s Support Services Association, a Vancouver-based non-profit that provides education, advocacy and support to women. Our work to address gender-based violence confirms that the root of much of the visible “disorder” we might see in the streets is unaddressed violence in the home.

When violence inside the home goes unaddressed, it becomes a public issue, driving homelessness, visible trauma, emergency calls, problematic substance use and safety concerns in streets, shelters, schools and transit systems.

What doing nothing costs us

At Battered Women’s Support Services, we estimate the cost of inaction on intimate partner violence at $11,000 per person, per year. This figure draws from Justice Canada’s national estimate of $7.4 billion annually, distributed across sectors like policing, health care, housing and justice.

When applied locally and accounting for B.C.’s emergency shelter costs, court delays and the pressure on municipal services, the true cost is likely even higher. Cities are already paying this price and doing so reactively, inefficiently and without a co-ordinated plan.

We’ve met with mayors and councillors in Richmond, Surrey, Abbotsford, Kelowna, Burnaby and Vancouver. Their message is clear: most cities want to act, but they need a road map.

We’re calling on all municipalities to step up

Vancouver is the largest city in B.C. and a leader that sets the precedent for public safety planning and budget priorities across the province.

Yet the city has issued no co-ordinated response to the rise in femicide or domestic homicide.

To date, there is no Vancouver acknowledgment, no task force, no strategy, no survivor-informed safety plan.

Meanwhile, remarkably, other municipalities are stepping up.

This year, Prince George tabled an inspired resolution for the upcoming 2025 Union of BC Municipalities convention, recognizing intimate partner violence and human trafficking as municipal responsibilities.

The Prince George resolution calls for the creation of local task forces that include survivors, police, housing and anti-violence leaders. It calls to assign a staff lead in city hall to co-ordinate violence prevention. It asks city communications to shift social norms. It requires police to use risk assessment tools. It calls on municipalities to track the cost of violence and report it annually.

This year, B.C. Attorney General Niki Sharma commissioned a systemic review of the B.C. legal system’s treatment of intimate partner violence and sexual violence by Kim Stanton.

The review revealed that nearly 48 per cent of women over age 15 in B.C. have experienced intimate partner violence. With a statistic like that, it should be obvious that violence against women is not a fringe issue. Gender-based violence deepens inequity: some groups suffer more, heal less and are most likely to be failed by legal and support systems.

To address domestic violence is also to address systemic inequality.

As the Union of BC Municipalities convention convenes in Victoria next week, cities face a choice: keep treating gender-based violence as a side-of-the-desk issue, or confront it as a core threat to public safety, economic recovery and community well-being.

Let this be the year cities step forward.

Let this be the moment we begin designing safety with survivors in mind, in memory of Bailey McCourt, Ivy Michelle Bell, Jessica Cunningham and all the women whose names we’ll never know, but whose lives should never have been lost.