Epidemic or Endemic? Language, Power, and Intimate Partner Violence Social Policy In Ontario and Nova Scotia

Background:

In social policy, how a problem is named determines what solutions become possible and who is held accountable for them. In Canada, the question of whether intimate partner violence (IPV) should be designated an “epidemic” has generated sustained legislative debate. Nova Scotia has legislated the designation in 2024, whereas Ontario has substituted the term “endemic” while routing the issue to committee. Specifically, this study asks: how is IPV represented as a problem across two Canadian provincial legislatures, and what political work does the epidemic/endemic categorization perform?

Method:

Bacchi’s What’s The Problem Represented to Be (WPR) framework is applied to examine how terms like epidemic/endemic function politically, including the assumptions embedded in the framing, the perspectives it silences, and the effects it produces in practice, including what assumptions, absence of certain perspectives, and the resultant impacts the framing has in practice. The WPR framework is applied across 13 legislative documents spanning both provinces, including bills, Hansard debates, committee hearings, and committee reports from 2024 to 2025. All six WPR questions were applied to each document, examining problem representation, underlying assumptions, genealogy, silences, effects, and sites of dissemination. Methodologically, this research demonstrates WPR as a rigorous and replicable tool for comparative legislative analysis that is particularly well-suited to policy contests where naming and categorization themselves are the primary sites of political struggle. The WPR framework enables systematic analysis of legislative language as a site of political struggle.

Results:

Nova Scotia provides the only empirical evidence in the corpus of what epidemic declaration actually produces. The answer, drawn from February 2025 Hansard debates five months post-enactment, is: changed discursive conditions, a political accountability framework, and seven named women dead. The declaration changed how femicide was publicly reported and created the grounds on which advocates returned to the legislature to demand epidemic-scale funding, but did not automatically produce commensurate stable core funding. Further, this declaration partially falsifies the foundational assumption across both corpora that naming precedes and enables adequate action.

The most significant structural difference between jurisdictions is genealogical, tracing to the origin of each province's epidemic framing. Nova Scotia's epidemic designation was grounded in the Mass Casualty Commission, which is a government-established external authority that settled the categorization question before it reached the legislature. Whereas Ontario's designation, rooted in opposition advocacy and the Renfrew County inquest, remained permanently contestable. The government's authority over Ontario's formal IPV policy representation ultimately rested in the Dixon Committee Report, a document whose legitimacy was simultaneously disputed on grounds of partisan authorship and alleged AI generation.

Conclusion and Implications:

These findings carry direct implications for IPV advocacy strategy and social work policy engagement. Epidemic declaration is necessary but not a sufficient condition for emergency-level response. Cross-jurisdictional learning is essential, as Ontario's legislative actors conducted their debate about what declaration would produce without reference to Nova Scotia's enacted experience. Social workers engaged in advocacy must pair declaratory campaigns with explicit funding mechanisms and accountability structures from the outset.