‘We work for change’: Chow announces funding for program supporting women fleeing intimate partner violence | CBC News

The City of Toronto will match $100,000 in donations made to a rent subsidy program supporting women who have fled intimate partner violence, Mayor Olivia Chow announced on Friday, the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. 

The rent subsidy program is run by Interval House, a shelter for women survivors of intimate partner violence and their children. 

Chow made the announcement at a memorial ceremony marking 35 years since the L’École Polytechnique massacre. Fourteen women were killed in an anti-feminist shooting rampage by a lone male gunman at the Montreal school on Dec. 6, 1989. 

“First we mourn, then we work for change,” Chow said at the ceremony, held at Women’s College Hospital. 

Currently, 10 families are being supported by the rent subsidy program — a number set to double after the city’s contribution, Chow said. 

“If you don’t have a permanent home, it’s hard to heal,” she said. “It’s hard to find independence … [and] break that cycle of violence.” 

The city is looking at forms of sustained funding for the program in the future, the mayor’s office said in an email to CBC Toronto. 

Chow, Freeland mark 35 years since Montreal massacre 

Chow and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland were among those who participated at Friday’s rose ceremony, placing roses in a vase in honour of the L’École Polytechnique massacre victims. 

The women were killed “for the crime, the offence, of being women and daring to study what patriarchy deemed to be a masculine field,” Freeland said. Almost all of the victims were engineering students. 

In 1991, the federal government designated Dec. 6 as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women to mark the massacre. 

Additional roses were presented on Friday for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, as well as black women and girls and transgender and non-binary people who experience violence. A fourth rose commemorated all victims of violence.

Freeland said she was delighted to be at the ceremony with Chow, Coun. Dianne Saxe and Jessica Bell, MPP for University—Rosedale. 

“It’s a good day to point out that here today, we have four women who have been elected by the people of this city and this community to represent them,” she said.