In our recent CharityVillage Connects podcast episode, The 2025 Federal Budget: What Nonprofits Need to Know to Navigate 2026, we gathered experts from across the sector to break down the 2025 federal budget and what it means to nonprofit organizations across Canada.
To better understand how the new federal budget impacts organizations working on the ground, we spoke with Aline Nizigama, National CEO at YWCA Canada, a leading voice for women, girls, and two-spirit and gender diverse people. YWCA Canada is the oldest and largest organization providing services and advocacy to advance gender equity, having been founded over 150 years ago. They are at the forefront of a movement to fight gender-based violence, to build affordable housing, provide high-quality, affordable childcare, advocate for economic equity, and to amplify the voices of youth and youth leadership.
We asked Aline to describe the most impactful parts of the budget for the work being done by YWCA Canada.
Aline Nizigama: …the parts around continuing to fund the women’s sector with the funding for women and gender equality, that renewal and the promises of ongoing funding. There was really a commitment to advance gender equity and supporting women, girls and 2SLGBTQIA+ people across Canada. What was tabled as stable, long-term funding is a necessary investment to help eliminate discrimination and advance the rights of women and gender diverse people. So to me and to us in the sector, this investment in women’s leadership and economic opportunities and efforts to end gender-based violence were and continue to be an essential part to building a more equitable and inclusive Canada.
That was one of the biggest announcements that, as you know, was also made in a pre-budget fashion to reassure the sector that these issues continue to be important for this government. We did a fulsome analysis of the budget that you are all invited to see, to read on our website.
The second aspect was the funding that was announced in housing and the launch of Build Canada Homes as an agency that’s going to help fast track building more affordable housing across Canada. This investment in affordable and non-market housing was seen as a positive and important step towards addressing housing insecurity.
We all know and feel this. Particularly for us, for single parent families, most of them are women. And we really look forward to working with the government to ensure that women and women-led families have long-term, safe, affordable, and deeply affordable places to call home. We also saw that there was a renewed commitment to childcare and expanding early learning. And all these aspects were some of the most important for our work.
Aline then described some of her organization’s concerns with gaps in the budget.
Aline Nizigama: YWCA Canada welcomed the federal commitment to some of the things that I just listed, including ending gender-based violence. But we also noted the lack of additional funding for the continuation of the 10-year national action plan to end gender-based violence. And we say this because we continue to be at a time when gender-based violence has reached crisis levels in Canada. And we hope there’s opportunity to continue to address this and shape some of the subsequent steps in other parts of the government, if it’s multi-year, the government funding that is, and we look forward to understanding how some of the new investments will support measurable progress towards safety and prevention. We see this crisis continuing to rise.
We just held a discussion about the need to continue to focus on ending gender-based violence. We are in a remembrance period when we reflect on the 14 lives that were taken at École Polytechnique in Montreal three decades ago. But we see that the data shows that this issue continues to be at crisis levels. And so we want to work with the government on this.
We also noted other critical gaps, which included a lack of new funding, as I said, to expand and enhance the Canada-wide early learning and childcare program. We know that accessible, affordable, community-based childcare is essential to women’s economic participation. And in our analysis and in our pre-budget consultations, we called for a $500 million investment over five years to expand nonprofit and community-based childcare spaces because we know that this is where you really get a lot of value add and get quality and continue to really focus on affordability for families.
An additional aspect was also on the housing investment because beyond housing, the budget includes limited long-term investment in social infrastructure that supports women’s safety and wellbeing, again, adding to what I just said. And so while we recognize that the investments were there, we continue to see a need to expand on this.
And last, we recognize investments in First Nations infrastructure, things like clean water, but we also call for actions on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action and the calls for justice that were also included in the national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. These are some of the most important pieces that I think could be strengthened in new iterations of the federal government’s funding.
Aline also shared some insight into the advocacy that was done to ensure the maintenance of a Minister of Women and Gender Equality, when there were initial reports that this position may be cut.
Aline Nizigama: In our sector, we believe that there is strength in numbers. And we know that it took more than 400 organizations that came together and advocated for the reinstatement of a women and gender equality department and a dedicated minister. And I like to cite something from my own tradition, my African tradition, a proverb that says, if you want to go fast, go alone. And if you want to go far, go together. And so we know that this means coming together as a sector and putting together our strength and having that collective action to shape programs and policies that will come from the operationalization of this budget.
We know that we still need to work together on applying a gender-based analysis plus to the rest of the budget. And this includes areas such as AI, defense, resource extraction, changes to immigration, changes to the justice and law reforms that we know are coming, tax reforms, and really analyzing the impact that will have on diverse populations of women and their families.
We also added to that, and I know this is going to be a key feature, some of the collective action work that we hope to work on with the workforce strategy. This is really broader, not just the feminist sector, but the nonprofit sector in general. We want to see a workforce strategy and we know that we need to work together as a sector to care for frontline workers. Valuing women, a majority workforce which, in the nonprofit sector, we see over 70 % of the workers being women or gender diverse people.
[This means working] beyond the feminist sector and our other partners, with broader partners, organizations such as Imagine Canada, other federated organizations and coalitions serving youth, those working in the women’s mental health in general, Indigenous and Black and racialized populations serving organizations in general, to make sure we are caring for the carers. And this continues to be a need as well.
We also wanted to know whether Aline felt the federal budget had been successful in applying a gender-based plus approach.
Aline Nizigama: Unfortunately, no, it was not well included or applied. It was very much limited to women and gender equality programs. And we see this as a miss. We also are disheartened by some of the recent remarks that we heard about international development and retracting from supporting women’s rights on the global sphere. And we see this as not very encouraging.
And I’m here to remind folks that feminism and having feminist policies, it’s not a bad word. It’s not a bad approach. It’s actually about leveling the playing field and addressing historic and continuing systemic inequalities and the impact that those have on virtually every aspect of life.
And we want to see this done, and we are actually committing not just as a YWCA movement but as a sector to implementing a GBA+ analysis on all aspects of this budget and we think that if the government is actually interested in learning more about this they need to consult with communities.
And I’m now reminded that we need to include Indigenous voices as well because there are many areas of the budget where questions around sovereignty and commitments to consulting with First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities were not respected. And so we want to ensure that that is done because we know that this is how you get buy-in, you show respect, and you get more success. And so if you’re not implementing community-backed projects, you do not see success and you actually get a lot of pushback. So we want to be able to help and we’re here to do that.
Want to hear more from Aline Nizigama? Listen to her full interview in the video below.
Listen to Aline Nizigama and other sector experts break down the 2025 federal budget and its impacts on nonprofits in our newest podcast episode. Click here to listen.
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