In December 2025, the Government of Ontario released an 877 page report “examining the scale” of intimate partner violence (IPV) in Ontario. Despite calls to label IPV an epidemic, as 116 municipalities in Ontario have done, including Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton and all three cities in Peel, the report decided to define it as endemic. It’s a small, but significant difference.
The report states that “such declarations may raise awareness, they remain largely symbolic and lack the operational mechanisms necessary to effect meaningful change.” However, even a symbolic gesture is better than a harmful one.
The IPV report’s creation and development process was abnormal. Rather than the usual team of professional research staff writing the report, it was authored by a single Progressive Conservative MPP, Jess Dixon, and is filled with incorrect citations displaying tell-tale signs of AI hallucinations.
“What I want this government to do is to address the issue of intimate partner violence with the urgency and crisis level action that it deserves,” NDP MPP Kristyn Wong-Tam said in a December interview. “If you have falsified citations and you have hallucinated footnotes and sources, then the assumptions that the report makes is now called into question.”
On page 52, an experiment from England related to free school meals is cited, but links to an unrelated article titled “Giant Lipoma over Thigh,” and the experiment isn’t even real. A report on “Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence Among Young People” is cited by the IPV report multiple times, but with varying accuracy, attribution and formatting, even when on the same page, seen on page 72. Or, in the case of citation 118 on page 69, the attribution is not the same between the footnote and body text, and the information isn’t accurate to the reference.
The NDP MPPs who were members of the committee responsible for the IPV report, withdrew a month before its publication, citing concerns that the process lacked integrity, accountability and respect.
“We knew we couldn’t honor the voices and the testimonies of the survivors if we stayed in that committee writing process and allowed the report, as it was and as it is, to be the only response,” said NDP MPP Alexa Gilmour in a December interview. “[It] ultimately doesn’t give the community what they asked for.”
When around 80 per cent of IPV goes unreported, proper acknowledgement and discussion is necessary to help those experiencing it. The flaws in the report risk further alienating survivors.
“I spent 18 months of my time in committee, listening to hundreds of witnesses, over 100 submissions, taking copious amounts of notes,” said Wong-Tam. “I didn’t do any of that lightly. I did not want to leave that committee…I literally begged them to work with the official opposition to fix their report.”
Instead, it faded into the background, scarcely covered. The NDP’s dissenting report, which does call to formally declare IPV an epidemic, was also mostly ignored.
“Declaring it an epidemic would compel the government to take emergency response and swift action, bringing critical funding, system-wide reform, rapid inter-ministerial coordination, and a crisis-level government response,” reads the dissenting report. “The declaration that IPV is endemic has triggered no such response.”
Now, over six months after the publication of the report, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that IPV can be the basis for lawsuits, but the Government of Ontario has done little to help survivors. Even the report itself has been largely forgotten.
“We would have had a meaningful document for people who had poured out themselves for the committee, and instead, we got a report…that turns out to have been largely AI, written with tremendous amount of errors that disrespects the voices of survivors and makes the report unusable,” said Gilmour. “When we play games with people’s lives, whole communities suffer, and our province suffers.”