The best news of 2015 has to be that after 8 long years we saw the crushing defeat of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government by Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. The newly elected Liberal government has already followed through on its pledge to launch a national inquiry into missing and murdered Aboriginal women and girls in Canada.

With recent intense media focus on this issue from both the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail, and the international condemnation of Harper’s unwillingness to call for an inquiry by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the UN Human Rights Committee in its recent report on Canada, Trudeau’s Liberal government seems to be right in step with what looks like a shifting zeitgeist of cultural attitudes on violence against women. The national inquiry is expected to begin sometime in 2016 and a pre-inquiry design process, set up to ensure that the government gets this right, is already underway.

Kathleen Wynne’s Ontario government continues to lead the way among all provincial governments on the issue of violence against women. Last week it introduced legislation that targets sexual violence, workplace harassment, and aims to increase support for survivors. The proposed bill removes the two-year statute of limitations on sexual assault cases in civil court, which is an important recognition of the challenges survivors face in reporting these kinds of crimes. It also requires post-secondary institutions to have a “standalone” sexual violence policy, it puts the onus on employers to keep workers safe, and it shortens the time it takes for those in abusive relationships to break a lease. This is an ambitious and important piece of legislation, and gives all of us who care deeply about these issues some hope.