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Nurses across Canada are facing an alarming rise in workplace violence. Physical assaults, threats, intimidation and verbal abuse are becoming routine parts of the job in emergency departments, long‑term care, clinics and community health care settings. The conditions driving this crisis are widespread: chronic understaffing, overcrowded facilities and systems stretched far beyond capacity leave nurses exposed and unsupported. Instead of receiving meaningful protections and support, many nurses are left to manage dangerous situations on their own, working every shift in fear.
Nurses are demanding real solutions: stronger security measures, timely incident responses, enforceable zero‑tolerance policies, proper staffing levels, and accountability from employers and governments. Safety cannot be optional. Nurses deserve workplaces where protection is guaranteed and zero-tolerance policies are enforced.
Across the country, nurses are calling for coordinated, national action and legislated standards that ensure safe working conditions. Because safe care starts with protecting the people who provide it.
No nurse should go to work fearing for their safety. We need enforceable protections, zero-tolerance policies, and accountability from employers and governments – because safe nurses mean safe care.”
Linda Silas,
President of the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions
From coast to coast to coast, we acknowledge the ancestral andunceded territory of all the Inuit, Métis and First Nations Peoples that call this land home. The Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions is located on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishnaabeg People. As settlers and visitors, we feel it’s important to acknowledge the importance of these lands, which we each call home. We do this to reaffirm our commitment and responsibility to improve relationships between nations, to work towards healing the wounds of colonialism and to improve our own understanding of local Indigenous Peoples and their cultures
The Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions (CFNU) is Canada’s largest nurses’ organization, representing frontline unionized nurses and nursing students in every sector of health care – from home care and LTC to community and acute care – and advocating on key priorities to strengthen public health care across the country. We are proud to advocate for our members and promote the nursing profession on the national level, and we work tirelessly to protect the quality of health care for our patients and our universal public health care system.
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