ottawa –
Members of the LGBTQ2s+ community have long faced discrimination and prejudice in Canada and abroad, and must fight for job protection, access to services, and basic human rights. Canada legalized same-sex marriage nearly 20 years ago, and the Canadian Human Rights Act has long prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or expression.
But this year has sparked a heated debate over LGBTQ2S+ rights for transgender and other gender nonconforming children. Both New Brunswick and Saskatchewan have introduced policies requiring parental permission before students can use their preferred name or pronouns in school.
Egale Canada, an advocacy group for LGBTQ+ people and issues, also reported more than 6,400 anti-LGBTQ2S+ protests and incidents of online hate in the first three months of 2023 alone.
The Canadian Press reached out to members of the bipartisan Canadian Pride Caucus on Parliament Hill about the past year regarding LGBTQ2S+ rights and debate. Two Liberal cabinet ministers, a New Democrat MP and a senator tell us what they’re seeing and hearing in Ottawa and beyond, how they feel about it and how they’re tackling it. talked about.
Minister of Employment Randy Boissonneau
As a child, Liberal MP Randy Boissonneau (Edmonton Centre) never thought he would have a job, be loved by a “great partner” or work in politics, let alone be appointed as a special adviser on LGBTQ2S+ issues. He said he had never thought about it. Prime Minister as in 2016.
Despite these personal realities, he said 2023 was a tough year.
“This was a setback for the movement for rights for LGBTQ people,” he said. “We needed a $1.5 million emergency fund just to save Pride (the event).”
He said the very issue of identity is being weaponized, including through “American-style politics by Canadian politicians who seek to divide communities and prey on the most vulnerable transgender children.” Stated. He called it “disgusting behavior”, adding: “For some children, going to school is the only place they actually feel like themselves.”
By 2024, Boissonneau said, there should be a discussion that “being an ally is no longer enough.”
“These kids need people to be champions,” he added. “An ally is someone who has your back when you’re in the room. A champion is someone who has your back when you’re not.”
New Brunswick Senator René Cormier, Co-Chair of the Canada Pride Caucus
Sen. Rene Cormier said, “The Senate is the safest place for me as a queer person because the Senate deals with rights. And until I became a senator, I realized how important rights are. I didn’t realize it was there. It sounds ridiculous in a way.” He is a member of the Independent Senators Group.
“I’ve never had to talk about my life in public because I thought other people’s lives were more important than my own. But now I’m trying to tell the younger generation that you too. “I think it’s important for people to understand that they are part of the LGBTQ community. You can be a senator, you can be anything you want to be,” said Cormier, who was appointed on the advice of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2016. he said.
“In Canada, we’re really blessed. We still have a lot of problems, but there’s still a lot of misconceptions about what it means to be from this community. People think we’re too loud. I’m thinking, we’re out too much,” he said. He said.
“But I think it’s important to stand up and speak. Silence is not the solution.”
Cormier said the current situation is polarized and lacks nuance, and there needs to be better education about what it means to be transgender. Removing such discussions from school sex education curricula will not solve the problem, he said.
“I think it’s really alarming that we as a country are putting our children in the middle of political games,” he said. “There’s a lot to do there.”
That effort should be done together across all generations and identities, he said.
“Because at the end of the day, we’re all human beings and we all want to be happy.”
New Democratic Rep. Randall Garrison
Early in his career as an MP for Esquimalt-Saanich-Sooke, British Columbia, Randall Garrison sat in the House of Commons next to someone who brought family photos and a Bible to his desk every day.
One day, a New Democratic Party member brought in a photo of her husband, and another member asked if Mr. Garrison was making fun of him.
“I said, ‘No, you bring what’s important to you to the House. It comes every day, and I’ll bring what’s important to me.’ Then, at first, our Despite the rift between us, we became friends.”
In June, Garrison and researcher Delana Thompson released a report on the situation of transgender and gender diverse people in Canada. Its 29 recommendations include ways to strengthen the LGBTQ2S+ community in response to hate.
“When faced with hate, we, as a community, cannot always rely on others to protect us. But if you are poor, unemployed, sick, or dealing with all of these… You don’t have to do it if you have to. And besides, you don’t have a lot of resilience to deal with hate,” said Garrison, who is retiring from Congress.
“If you’re suffering from all the other disadvantages of being transgender or non-binary, it’s hard to even start an organization that can give you a public voice because you’re too busy trying to survive,” he said. added.
He said hatred against LGBTQ2S+ people is on the rise again, both online and in person. He said the family he was traveling with had their pride flags torn down and their house set on fire. But he also noted that police and the local mayor acted quickly.
“So while we have seen an increase in hate, we have also seen improvements in how public institutions respond to hate,” he said.
Minister of Labor Seamus O’Regan
Seamus O’Regan wrote a deeply personal speech earlier this year on a plane to Geneva to attend an International Labor Organization conference. At the time, some countries in Africa and the Middle East called on the U.N. agency to remove language from its budget that protects workers based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
“I’m a vulnerable worker. I’m Canada’s Minister of Labor, but I’m gay and I’m married. If I were, I would either not be able to work, I would be in jail, or I would be sentenced to death.” “I would have been sentenced to “born in a smaller part of the member state than I was,” Mr. O’Regan told Congress.
“I was looking into the eyes of people who would persecute and kill me for who I am,” O’Regan said in an interview this month. “It felt very public and international, but at the same time it felt very intimate and very personal.”
O’Regan, a Liberal MP from St. John’s and Southmount Pearl, New Jersey, constantly talks about how tenuous LGBTQ2S+ rights can sometimes feel, given that they were earned during his lifetime. He said he had done so.
He also said being openly gay on Parliament Hill forces people to accept that he’s there.
“I exist. I’m not theoretical. If you’re going to take away or undermine gay rights in this country, look me in the eye and do it.”
He said that as a cabinet minister, he could make legislative or regulatory changes that he deemed helpful regarding federal jurisdiction.
“But sometimes in local and territorial spheres, and even in international spheres, we have to rely on the moral case,” he said. “I would not hesitate to do so, and I did.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 23, 2023.