Protecting one of Canada’s most vulnerable minorities should be a no-brainer

  • May 25, 2017

The CBA appeared on May 11 before the Senate’s Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee to urge the passage of a bill it says has been “debated in Parliament for far too long.”

Marie-Laure Leclercq, the first member of a major Montréal law firm to transition while practising, and employment lawyer Siobhan O’Brien appeared before the committee on the CBA’s behalf to argue in favour of Bill C-16, which would amend the Canadian Human Rights Act to include gender identity and gender expression as prohibited grounds of discrimination, and the Criminal Code to include them in the definition of hate crimes and as an aggravating factor in sentencing.

When Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould tabled the legislation last year it was the seventh time over the course of a decade that parliamentarians had tried to include gender identity and gender expression in the list of protected conditions, but it was the first time that a sitting government had done so.

“Members of Parliament, Senators and dozens of witnesses, including the CBA, have all had opportunities to be heard in the long saga of parliamentary efforts to provide legal protections for transgender persons,” the CBA says in its submission, a letter from Association President René Basque to Senator Bob Runciman, who chairs the committee. The letter addresses the two main arguments against the bill: that it will further endanger women and children and that it will impede freedom of expression.

The last time a bill on this issue made it to the Senate, it became widely known as the “bathroom bill” after a Senate committee added a number of amendments that would restrict the use of public washrooms and changing rooms – effectively gutting the intent of the bill.

The suggestion that passage of this bill would endanger women and children in public toilets or locker rooms “has been fully explored in Parliament. It has no legal, scientific or factual foundation,” the submission says, adding that the people who need protection are the transgender individuals “who fear for their safety in public spaces because of the way they are perceived by others.”

The second argument against the bill, that it would impede the freedom of expression of those who find certain concepts objectionable, is a “misunderstanding of human rights and hate crimes legislation,” the submission says.

“The amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act will not compel the speech of private citizens,” the submission says. “Nor will it hamper the evolution of academic debates about sex and gender, race and ethnicity, nature and culture, and other genuine and continuing inquiries that mark our common quest for understanding of the human condition.”

What it will do, however, is protect one of Canada’s most vulnerable minorities. The federal government is the only one of the federal-provincial-territorial governments which does not currently have legislation protecting gender identity or gender expression, or both (a bill in Yukon has passed second reading).

The CBA urges the Senate to pass Bill C-16 without amendment.

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