The mandate letter from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Jody Wilson-Raybould sets out an ambitious 15 top priorities for the new Justice Minister.
Last on the list is the direction to “introduce government legislation to add gender identity as a prohibited ground for discrimination under the Canadian Human Rights Act, and to the list of distinguishing characteristics of ‘identifiable group’ protected by the hate speech provisions of the Criminal Code.”
The CBA welcomes the Liberals’ plan to tackle transgender rights. It has long been a concern for the CBA’s Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Community Forum, which has sponsored resolutions and made submissions on issues such as homophobic and transphobic bullying, gender recognition on ID for trans people and restrictions on trans travellers.
A little history:
In 2010, Council passed a resolution sponsored by SOGIC calling on the CBA to “urge the federal, provincial and territorial governments to review their legislation and policies, especially human rights legislation and hate crimes under the Criminal Code, and made amendments necessary to protect individuals from discrimination on the basis of gender identity and gender expression.”
In 2011, we urged the Senate Committee on Human Rights to pass Bill C-389, introduced by NDP MP Bill Siksay in 2009.
Passing Bill C-389 would provide notice to the public that ALL forms of transphobic discrimination are wrong, whether against transgender, transsexual, two-spirit, genderqueer, or gender-non-conforming people however they may identify. The legislative changes set out by Bill C-389 could help prevent violence and discrimination against transgender people. All that a right “read-in” by court precedent can do is address hate crimes and discriminatory conduct once they have already happened.
Bill C-389 died on the order table when the 2011 election was called, but in 2013 the House of Commons passed Bill C-279, Better Protection for Transgender People, introduced by NDP MP Randall Garrison, which sought essentially the same protections as C-389. Once again, SOGIC was in favour of the bill’s passage, and once again, the bill made it as far as the Senate, where once again it ran into a roadblock – not an election call this time, but an amendment by Senator Plett which essentially stripped what critics had begun calling “the bathroom bill” of its purpose.
This time, then-CBA president Michele Hollins wrote to Senate members to express the CBA’s “dismay” at the amendment.
Senator Plett’s rationale for this amendment positioned trans people (and trans women in particular) as a threat to others in sex segregated spaces, and users of sex segregated spaces as being vulnerable. Senator Plett described trans women as biological males, which erases and delegitimizes their gender identity and expression. Sadly, this delegitimization is at the root of the discrimination, harassment and violence that trans people face, not only in sex segregated spaces, but in employment, housing and in the community.
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Senator Plett also suggested that the inclusion of gender identity as an explicitly prohibited ground of discrimination would shield individuals posing as transgender and allow them access to sex segregated spaces in order to victimize vulnerable persons.
Opposition to Bill C-279 appears to rest primarily on a misapprehension of existing human rights law and criminal provisions. Assertions that legal protections for trans persons would allow male sexual predators to invade women’s washrooms and change rooms wilfully ignores the fact that nothing in the proposed legislation would detract from existing criminal prohibitions against voyeurism and sexual assault. Prevalent discriminatory mischaracterizations of the proposed legislation provide further compelling evidence for why it should be passed. (emphasis in original)
The bill failed to become law before the 2015 federal election.