Council approves ban on conversion therapy
City council took the last step Monday to stop businesses from offering the harmful, widely discredited practice of conversion therapy.
The vote sees Calgary join other Alberta municipalities, including Edmonton, that have made similar moves to stop any advertising or offering of services that aim to change or repress a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
Coun. Evan Woolley said city staff delivered exactly what council asked for when they gave unanimous approval to a motion asking for the bylaw in February, and the vote is an important move for protecting the LGBTQ community.
“Reflecting on this 10 years from now, think about what side of history you want to be on,” he said.
Anyone found in violation of the bylaw could face a $10,000 fine. The city’s new rules don’t ban services that relate to “non-judgmental exploration and acceptance” of a person’s identity.
A bylaw needs three readings to become law, and council voted unanimously in favour of the first reading. But the final vote was 14-1 as Coun. Joe Magliocca voted against the following two readings. He said he supported banning conversion therapy, but council voted down his suggestion to move the city’s definition closer to wording from the federal government.
The federal government is currently looking to add conversion therapy to the Criminal Code, but the legislation hasn’t passed yet, and their definition of conversion therapy could still change.
On Monday, council spent more than two hours asking questions about the new bylaw, with several councillors looking for clarification about how it would apply in a variety of different situations.
Coun. Gian-carlo Carra said the discussion was getting bogged down in “minutiae” after an extensive committee discussion earlier this month, when councillors spent two days listening to a total of 121 speakers at a public hearing.
“We should have a very clear understanding that this is an abhorrent practice that ruins lives. We heard from people who are suffering from those effects,” he said.
“This is a practice that is not as archaic or a thing of the past as a lot of us would hope to be the case.”
The city received upward of 1,800 written submissions on the bylaw, and councillors reported getting hundreds of emails in recent days.
Mayor Naheed Nenshi said there was an “organized effort” behind the volume of feedback council saw.
“People thought Calgary, with our reputation as a conservative city, would be a place where they could take a stand against the rights of gender and sexually diverse people,” he said. “And obviously, council today proved them wrong.”
Coun. Jeromy Farkas, who is openly bisexual, said he’d received emails “pointedly making the claim that I’m somehow inhuman, that I’m unfit for office, that I’m unfit to receive God’s love or anyone else’s.”
He said he wouldn’t dignify those messages with a response, and he told his own personal story of being made to feel ashamed about his identity when he was growing up.
He said he was satisfied that the bylaw is crafted in a way that doesn’t restrict religious thoughts or beliefs or prevent anyone’s right to worship. The Ward 11 councillor also pointed out that the bylaw won’t regulate anyone’s private conversations because the city doesn’t have jurisdiction over that.
Farkas said he’d be willing to revisit the bylaw in the future if any “unintended consequences” come up.