Senate shouldn’t stall transgender rights bill C-279

Proposal has already passed in the House, writes Justin Ling.

The government should be ashamed of itself.

It’s not often that a self-respecting journalist can write that phrase, not least of which one that considers himself aggressively nonpartisan. If we do, we can usually expect a guest role in the next Conservative party fundraising email.

But the government has spent the past several years actively thwarting the democratic will of Parliament by kneecapping a bill that would afford human rights protections to transgender people. And that’s unconscionable.

Even though the Senate committee is studying the bill, it doesn’t look good for C-279.

Bill C-279 is an NDP initiative that, simply put, affords trans people the same rights as other minorities. It would allow them to file complaints to the Human Rights Commission if discriminated against, and it would make committing or advocating violence against trans people, because of their gender, a hate crime.

You know, crazy stuff that would upend our civilization as we know it, allowing dogs to marry brooms and whatnot.

These are protections every other minority already has. I get fired for gaying it up at work, for example, I could file a complaint against my employer. Or, if I’m attacked by a hate-driven neo-Nazi, the community could rest assured knowing that the law would lock him up and throw away the key.

Adding to the why-haven’t-you-passed-this-yet column is the fact that six of the provinces, including Ontario, have already adopted these provisions on the provincial level.

These simple, but powerful, changes are being opposed by this stubborn government.

Led by their flat-footed captain, a gaggle of bleating goats from Canada’s increasingly irrelevant cult of social conservatism have dubbed this legislation “the bathroom bill,” arguing that it would allow men to wander into women’s change rooms with impunity. An Ontario man, they squawked gleefully, tried to get entry to a women’s shelter by claiming he was trans and he’s protected by the Ontario law!

Baloney. That man was arrested and sentenced to indefinite detention as a dangerous sex offender after a judge, as well as everyone else, agreed that he was not actually transgender.

The more reasonable Conservatives, however, have argued that the bill is merely unnecessary, as courts and tribunals already read protections for trans people into the existing laws, under the “sex” and “disability” classes.

But aside from the obviously offensive pretext of calling trans people disabled, it’s obvious that writing in these protections would have a huge impact. Indeed, they may have helped in the case of Shelby Tracy Tom, a trans woman who was strangled to death and dumped in an alley by a man who killed her because he saw the scars from her sexual reassignment surgery. He copped to manslaughter, serving just 4½ years, as there appeared to be no initiative to try that murder as a hate crime, even as the judge admitted that he killed Tom because she was trans.

Most police services don’t even report the number of crimes committed against trans people.

But it’s not all Conservatives who are culpable in this; 18 supported the bill and, with their support, it passed the House of Commons.

Which is where the real offence comes in: the Senate is killing it.

The Senate Liberals, as well as several Conservatives, are trying to get it brought forward again to be voted on, but the government in the Senate is stalling. It’s increasingly likely that C-279 will simply die on the garish carpets of the Red Chamber, bludgeoned to death by a pigheaded government.

It’s incredibly clear that this is the work of the Prime Minister’s Office — evidenced by the fact MPs were given talking points insisting that “there is no need for a societal debate” on adding these protections for trans people.

The octogenarian bagmen in our broomcloset of so-called “sober second thought” are thwarting a bill passed by our elected members of Parliament to give people human rights protections, because the Prime Minister is telling them to.

For a government supposedly so endeared to reforming our national democratic hangover, and professedly so excited about their newfound friendship with the LGBTQ community, this is a case of petulant hypocrisy.

Angrily throw something out a window or flip a table, because this isn’t how our democracy is supposed to work.