Crowd cheers as Calgary city council unanimously passes conversion therapy ban
CALGARY – A rainbow-clad crowd burst into applause at city hall Monday as council unanimously passed a motion to ban conversion therapy.
Calgary joins Edmonton and St. Albert as another Alberta community taking steps to block the harmful and discredited practice of using psychological or spiritual intervention to change a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.
City staff will now draft a bylaw that prohibits conversion therapy and fine anyone found advertising or offering the practice in Calgary. The motion also includes a request to push the federal and provincial governments to end the practice.
Coun. Jeromy Farkas, who is openly bisexual, teared up as he talked about his experiences coming out at a young age.
“When another person in authority, someone I trusted and admired, approached me and said that I could, more or less, pray the ‘me’ away, I felt humiliated,” Farkas said.
“I would say more than 20 years later and serving in a public role like I am, where every step and misstep is broadcast on television, I still have never felt so humiliated as that day.”
Many councillors said the province and feds need to do more about conversion therapy. The Liberal government is currently looking at a ban across Canada, but there’s no law in place yet. Last year,
Alberta’s UCP government cancelled a working group tasked with banning conversion therapy in the province, just a month before the federal government issued a letter to provinces and territories urging them to do their part in abolishing the “cruel exercise.”
Farkas said he still has concerns about whether the move to ban conversion therapy should fall to the city when the other levels of government have more powers to stop it.
But he still put his support behind the motion.
“Some will say that this is virtue signalling, but is it worth it to send a signal about the kind of city we are and we want to be? Damn straight.”
‘It sends shivers up your spine’
Lois Szabo, 83, watched at city hall as one by one, council members spoke in support of the ban on conversion therapy. In 1970, she helped found Club Carousel, Calgary’s first gay bar. That was a time when people “wouldn’t have dared” to be a politician and openly LGBTQ.
“If they dared to enter politics at all, they wouldn’t have been open and out and supported,” she said. “It sends shivers up your spine to realize that people are now standing up.”
Szabo came out as a lesbian in the 1960s, and she said the fight for equal rights is far from over.
“We can’t let up for one minute. I’m disappointed to see not so many grey-haired people at this event. They should be packed here with people who went through hell to get what we’ve got.”