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At Toronto Metropolitan University medical school, some students are more equal than others

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READ THE REALITY CHECK

By Bruce Pardy

 

 

A new Aristotle Foundation Reality Check from Queen’s University law professor Bruce Pardy details how Canada’s courts reinterpreted even the clear equality clause in the constitution to read in anti-individual “equity.” That hollowed out a founding Canadian principle of equality before the law.

Canada’s newest medical school will select students not for their ability, but their identity.

Great, as if Canada’s healthcare system wasn’t bad enough already.

The school, which opens next fall at Toronto Metropolitan University, will reserve 75 per cent of its seats for Indigenous, Black, and other “equity-deserving” groups including 2SLGBTQ+. These students will need an undergraduate GPA of only 3.3 on a 4-point scale, and maybe not even that; for comparison, the University of Toronto medical school’s average accepted GPA is 3.95.

Able-bodied straight white students can’t apply for these seats. It’s TMU’s affirmative action school for doctors who can’t get in on their merits. Canada now has full-blown racial and gender discrimination. How did we get here? The Supreme Court of Canada is largely to blame.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court brought race-based admissions at American universities to an end. Harvard University, among others, preferred Black and brown students to Asian and white ones in the name of “diversity.” That practice, the court declared, violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Equal protection “cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color.” In the United States, equal treatment under the law is a constitutional requirement.

But not in Canada. “Every individual is equal before and under the law,” says the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, “and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination …” But the Supreme Court of Canada has long insisted that the clause does not mean equal treatment but equity.

Equity, also known as “substantive equality” or “equality of outcome,” means treating different groups differently. It means applying standards and granting rights to compensate for perceived advantages, disadvantages, strengths, and weaknesses. Equity is a right granted not to individuals as individuals, but to members of groups.

Equal treatment and equity are opposites. The law cannot apply the same laws and standards to everyone and also adjust them depending upon the group. As Friedrich Hayek put it, “From the fact that people are very different, it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either the one or the other, but not both at the same time.”

So what happened? The Supreme Court of Canada did not decide its first case under the equality provision, section 15(1), until 1989. In the interim, the federal government established a Royal Commission on Equality in Employment, also known as the Abella Commission after its commissioner Rosalie Abella. Abella, now retired, would later become the most activist judge on the court. The commission’s report, released in 1984, recommended employment equity policies in the federal government and in federally regulated companies, and led to the passage of the federal Employment Equity Act in 1986, which required affirmative action programs that gave preference to candidates from some groups over others.

The Act did not bind the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Charter, but it was newly in place when the Supreme Court heard the case of David Mark Andrews, a British citizen and permanent resident of Canada, and a qualified lawyer, who challenged a British Columbia requirement that lawyers be Canadian citizens. In its 1989 decision, the court struck down the requirement. Justice William McIntyre wrote, “… a law which treats all identically and which provides equality of treatment between “A” and “B” might well cause inequality for “C,” depending on differences in personal characteristics and situations. To approach the ideal of full equality before and under the law… the main consideration must be the impact of the law on the individual or the group concerned…”

The court has been doubling down on equity ever since. Unlike the American Constitution, the Charter contains an exception to its equality guarantee. Section 15(2) allows for programs of affirmative action that discriminate against members of some groups to promote the fortunes of others. It was meant to be an exception, but the Supreme Court has made it the general rule.

In Canada, the Charter may not even apply to university admission policies (because universities are not governments), but human rights codes do. Like section 15(1) of the Charter, human rights codes promise a right to equal treatment. But in accordance with the Supreme Court’s equality jurisprudence, human rights have come to mean equity too. In 2022, the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal said that white people cannot claim discrimination. “An allegation of racial discrimination or discrimination on the grounds of colour,” it wrote, “is not one that can be or has been successfully claimed by persons who are white and non-racialized.”

Thanks to the Supreme Court, equality rights have become weapons wielded by preferred groups to demand more lenient standards and advantageous outcomes. In Canada, some people are more equal than others. Remember that next time you’re waiting to see your newly minted doctor.

Bruce Pardy is executive director of Rights Probe, professor of law at Queen’s University, senior fellow with the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, and author of the new report “A Right to Unequal Treatment”.

Know about the Dorchester Review?

You should.

Our friends at the Dorchester Review have printed excerpts of The 1867 Project—Why Canada Should Be Cherished, Not Cancelled. In addition to such fine selections, their quarterly has other terrific historical work.

Check them out here.  

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Aristotle Foundation

Canada has the world’s MOST relaxed gender policy for minors

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Are Canada and the United States out-of-step on gender policy for minors?

READ the new study by the Aristotle Foundation and Do No Harm: https://aristotlefoundation.org/study…

Watch our five-minute video on how most Canadian provinces and many U.S. states are out-of-step with UK and European policy on gender policy for children.

 

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Alberta

On gender, Alberta is following the science

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By J. Edward Les, MD

 

Despite falling into disrepute in recent years, “follow the science” remains our best shot at getting at the truth of the physical sciences.

But science, if we are to place our trust in it, must be properly defined and understood; it is at its essence an ever-changing process, a relentless pursuit of truth that is never “settled,” and one that is unafraid to discard old hypotheses in the face of new evidence.

And it is in this light—in the unforgiving glare of honest science—that Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s three new legislative initiatives around gender policy are properly understood, notwithstanding the opprobrium they’ve attracted from critics.

Bill 26, the Health Statutes Amendment Act, proposes to prohibit the prescription of puberty blockers and cross-gender hormones for the treatment of gender dysphoria to youth aged 15 and under. It would allow minors aged 16 and 17 to begin puberty blockers and hormone therapies for gender “reassignment” and “affirmation” purposes only with parental, physician, and psychologist approval. The bill also prohibits health professionals from performing sex reassignment surgeries on minors.

Bill 27, the Education Amendment Act, seeks to enshrine parents’ rights to be notified if their kids change their names/pronouns at school, and it gives parents the right to “opt in” to what sort of gender and sex education their kids are exposed to in school.

And Bill 29, the Fairness and Safety in Sports Act, is designed to protect females in sports by ensuring that women and girls can compete in biological female-only divisions, while supporting the formation of co-ed opportunities to support transgender athletes.

Each of these initiatives is entirely reasonable, given what we know of the science underpinning “gender care,” and of the undeniable advantages that a male physique confers upon biological males competing in sports.

The notion that the trifecta of puberty blockers, cross-gender hormones, and revisionist surgery is a pathway to good health was a hypothesis initially devised by Dutch researchers, who were looking to ease the discomfort of transgender adults struggling with incongruence between their physical appearance and their gender identities. As a hypothesis, it was perhaps reasonable.

But as the UK’s Cass Review exposed in withering detail last spring, its premises were wholly unsupported by evidence, and its implementation has caused grievous harm for youth. As Finnish psychiatrist Riittakerttu Kaltiala, one of the architects of that country’s gender program, put it last year, “Gender affirming care is dangerous. I know, because I helped pioneer it.”

It’s no accident, then, that numerous European jurisdictions have pulled back from the “gender affirming care” pathway for youth, such as Sweden, Finland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

It makes perfect sense that Canadians should be cautious as well, and that parents should be apprised if their children are being exposed to these theories at school and informed if their kids are caught up in their premises.

Yet the Canadian medical establishment has remained curiously intransigent on this issue, continuing to insist that the drug-and-surgery-based gender-affirming care model is rooted in evidence.

Premier Smith was asked by a reporter last month whether decisions on these matters aren’t best left to discussions between doctors and their patients; to which she replied:

“I would say doctors aren’t always right.”

Which is rather an understatement, as anyone familiar with the opioid drug crisis can attest, or as anyone acquainted with the darker corners of medical history knows: the frontal lobotomy saga, the thalidomide catastrophe, and the “recovered memories of sexual abuse” scandal are just a few examples of where doctors didn’t “get it right.”

As physicians, we advocate strongly for self-regulation and for the principle that medical decisions are private matters between physicians and patients. But self-regulation isn’t infallible, and when it fails it can be very much in the interests of the public—and especially of patients—for others to intervene, whether they be journalists, lawyers, or political leaders.

The trans discussion shouldn’t be a partisan issue, although it certainly has become one in Canada. It’s worth noting that Britain’s freshly elected Labour Party chose to carry on with the cautious approach adopted by the preceding administration in light of the Cass Review.

Premier Smith’s new polices are eminently sensible and in line with the stance taken by our European colleagues. None of her initiatives are “anti-trans.” Instead, they are pro-child, pro-women, and pro-athlete, and it’s difficult to see how anyone can quibble with that.

Dr. J. Edward Les, MD, is a pediatrician in Calgary, senior fellow at the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, and co-author of Teenagers, Children, and Gender Transition Policy: A Comparison of Transgender Medical Policy for Minors in Canada, the United States, and Europe.

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