From LifeSiteNews

By Jonathon Van Maren

After Alberta’s Danielle Smith put forth legislation to protect kids from being gender ‘transitioned,’ the Canadian media went on a predictable melt down, citing ‘experts’ who blatantly lie to advance the LGBT agenda.

A year after announcing her intention to combat transgender ideology and protect children, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has tabled three pieces of UCP (United Conservative Party) government legislation: 

• The Education Amendment Act 2024 will require parental consent for “socially transitioning” children under the age of 16 (changing a child’s name or “preferred pronouns”). The bill also gives parents an “opt-in” option for any sexual or content at school. Smith has emphasized that the Alberta Teaching Profession Commission has the power to discipline teachers if they decide to break the law. 

• The Health Statues Amendment Act 2024 will ban the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors, as well as prohibit sex change surgeries on minors. 

• The Fairness and Safety in Sport Act will ban trans-identifying men from female sports teams.  

Together, these three bills represent the most definitive pushback against gender ideology in Canada by any premier. Smith’s decision to announce her intent to pursue such legislation and then wait has turned out to be politically savvy—it has given the UCP government a good look at the LGBT response, and during that time the U.K.’s Labour government has successfully fought to maintain a similar ban in the courts and publicly rebutted many of the scare tactics used by LGBT activists.

Smith and the UCP are thus walking into this debate with eyes wide open, and are clearly certain that the public is on their side (it is) and that the legislation can survive the court challenges surely coming from LGBT activists. The policies are clearly popular with the UCP party’s base, who handed Smith a staggering 91.5% approval rating in her leadership review at UCP gathering in Red Deer last Saturday.  

The party also passed 35 policy resolutions, including several that indicate the UCP’s willingness to go further in fighting transgender ideology, with resolutions that would restrict “exclusively female spaces” like bathrooms and changerooms to females and designating transgender surgeries as “elective cosmetic procedures” not funded by the taxpayer. The motions received near-unanimous support.  

The Canadian press, unsurprisingly, is working hard to present policies that the vast majority of Canadians support as an attack on fundamental norms (albeit norms that only surfaced in the last few years and were never presented to voters). Global News ran the headline: “Alberta unveils 3 sweeping bills affecting trans and gender-diverse youth.” It is important to note that the press accepts the premises of transgender ideology as the starting point for their reporting, with heavy usage of nonsensical phrases like “gender-diverse youth,” which implies that there are many genders. 

In fact, Global News and other Canadian outlets trotted out talking points that have been definitively rebutted by the U.K.’s Cass Review and multiple medical studies—in fact, even the New York Times has been reporting on the permanent harms of puberty blockers over the past several years. An example from Global News: 

Alberta parents of gender-diverse youth like Haley Wray believe the new laws will give kids less choice — especially when it comes to health-care that is not permanent but instead, gives kids time to work through their identity struggles. 

‘Hormone blockers are a very valuable tool,’ Wray said, explaining they have a very small window of effectiveness to pause, but not prevent, puberty. ‘It is reversible because nothing changes. And what that does is it allows youth and families to have that that pause, that break to explore further, validate, understand what this means and know that permanent changes aren’t happening.’

Wray believes the proposed legislation will make the province a less safe place for tens of thousands of Alberta kids who aren’t straight. It’s why, Wray says, a growing number of families with transgender children are now grappling with whether Alberta is a place they can stay. ‘I know people who have, and I know people who genuinely feel like there is likely nowhere to go,’ she said. 

This is incorrect. Puberty blockers cause permanent damage, and children may be rendered permanently sterile after taking them for a relatively short period of time. Puberty is not something that can be “paused,” and it frequently causes irreversible rather than reversible damage. Smith and her government understand this, which is why they have decided to pass this legislation—not, as nearly every press outlet claimed, to “target trans youth,” but to protect them. 

The CBC chimed in with sentences like this one: 

Terms like ‘biological female’ and ‘biological male’ can be used to imply that transgender people are still their assigned sex at birth, despite their identity. 

To translate: a scientifically accurate and precise statement is now an ideological one, but inherently ideological language invented by the transgender movement over the past decade is, in fact, technically accurate. People can identify as anything they want; it is irrelevant to their biology. The CBC presents pointing this out as some sort of propagandistic attack on vulnerable people. 

Fortunately, Smith appears to know what she’s doing here. She’s taken her time to ensure that the legislation she has put forward will pass, and that it is defensible in court. Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, who has just led the Saskatchewan Party to its fifth straight majority government, is of a similar mind—he’s promised to put forward legislation protecting female spaces as a matter of first priority. It took long enough, but Canada’s conservatives are finally starting to move. 

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Jonathon Van Maren

Jonathon’s writings have been translated into more than six languages and in addition to LifeSiteNews, has been published in the National Post, National Review, First Things, The Federalist, The American Conservative, The Stream, the Jewish Independent, the Hamilton Spectator, Reformed Perspective Magazine, and LifeNews, among others. He is a contributing editor to The European Conservative.

His insights have been featured on CTV, Global News, and the CBC, as well as over twenty radio stations. He regularly speaks on a variety of social issues at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions in Canada, the United States, and Europe.

He is the author of The Culture War, Seeing is Believing: Why Our Culture Must Face the Victims of Abortion, Patriots: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Pro-Life Movement, Prairie Lion: The Life and Times of Ted Byfield, and co-author of A Guide to Discussing Assisted Suicide with Blaise Alleyne.

Jonathon serves as the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

News release from the Friends of Science

A new poll from FIRE, championed on X by Elon Musk reports that free speech is a critical US voter issue on par with economic issues; climate change is a non-starter, far down the list, says Friends of Science Society. Climate change has lost steam among Canadian voters; a major push-back against the costly carbon tax is happening nation-wide. CALGARY, AB, Oct. 31, 2024 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — On Oct. 24, 2024, Elon Musk on “X” wrote: “Major vibe shift” as FIRE, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression reported their recent poll results with free speech ranked higher than health care, crime and immigration; climate change was second from the last of twelve issues, says Friends of Science Society. The poll was conducted by the prestigious National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. Even a September 9, 2024 Pew Research Centre poll of the ‘most important’ voter issues had climate change last on the list of 10. It appears that one of the benefits of Elon Musk’s take-over of Twitter, now “X,” has led to an opening up of the debate on climate change and other topics, to the point where leaked documents show that the Centre for Countering Digital Hate out of the UK specifically targeted him and his platform to be shut down prior to the US election, as reported by the Express Tribune, Oct. 22, 2024. People are now asking “What if CO2 is Good For You?” Climate fearmongers on “X” are met with a barrage of scientific papers and biting memes pushing back, says Friends of Science. On November 11, 2024, just 6 days after the US election, the 29th Conference of the Parties (COP29), countries signatory to the UNFCCC, begins in Baku, Azerbaijan, a petro-state. This year’s focus is on climate finance. S&P Global reports that the target for a climate fund for developing nations is $1 trillion dollars while imposing more stringent Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) emissions reductions, especially in Europe and other Western industrialized nations where that money is expected to come from. Robert Lyman is a former Canadian federal public servant of 27 years, diplomat of 10 years, and a retired energy economist, predicted in June of 2024 that COP29 will fail, as have all the previous COP conferences. Friends of Science Society issued a report by Robert Lyman titled “Europe on the Brink” which summarizes key points in Prof. Samuel Furfari’s analysis of Mario Draghi’s report on European Competitiveness. Both Europe and Canada seem to be on a climate-policy driven path toward economic destruction, thanks to their commitments to NetZero goals, says Friends of Science Society. Friends of Science Society’s analysis of “Getting to Net Zero” shows that poverty, degrowth and deprivation await citizens. Video explainer here. For most Canadians, the climate change has fallen from public interest with a September 2023 poll showing a 93% concern for economic issues, only a 7% concern for climate change. A more recent poll using different metrics showed 70% of Canadians are focussed on immediate concerns like housing and the cost of living. Provinces are pushing back on the burdensome carbon tax. As reported in the Western Standard of Oct. 30, 2024, David Suzuki and 4 other broadcast colleagues want CBC, the national broadcaster, to make climate emergency a daily news issue. Author Seth Klein proposes a War Measures Act style economy; much like that outlined in the US House Judiciary’s report on the “Climate Cartel” which is reviewing Mark Carney’s “GFANZ.” Friends of Science Society rejects their climate catastrophe activism and rebuts their claims in this video. Canada’s Climate Action Network (CAN-RAC) in “Paving the Way” is pushing for an emissions cap in Alberta, and for COP29 a phase-out of fossil fuels, an increase in foreign spending on climate finance and a tripling of renewables. The manufacturing of renewables requires vast quantities of oil, natural gas and coal, as explained in IEEE Spectrum’s publication of Vaclav Smil’s “To Get Wind Power You Need Oil,” thus these groups are asking the impossible, says Friends of Science Society. Regarding Canada’s proposed emissions cap, Robert Lyman summarizes a Deloitte report in “A Dire Assessment,” showing that “If production is curtailed as Deloitte projects, GDP in Alberta’s oil and gas sector would be $16.2 billion (20%) lower compared to the baseline in 2040. In the rest of Canada, GDP in the sector is projected to be $2.7 billion lower by 2040 compared to the baseline.”