Mental Health
Mental Health, MAID, and Governance in Trudeau’s Canada
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The Opposition with Dan Knight
A Critical Examination of Governance, Ethical Implications, and the Search for Compassionate Solutions in a Nation in Crisis
The mental health crisis in Canada, deepened and exacerbated under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s leadership, has laid bare the stark realities and the fundamental cracks in our national mental health support structures. The haunting statistics released by the Angus Reid Institute have catapulted this crisis to the forefront of national discourse, but it seems that the ramifications extend far beyond mere numbers. Approximately 80% of Canadians are grappling with the inadequate availability of mental health resources, and the governmental response, or lack thereof, has amplified this concern.
Under Trudeau’s regime, the pervasive decline in mental health has not only been met with superficial commitments but has also seen the advancement of policies that many argue are an affront to the sanctity of life and individual liberty, namely, the Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) legislation.
The Trudeau administration, amidst the throes of a profound mental health crisis, had pledged a seemingly substantial $4.5 billion over five years to address mental health care during the 2021 federal election. However, the tangible execution of this commitment remains elusive, with the funds ostensibly being absorbed into broader health care allocations. A dire need, once seemingly acknowledged, now seemingly diluted in priorities.
It’s in this same disconcerting timeframe that the contentious discussions around MAID have intensified. The proposed legislative modifications seek to expand the eligibility criteria to include individuals whose sole medical condition is a mental illness. This proposition has resulted in a fierce national debate and has amplified concerns over the values and the ethical compass guiding our nation’s leadership.
While the inception of MAID in 2016 found support among 64% of Canadians, the broadening of its scope to include mental illnesses has sparked widespread hesitation and reflection on its ethical implications. A mere 28% of Canadians support allowing those with only a mental illness to seek MAID. This shift in public sentiment is indicative of a collective realization of the complex moral, ethical, and societal implications of such a policy in a nation already strained by a lack of mental health support.
There’s an unsettling correlation between the difficulties in accessing mental health care and the support for the expansion of MAID. Two in five Canadians who’ve encountered barriers in accessing mental health care express support for the inclusion of mental illnesses in MAID eligibility. This correlation rings alarm bells about the level of desperation and despair fueled by inadequate mental health resources and support.
The MAID legislation, particularly its proposed expansion, is symptomatic of a deeper, more entrenched disregard for life and liberty. The policies and legislation emanating from Trudeau’s administration seem to foster an environment where the value of life is underplayed, and individual freedoms are undervalued. Rather than addressing the root causes and formulating holistic, compassionate solutions for mental health struggles, the government seems poised to offer an expedited escape route, overlooking the sanctity of life and the intrinsic rights of the individuals.
The urgency to address mental health challenges, especially those disproportionately affecting women, young adults, and lower-income households, is paramount. It requires genuine, sustained commitments and actions, far removed from mere electoral promises and rhetoric. The dialogue surrounding MAID, although crucial, risks overshadowing the fundamental issues at hand – the acute need for enhanced, accessible mental health care resources and a governmental ethos that values and preserves life and liberty.
In light of these pivotal concerns, this beckons a grave question to us all: Is this truly the Canada we desire? A Canada where, when faced with life’s vicissitudes, the solution provided by the government is simply to opt for MAID? Or do we yearn for a Canada that embodies hope, a belief that circumstances can, and will, improve? When 2025 arrives, the bell will indeed toll for Justin Trudeau and his Liberal compatriots, and we, as staunch Canadians, will need to rise to the occasion and answer this question. It’s a query not merely about policies or governance but about the very soul and essence of our great nation.
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Alberta
Media melts down as Danielle Smith moves to end ‘transitioning’ of children in Alberta
From LifeSiteNews
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.
Frontier Centre for Public Policy
The Destructive Legacy of Gender Theory’s Popular Pioneer
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
By Lee Harding
The idea that gender is disconnected from sex was popularized by psychologist John Money. Perverted minds produce perverted ideas. Unfortunately, Money’s legacy of destruction continues.
The idea that sex drives come out of nowhere and have nothing to do with biology should be dismissed out of hand, given the countless generations of procreated human and even animal species. Yet, in 1961, Money claimed that “erotic outlook and orientation is an autonomous psychological phenomenon independent of genes and hormones.”
Money later said that “like hermaphrodites, all the human race follow the same pattern, namely, of psychological undifferentiation at birth.”
In other words, no one is born heterosexual, and there are no biology-based differences in how men and women act. By 1973, even Money had to acknowledge a wide body of research that showed “fetal gonadal hormones . . . have an influence on neural pathways in the brain.” Still, he emphasized nurture over nature.
Money had a chance to test his theories after the birth of Winnipeg twin brothers Bruce and Ron Reimer, born in 1965. A botched circumcision left Bruce’s penis almost severed, seemingly damaged beyond function. Their parents saw Money on TV in 1967 and went to his gender clinic at Johns Hopkins University.
The clinic was the first of its kind and specialized in cross-sex surgeries. Money convinced the parents to have Bruce’s penis and testes removed, rename him Brenda, and raise him as a girl. Both twins visited Money annually, and Money used their example on a lecture circuit to insist that gender roles were instilled and not innate.
This was complete fiction, but the truth didn’t come out until it was exposed by psychologist H. Keith Sigmundson and biologist Milton Diamond in a medical journal in 1997.
The twins’ mother Janet recalled how Brenda hated dresses, sewing, and dolls. Instead, the child preferred to play soldier, dress in men’s clothes, tinker with tools and gadgets, and even stand up to pee. When Brenda told doctors “she” felt she wasn’t a girl, they discounted it.
It turns out Money made the twins inspect each other’s genitals. His therapy involved forcing the twins into a simulation of sexual positions and motions, something Money justified as healthy childhood sexual exploration. Money photographed this while as many as six colleagues looked in person. If either child resisted orders, the doctor responded with anger and verbal abuse.
This disturbing account is not entirely surprising. Money participated in nudism and group sex as part of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. He advocated open marriages and even compiled a pornographic presentation for students at Johns Hopkins Medical School called “Pornography in the Home.”
In his 1975 book Sexual Signatures, Money wrote, “[E]xplicit sexual pictures can and should be used as part of a child’s sex education…. [to] reinforce his or her own gender identity/role,” Money explained.
By the age of 13, Brenda so dreaded the annual visit to Money that she threatened suicide. Her parents sent her anyway. Consultants at the Baltimore clinic recruited male-to-female transsexuals to convince Reimer it was better to be female and have a vagina. This so disturbed Reimer, that she ran away from the hospital and hid on the roof of a nearby building.
In 1980, Reimer begged her father to know the truth and he finally admitted her birth as a male. The family moved and the child took the name David. Next, endocrinologists, psychologists, and surgeons did their best to reconstruct Reimer’s manliness. Money stopped talking about the twins on the lecture circuit but did not confess how woefully wrong he was.
In 1979, Dr. Paul McHugh, chief psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, investigated whether their sex reassignment surgeries helped the psycho-social problems of patients. The answer was so clearly “no” that the clinic stopped doing them.
In 2004, McHugh recalled that those operated on “had much the same problems with relationships, work, and emotions as before.” He added, “I concluded that Hopkins was fundamentally cooperating with a mental illness. We psychiatrists, I thought, would do better to concentrate on trying to fix their minds and not their genitalia.”
When the gender clinic was shut down in 1980, Money started another clinic at Johns Hopkins for gender “paraphilias,” a polite term for deviancies. That year, he told Time magazine, “A childhood sexual experience, such as being the partner of a relative or of an older person, need not necessarily affect the child adversely.”
In 1991, Money told Paidika, a pro-pedophilia journal in the Netherlands that a mutually acceptable sexual relationship between a ten-year-old boy and a man in his 30s was not “pathological in any way.” He said efforts to keep children from sexual activity, including sexual consent laws, was “really a diabolically clever ploy to establish anti-sexualism on a big scale.”
David Reimer killed himself in 2004, while Money died in 2006. Too bad the psychologist’s warped ideas didn’t die with him. In practice, they lead to futility and failure.
Lee Harding is a Research Fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
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