Opinion
Ordinary working Canadians are not buying into transgender identity politics
![](https://www.todayville.com/edmonton/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/05/tvrd-ls-construction-workers-employment-image-2024-05-17.jpg)
From LifeSiteNews
By Jonathon Van Maren
Progressives don’t seem to understand that most people simply trying to make a living aren’t interested in being hectored about their insufficiently up-to-date views on however many genders the Canadian establishment currently believes in.
A couple of weeks ago, I made the mistake of turning on the news on my car radio. It was the CBC, and a panel was discussing Canada’s housing crisis. According to the experts brought on by the CBC, this crisis was accompanied by a shortage in tradesmen, and this shortage was in part due to the fact that construction sites were hostile environments for women and “non-binary people.” This, the panel opined, was a huge problem that needed to be fixed. It reminded me that the salaries of Canadian tradesmen are garnished to pay for this garbage.
Listening to the panel, it struck me how out of touch progressive activists are with the reality of what they would call the “lived experience” of most normal people working normal, blue-collar jobs. Anyone who has worked on a construction site knows that enforcing political correctness – especially the swiftly moving Overton Window of acceptable speech these days – is a fool’s errand. Attempting to police the way men talk to one another on a job site is a great way to ensure hostility from said men, who incidentally have jobs to do.
But progressives don’t seem to understand that most people simply trying to make a living aren’t interested in being hectored about their insufficiently up-to-date views on however many genders the Canadian establishment currently believes in. Case in point is a recent column in the Globe and Mail sounding the alarm about a new Canadian travesty: “Non-binary job applicants are less likely to receive interest from employers if they disclose gender-neutral pronouns on their resume, according to a recent working paper.”
According to University of Toronto economics Ph.D. candidate Taryn Eames in a paper titled “TARYN VERSUS TARYN (SHE/HER) VERSUS TARYN (THEY/THEM): A Field Experiment on Pronoun Disclosure and Hiring Discrimination,” employers appear to be discriminating against “non-binary” Canadians. As Eames says in her abstract:
Thousands of randomly generated, fictitious resumes were submitted to job postings in pairs where the treatment resume contained pronouns listed below the name and the control resume did not. Two treatments were considered: nonbinary ‘they/them’ and binary ‘he/him’ or ‘she/her’ pronouns congruent with implied sex. As such, I estimate discrimination against nonbinary and presumed cisgender applicants who disclose pronouns. Results show that nonbinary applicants face discrimination: disclosing ‘they/them’ pronouns reduces positive employer response by 5.4 percentage points. There is also evidence that discrimination is larger (approximately double) in Republican than Democratic geographies, potentially reflecting attitudinal differences. By comparison, results are inconclusive as to whether presumed cisgender applicants who disclose pronouns are discriminated against.
In her paper, Eames states that there is “strong evidence of discrimination against applicants who disclose nonbinary ‘they/them’ pronouns,” and, like the CBC panel, announces that this is a problem that needs to be solved. “Non-binary gender identities are becoming more and more common, especially among younger generations,” she said. “These people are going to be aging into the labour force, and this is going to become a bigger and bigger topic over time.”
The Globe and Mail attempts, sloppily, to tie this study to parental rights policies in New Brunswick and elsewhere, as well as implying that Alberta’s proposal to ban sex change surgeries for minors are also part of an anti-trans trend that is “trickling down” into the workplace. “Even in situations where a hiring manager is open to hiring a non-binary employee, there may be perceived obstacles,” the Globe and Mail stated. “Customer-service positions, for instance, an employer might have concerns about how they will manage situations that can arise from employing a non-binary person.”
The reporters assume, of course, that “non-binary” – that is, claiming to be neither male nor female – is a real identity that should be accepted by every employer and all of society at large. The assumption is that there is no debate over this recently invented identity category whatsoever, and that the task at hand is to find ways of forcing employers to proactively affirm the assertions of LGBT activists. They apparently do not stop to consider the fact that many employers simply want to do business and not be forced into cooperating with an ideology that they are ambivalent about.
Frontier Centre for Public Policy
UBCIC Chiefs Commit A Grave Error In Labelling Authors As Racist Deniers
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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
By Rodney A. Clifton
UBCIC Chiefs attempt to suppress open debate on residential schools.
Is anyone surprised that the Union of BC Indian Chiefs on Aug. 12 wrote to many provincial municipalities (Powell River, Kamloops, and Quesnel, for example) demanding they reject “Residential School Denialism”?
Their demand is in response to a book edited by C.P. Champion and Tom Flanagan, Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools). The authors of the 18 chapters include several well-known Canadian anthropologists, historians, political scientists, sociologists, and lawyers, many of whom have published extensively on Indigenous/non-Indigenous issues.
Even so, the organization of Chiefs call this book an “ardent dissemination of racist misinformation.”
Their letter to municipal leaders concludes with the following:
“The UBIC Chiefs Council stand with survivors and intergenerational survivors of Residential Schools and their families, as well as the children who never made it home and those who are harmed by the actions of those involved with the production and distribution of the book … and the deeply troubling trend of Residential School racist denialism and any unwillingness to accept facts and the work of experts.”
“We look forward to your response.”
As an author of a chapter in Grave Error, as co-author of two other chapters, and as a co-editor with Mark DeWolf of From Truth Comes Reconciliation: An Assessment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, I am pleased to respond to the Chiefs.
My recommendation to municipal leaders, and other concerned Canadians, is that before you respond to the Chiefs, you should read Grave Error and make up your up your own minds.
On Amazon, Grave Error has over 800 reviews, with an average rating of 4.6 out of 5. In fact, this book is ranked first on three Amazon lists, and it has been a best seller for many months.
One of the top Amazon reviews begins, “A well-researched, non-partisan and balanced approach to the hysterical outpourings of recent years.” Another review says, “There is not one whiff of racism or hatred in this book.”
As a contributing author to Grave Error, I will add a little of my history.
I lived for four months during the Summer of 1966 in the teachers’ wing of Old Sun, the Anglican Residential School on the Siksika (Blackfoot) First Nation in Southern Alberta. At the time, students were still in residence, and I was a 21-year-old university student intern working at the Band Office, where about half the employees were Siksika members. Also, most of the employed in Old Sun, where I lived, were Siksika.
In the fall of 1966, I became the Senior Boys’ Supervisor in Stringer Hall, the Anglican residence in Inuvik, NWT, where I looked after 85 mostly Indigenous boys in three dorms. About half of the employees in this residence were Indigenous.
I returned to the University of Alberta for the 1967-68 academic year, and in the summer of 1968, I was employed as the Beach Supervisor and Swimming Instructor in Uranium City, Northern Saskatchewan, where I taught swimming to many Indigenous children in a local lake.
Finally, in September 1968, Elaine Ayoungman, a young Siksika woman I met in 1966, and I were married in the Anglican Church in Strathmore, Alberta. Elaine had been a student in Old Sun for 10 years, and this September, we will celebrate our 56th wedding anniversary. We are still married, and, no doubt, surprisingly to the BC Chiefs, we are still in love.
By now, readers will realize that I strongly reject the UBCI Chiefs’ claim that I, or any of the other authors with chapters in Grave Error, are “racist deniers” of the reality of Indian Residential Schools.
In short, my message to the BC municipal leaders is to resist echoing the opinion of the UBCIC, me, or the opinions of over 80 percent of the reviews on Amazon who awarded the book a 4 or 5. My message is simple: Read Grave Error and make up your own mind. Likewise, my message to Canadians who want to know more about Indian Residential Schools is to listen to the survivors and Chiefs but also read the Truth and Reconciliation Report and then read both Grave Error and From Truth Comes Reconciliation.
Rodney A. Clifton is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. His most recent book, with Mark DeWolf, is From Truth Comes Reconciliation: An Assessment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report (Sutherland House Press, 2024). The book can be preordered from the publisher.
Crime
Venezuelan Migrant Says She’d ‘Return’ To Country After Living In Housing Taken Over By Venezuelan Gang
![](https://www.todayville.com/edmonton/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/tvrd-dc-venezuelan-gangs-take-over-appartments-denver-image-2024-09-07.jpg)
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Hailey Gomez
A Venezuelan immigrant living in migrant housing in Aurora, Colorado, appeared to fight back tears while speaking to independent reporter Nick Shirley, saying she would return to her country after living in the U.S.
This week, the city of Aurora faced major pushback from Republicans after footage surfaced online of armed men inside an apartment complex in late August. Shirley was seen visiting various migrant housing units before stopping at the viral location to interview residents where the armed men had been spotted.
Shirley spoke with a Venezuelan woman who showed him the poor living conditions her family endures, stating she pays $1,200 per month for the apartment. The migrant stated that the electricity and hot water in her apartment weren’t working, telling Shirley that the landlord hadn’t accepted any payment for the “past couple of months.”
“Does your father still have to pay rent?” Shirley asked as they walked around her father’s apartment.
“The owner is no longer receiving any kind of payment, because he is also taking all this, that the gangs and the mafia are taking advantage of all of this to get us out as if we were dogs and it’s not fair,” the migrant stated, according to a translation.
Shirley asked if gangs had been charging people, to which the migrant replied, “no.” The independent reporter then asked if her life in the U.S. was what she expected after crossing the border.
WATCH:
“No, never. I would have stayed in my country. They say that here everything is different, the laws, everyone gets a good job, you get ahead, you can save money to take back to your country,” the migrant stated. “But not everything is as they say, the American dream is simply just a dream. When you get here you wake up, it’s not like they say.”
Shirley then pressed the migrant, asking in Spanish if she would take a “flight or opportunity to go back” to her home country.
“With all the love in the world I would return to my country,” the migrant said.
Republican lawmakers on Friday sent a letter criticizing the Biden-Harris administration’s “open border policies” and local “sanctuary” policies over the reported presence of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which allegedly terrorized several apartment buildings in Aurora.
Reportedly beginning as a prison gang in 2014 within the northern Venezuelan state of Aragua, Tren de Aragua has grown into one of Venezuela’s largest criminal organizations. With around 5,000 members and stretching internationally across Latin America and the U.S., the gang has allegedly been connected to several high-profile crimes within the U.S., including the kidnapping and strangling of a Florida man last year.
This week, the Aurora Police Department announced the arrest of two confirmed Tren de Aragua gang members, Jhonnarty Dejesus Pacheco-Chirinos and Jhonardy Jose Pacheco-Chirinos, following a July 28 shooting that left two men hospitalized with serious injuries.
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