Quebec’s ban on gender-neutral bathrooms in schools is good news

When one school in Alberta decided to bring in gender-neutral bathrooms back in 2017, many students avoided them because, as any idiot knows, boys and girls generally feel uncomfortable doing their business in a stall next to a member of the opposite sex.

It is still sometimes surreal to consider what constitutes a news story in 2024. Imagine telling your grandparents, or even your parents 20 years ago, that it would be breaking news across the board — Global News, the Globe and Mail, the national broadcaster — that a provincial government had issued a directive … that bathrooms and locker rooms in schools be specifically designated for either boys or girls.

But yet here we are. On May 1, Quebec’s new rules banning the implementation of shared, “gender-neutral” or “all-gender” bathrooms came into effect, the result of a 2023 petition to protest the plan to make all bathrooms gender neutral at D’Iberville high school in Rouyn-Noranda. At the time, Premier François Legault commissioned Family Minister Suzanne Roy with creating an advisory committee to do research; recommendations are expected in the winter of 2025.

But Education Minister Bernard Drainville, perhaps realizing how ridiculous it is that an advisory committee needs to be created — and then needs a year — to determine whether or not teenage boys and girls need their own bathrooms, decided to go ahead and “correct the course,” citing the need protect young girls from discomfort and harassment. When the news broke that a Quebec high school in Rouyn-Noranda was starting work on gender-neutral bathrooms, Drainville decided to address the issue via directive.

The very existence of such a sane, common-sense directive reveals how insane our culture has become; mandating male and female bathrooms is not the sort of thing one used to have to do, explicitly. The directive also stipulates that any student wishing to use an individual bathroom must be able to do so. The directive, Drainville says, is needed. “It’s a question of well-being, privacy, and respect for private life,” he said.

The CBC, of course, promptly hunted down some LGBT activists who predictably oppose the policy. “(The directive) is not well balanced because it stigmatizes kids that are a bit different,” said Mona Greenbaum, co-director of LGBT+ Family Coalition. “We know that from all sorts of research that it’s very harmful for young people to not have their gender identity affirmed.” The most recent research, of course, is the UK National Health Service’s Cass Review, which in fact concluded that the so-called “affirmative model” is “very harmful for young people.”

Jennifer Maccarone, a frequently hysterical LGBT activist and Member of the National Assembly, serves as the Liberal Party critic for “the 2SLGBTQIA+ community,” also weighed in, stating that the directive contradicted a 2021 guide for schools published by the Ministry of Education that supported the idea of gender-neutral spaces. “Does the government still stand by their document?” Maccarone demanded to know during a news conference. Drainville’s directive is pretty clear, so it would seem the answer to her question is “no.”

It is because of folks like Maccarone that such directives are even needed in the first place. When one school in Alberta decided to bring in gender-neutral bathrooms back in 2017, many students avoided them because, as any idiot knows, boys and girls generally feel uncomfortable doing their business in a stall next to a member of the opposite sex. Lineups began to form outside the gender-specific bathrooms, and students trekked all the way across the school to avoid using the gender-neutral bathrooms. Girls even risked dehydration and bladder infections rather than use bathrooms with males.

Of course, none of that matters to Maccarone and the LGBT activists. Their agenda is far more important than the comfort and safety of students — especially girls. Their complaints, and their stories, are never even considered. Fortunately, it appears that saner heads are finally prevailing.

Jonathon Van Maren is a public speaker, writer, and pro-life activist. His commentary has been translated into more than eight languages and published widely online as well as print newspapers such as the Jewish Independent, the National Post, the Hamilton Spectator and others. He has received an award for combating anti-Semitism in print from the Jewish organization B’nai Brith. His commentary has been featured on CTV Primetime, Global News, EWTN, and the CBC as well as dozens of radio stations and news outlets in Canada and the United States.

He speaks on a wide variety of cultural topics across North America at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions. Some of these topics include abortion, pornography, the Sexual Revolution, and euthanasia. Jonathon holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in history from Simon Fraser University, and is the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

Jonathon’s first book, The Culture War, was released in 2016.

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Joe Rogan Tells Elon Musk He ‘Changed’ History By Buying Twitter, Calls Out Previous Government Interference

Fraser Institute / 4 hours ago

U.S. election should focus or what works and what doesn’t work

Business / 5 hours ago

EU Tightens Social Media Censorship Screw With Upcoming Mandatory “Disinformation” Rules

Daily Caller

Joe Rogan Tells Elon Musk He ‘Changed’ History By Buying Twitter, Calls Out Previous Government Interference

Published on November 5, 2024

Todayville

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Hailey Gomez

The popular podcast host thanked Musk for deciding to buy the company, noting how social media companies had coordinated with the government to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, impacting the 2020 election.

Podcast host Joe Rogan told billionaire Elon Musk on Monday that he “changed the course of history” by buying Twitter in 2022, recounting how the government had become intertwined with social media platforms.

In October 2022, Musk won a legal battle to become the sole owner of Twitter, now known as X, and promptly fired several top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal and Vijaya Gadde, head of legal policy, trust and safety. On “The Joe Rogan Experience,” the popular podcast host thanked Musk for deciding to buy the company, noting how social media companies had coordinated with the government to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, impacting the 2020 election.

“First of all, thank you. Thank you so much for buying Twitter. Thank you so much. I’m not exaggerating when I think you changed the course of history. I really do. I really think you made a fork in the road. We were headed down a path of censorship and of control of narratives that is unprecedented,” Rogan said.

“Forget about what they were able to do back when they had newspapers and the media under control. What they were doing with social media by suppressing information and when you had a combined government effort — like with what they were doing with the laptop story,” Rogan added. “We have 51 former intelligence agents saying that this is Russian disinformation, take it off offline, and Twitter complied. If you didn’t buy that we wouldn’t have known that. We had no idea.”

Musk explained how he became aware that the system on Twitter was changing, pointing out how former President Donald Trump was permanently banned from the platform after Jan. 6, despite calling on his supporters not to riot.

WATCH:

“The reason I bought [Twitter] was because I’m pretty attuned, since I was the most interacted with users on Twitter before the acquisition,” Musk said. “So before the acquisition I had more interactions then — like there’s some accounts like [former President Barack] Obama and whatever had a higher follower count — but I had the most number of interactions of any account in the system. So I was very attuned to like if they change the system, I can tell immediately. And I’m like, something weird is going on here, you know?”

“I just got increasingly uneasy and obviously when they de-platformed a sitting president, you know, de-platformed Trump — that was just insane. The things he was posting … he was posting good things. He was saying, ‘Hey, we do not riot, but don’t do any destruction of property, please stay calm.’ That’s the kind of stuff he was posting, and you’re like, ‘Uh, what’s wrong with that?’ Then some people said, ‘Oh, that’s like some sort of dog whistle, he means the opposite.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, so we’ll give you Trump’s account. Now you post what you think he should post because you can post nothing, he can ask people to calm down, like what? It was insane, it didn’t make any sense,” Musk said.

Following Musk’s acquisition of the company, the billionaire collaborated with independent journalists and authors like Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger to release the “Twitter Files,” which revealed that the company’s former executives justified banning Trump by citing the “context surrounding” the former president and his supporters “over the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years.”

After the interview with Musk was released Monday evening, Rogan announced on X that he endorsed Trump in his bid for the White House.

Fraser Institute

U.S. election should focus or what works and what doesn’t work

Published on November 4, 2024

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew D. Mitchell

As Republicans and Democrats make their final pitch to voters, they’ve converged on some common themes. Kamala Harris wants to regulate the price of food. Donald Trump wants to regulate the price of credit. Harris wants the tax code to favour the 2.5 per cent of workers who earn tips. So does Trump. Harris wants the government to steer more labour and capital into manufacturing. And so does Trump.

With each of these proposals, the candidates think the United States would be better off if the government made more economic decisions and—by implication—if individual citizens made fewer economic decisions. Both should pay closer attention to Zimbabwe. Yes, Zimbabwe.

Why does a country with abundant natural resources, rich culture and unparalleled beauty have one-sixth the average income of neighbouring Botswana? While we’re at it, why do twice as many children die in infancy in Azerbaijan as across the border in Georgia? Why do Hungarians work 20 per cent longer than their Austrian neighbours but earn 45 per cent less? Why is extreme poverty 200 times more common in Laos than across the Mekong River in Thailand?

Or how about this one: Why were more than one-quarter of Estonians formerly exposed to dangerous levels of air pollution when the country was socialist while today nearly every Estonian breathes clean air in what is ranked the cleanest country in the world.

These are anecdotes. However, the plural of anecdote is data, and through careful and systematic study of the data, we can learn what works and what doesn’t. Unfortunately, the populist economic policies in vogue among Democrats and Republicans do not work.

What does work is economic freedom.

Economic freedoms are a subset of human freedoms. When people have more economic freedom, they are allowed to make more of their own economic choices—choices about work, about buying and selling goods and services, about acquiring and using property, and about forming contracts with others.

For nearly 30 years, the Fraser Institute has been measuring economic freedom across countries. On one hand, governments can stop people from making their own economic choices through taxes, regulations, barriers to trade and manipulation of the value of money (see the proposals of Harris and Trump above). On the other hand, governments can enable individual economic choice by protecting people and their property.

The index published in Fraser’s annual Economic Freedom of the World report incorporates 45 indicators to measure how governments either prevent or enable individual economic choice. The result reveals the degree of economic freedom in 165 countries and territories worldwide, with data going back to 1970.

According to the latest report, comparatively wealthy Botswanans rank 84 places ahead of Zimbabweans in terms of the economic freedom their government permits them. Georgians rank 107 places ahead of Azerbaijanis, Thais rank 60 places ahead of Laotians, and Austrians are 32 places ahead of Hungarians.

The benefits of economic freedom go far beyond anecdotes and rankings. As Estonia—once one of the least economically free places in the world and now among the freest—dramatically shows, freer countries tend not only to be more prosperous but greener and healthier.

In fact, economists and other social scientists have conducted nearly 1,000 studies using the index to assess the effect of economic freedom on different aspects of human wellbeing. Their statistical comparisons include hundreds and sometimes thousands of data points and carefully control for other factors like geography, natural resources and disease environment.

Their results overwhelmingly support the idea that when people are permitted more economic freedom, they prosper. Those who live in freer places enjoy higher and faster-growing incomes, better health, longer life, cleaner environments, more tolerance, less violence, lower infant mortality and less poverty.

Economic freedom isn’t the only thing that matters for prosperity. Research suggests that culture and geography matter as well. While policymakers can’t always change people’s attitudes or move mountains, they can permit their citizens more economic freedom. If more did so, more people would enjoy the living standards of Botswana or Estonia and fewer people would be stuck in poverty.

As for the U.S., it remains relatively free and prosperous. Whatever its problems, decades of research cast doubt on the notion that America would be better off with policies that chip away at the ability of Americans to make their own economic choices.