Gender Ideology and the Canadian Federal Election

Is no news good news?

Undermedia, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

I am not going to risk any predictions about the Canadian federal election which will be held on April 28. For over a year, the polls had been predicting a landslide Conservative majority, but fortunes shifted in a little more than a month and now the Liberals seem almost certain to win a majority. Most of the Liberal gains are coming at the expense of smaller parties. The NDP is currently predicted to win around 8% of the vote and 9 seats. This would be the party’s worst showing since 1993 and would leave it without official party status. The Bloc Quebecois could lose half of its seats.

So far, there has been no mention of gender related issues during the campaign. This is a contrast from both the recent U.S. election and the 2021 election where the Liberals had a well-publicized 2SLGBTQ+ platform. This is not surprising, as there are much more urgent issues and gender ideology affects only a tiny portion of the population. However, for people who are affected, these issues are vital. The Trudeau government has aggressively promoted the entire transgender activist agenda. Its policies included an ill-considered conversion therapy law that effectively promotes medical transition as the only acceptable therapy for gender dysphoria and placing violent male offenders in women’s prisons. These programs were supported by large scale funding of 2SLGBTQ groups like Egale Canada.

The Liberals: Quiet Quitting?

Prime Minister Mark Carney has been almost completely silent on LGBTQ issues. A reporter for XTRA Magazine worried that Carney had never appeared at a pride parade and had not mentioned trans or queer issues during his leadership campaign.

The trans issue was raised in a more direct way when Juno News reported that one of Mark Carney’s daughters was trans-identified and had been a patient at the Tavistock clinic in London. Carney did not respond to the story, and most of the Canadian media said that politicians’ children should be off limits.

However, Sasha Carney is an adult and the Juno News story was based on her published writings. These are legitimate subjects for public comment. In one article, “Mumsnet, and Transmasculine Childhood,” she discusses her experience growing up in England. She writes of her “family’s insistence that I wear dresses to church” but says nothing else directly about her parents’ attitudes to her gender non-conformity. However, she does refer to 4thwavenow and Transgender Trend and writes, “My teenage years existed in close proximity to this TERF-driven scrutiny.” She was a patient at the Tavistock clinic but was not in the medical stream. She may have been seeing one of the psychotherapists who resigned from the Tavistock in protest against the clinic’s practice of referring children for medical transition without adequate assessment. She did have a double mastectomy while she was a student at Yale, but it is not clear whether she took cross-sex hormones.

Parents of trans-identified children fall into three categories. Some become public supporters of their child’s identity, while others are active opponents of medical transition. A third group may have concerns about their child’s well-being but stay silent to avoid division in the family and damage to their careers. Carney’s silence is consistent with him being in the third category, but we cannot be sure.

Carney’s actions since becoming Prime Minister have been equivocal. In his new cabinet he eliminated the Department of Women and Gender Equality, which was responsible for the government’s 2SLGBTQI+ initiative, and placed it under the Department of Canadian Culture and Identity under Steven Guilbeault. Guilbeault is a vocal member of the Liberals’ extreme woke wing, but his public statements have been cautious. On March 19, he posted on X, “Let me be clear – gender equality and the rights of women and 2SLGBTQI+ people will always be a priority for our government” and on March 31 he re-posted a Liberal Party post on Transgender Day of Visibility.

What a Carney government would do on trans/queer issues after the election is hard to predict. The best guess in these situations is that nothing will change, but that is not certain. An equally likely scenario is a sort of quiet quitting. The government will continue to support the trans / queer agenda but with less money and slightly more toleration for opposing views.

In the last decade, federal government spending has grown by 45% while productivity has stagnated. Any government is going to have to look for program cuts. A report by Lucy Hargreaves at Build Canada suggests that the Department for Women and Gender Equality is due for elimination. She argues that, “Single-gender strategies are less effective at tackling poverty and inequality than universal, needs-based approaches.” She recommends shifting the majority of the department’s budget into broader needs-based programs and moving the programs designed to address gender-based violence to the Department of Justice.

While the 2SLGBTQI+ initiatives are not mentioned, they could easily be swept aside in this kind of reorganization without any political cost. The Conservative opposition would be supportive and the remnants of the NDP caucus would have to think twice before spending any of their diminished question period time on a small minority with limited public support.

Gender ideology is deeply entrenched in the Liberal establishment and its supporters will continue to enjoy power throughout the institutions of government. Funding for groups like Egale is unlikely to be completely eliminated.

However, it is also important to remember that Carney is an internationalist, and the international consensus on gender identity is shifting. Groups like World Athletics have revised their policies to exclude biological males from female categories. This will force Canada’s national teams to revisit their policies. Carney was living in the United Kingdom when the controversy that led to the closure of the Tavistock clinic began. He will almost certainly be more aware of the underlying issues than the average Canadian politician.

The Canadian government’s promotion of extreme gender ideology at the international level has been enabled by similar policies in the United States. Now that Trump has completely reversed American policy and the United Kingdom and other countries are rethinking their approach, Canada risks becoming an international outlier if it continues with the Trudeau era policies.

The Conservatives: Noisier Quitting

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre spoke out in support of keeping biological males out of women’s sports and protecting same-sex spaces last year. He also expressed support for Danielle Smith’s initiatives in Alberta. But he has not mentioned these issues in the election campaign.

The Conservatives are aware of polls that have found that around 80% of Canadians support keeping biological males out of women’s sports, but they are also aware that this is not a top priority issue for most voters. Furthermore, they are aware that the mainstream media is hostile and will link any Conservative statements on transgender rights to opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage, both of which are highly unpopular.

In Canada, transgender rights are still closely associated with lesbian, gay and bisexual rights. While there are individual gays and lesbians in Canada who are challenging the trans and queer agenda, they are largely ignored by the media. Mainstream organizations, which are often heavily subsidized by the federal government, remain fully committed to the 2SLGBTQI+ (or whatever) agenda.

The Conservatives also have to contend with the Canadian version of Trump derangement syndrome. Trump’s executive orders on gender issues are mostly sound and have broad public support. However, almost everything else he has done has been wrong, seriously harmful and highly unpopular. Trump has also directly threatened Canadian sovereignty. Of course there is no rational link between Trump’s evidence-based policies on protecting women’s sports and his ramblings about making Canada the 51st state, but nationalist fervour is not rational. In the current Canadian political climate, any hint of identification with any Trump policy is regarded as close to treason.

If the Conservatives do win, their trans/queer policies are likely to be a more aggressive version of what the Liberals would do. The cuts to funding for groups like Egale will be faster and deeper. More critics of gender ideology will be appointed to positions of influence. However, the new government is unlikely to spend political capital on re-opening controversial debates on Bill C-16 and the conversion therapy ban.

What Next?

The campaign is not over and things could change quickly. In 2011 a surge in NDP support two weeks before the election vaulted the party from fourth place to official opposition. The televised leaders’ debates could be a game-changer. Carney’s French is much weaker than Poilievre’s so the French language debate will be a challenge. It would be interesting if a Quebec journalist surprised him with a question on a subject like placing trans-identified males in women’s prisons.

Meanwhile, it is important to remember that the major controversies over gender identity are in the areas of healthcare and education, which are both exclusively provincial jurisdictions. Alberta is moving ahead with its package of reforms. Egale Canada has brought a court challenge to the ban on medical transition. An application for an interim injunction was heard last month and a decision is pending.

The Alberta government has mounted a vigorous defence with affidavits from four experts as well as evidence from local doctors, parents and de-transitioners. If the court rules against the government on the injunction, Premier Smith may follow the lead of Saskatchewan and invoke the notwithstanding clause. However, the amount of work the government lawyers have put into the case suggests that they are prepared to proceed to a full hearing. This will bring the facts on the shaky foundations for gender medicine before a Canadian court for the first time.

In Quebec, the Comité de sages on gender identity is ready to present its report. The mandate of the Comité is wide, covering issues ranging from sex segregation in washrooms and changing of sex markers on public documents to gender identity in education and gender medicine. It will certainly spark debate in Quebec which the rest of Canada will not be able to ignore.

The debate over gender issues is being overshadowed in the current election campaign, but it is not going away. The evidence of the harm caused by 10 years of government policies which deny the basic facts of biological sex is mounting. A reelected Liberal government may try to maintain their old policies but this will be increasingly difficult as public awareness grows.