British Columbia

TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS.

Four days ago, for the first time in Canadian history, a member of a legislature proposed a bill to repeal an entire Human Rights Code. And 36 other members of said legislature voted for the same. BC MLA Tara Armstrong attempted to introduce Bill M233, the Human Rights Code Repeal Act, which outright repeals the B.C. Human Rights Code and abolishes the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal.

It’s fortunate that this bill didn’t make it anywhere close to third reading. Yet, what this bill entails is horrifying. This would mean that an employer could refuse to serve someone for being Black (just like in Christie v. York Corporation, a 1939 Supreme Court of Canada case upholding “freedom of contract”). It would mean that a business owner can refuse to sell their business to a woman because they are a woman. It means that a landlord can refuse to rent to someone because they’re Indigenous. And of course, it would mean that dehumanizing speech against trans people — speech that can make a workplace untenable or even lead to incitement to genocide, as exemplified so well in Chilliwack Teachers’ Association v. Barry Neufeld (No. 10) — will face no sanction by the State.

the notwithstanding clause is a five-alarm fire, this is even more unprecedented. It means regressing back to a vision of Canada consisting solely of a white, male, able-bodied, cisgender and heterosexual class that gets to participate in society, and everyone else, left by the wayside.

Yet, this isn’t isolated. The callous disregard for human life and human dignity can be seen across the world. Last week, Kansas (USA) took away the drivers’ license and birth certificate of every single one of its trans citizens, only permitting said IDs to contain sex assigned at birth — an obvious marker of transness — officially making trans people second-class citizens, akin to how the Nazis did so with Jewish people’s passports in 1938. And just over the weekend, the United States and Israel decided to launch an offensive war against Iran — one obviously motivated by imperialist interests more than anything else.