Letting Your Biases Get In Front Of You

Yesterday, I ran across this essay on X(itter), and it annoyed me because the author makes all kinds of errors of both fact and reason.  Since things on X have a nasty habit of disappearing at random, I will start with a bunch of screen captures of the essay itself.  Then I will delve into the problems with the arguments being made. 

Yes, Andrew, Democracy Is Under Attack In Canada

So, Andrew Coyne muses that Justin Trudeau should just step aside in the wake of a recent by-election defeat.  His reasoning?  Well - it's a bit of a jumble of deflection, redirection and obfuscation.  Oddly enough, he makes a far better summary of his reasoning in one post on X (FKA Twitter):

In his column, Cone opines as follows:  

But there is no equivalent in Canada to Mr. Trump’s attempts, by a combination of force and fraud, to overturn the results of a democratic election, or his threats to use the Justice Department to “go after” his political opponents, or his privately and publicly expressed desires to see some of them executed, or his efforts to intimidate officials in his several criminal trials and otherwise undermine the rule of law.

Is there no equivalent in Canada?  That's very much a matter of perspective.  Can we truly say that there is no Canadian equivalent to Trump's January 6 assault on Capitol Hill?  Not really - because only a year later the so-called "Freedom Convoy" would descend upon Ottawa not only with a demand that the Governor General dissolve Parliament and install the Convoy leadership as some kind of interim junta.  

Likewise, on the matter of going after political enemies, we cannot ignore Pierre Poilievre's recent hints that he would cheerfully invoke the Notwithstanding Clause (S33) of the Charter to insulate his laws from Charter scrutiny.  If you don't think this can be weaponized not only to realize his "tough on crime" agenda, but also to attack perceived and real political enemies, you aren't paying attention - because S33 is essentially a clause that puts Charter Rights in abeyance indefinitely.  Not only does that undermine the concept of "rule of law", but it creates an environment where the rule of law becomes arbitrary, and politicians can rewrite the rules pretty much at will. 

The politicization of nearly every public office – prosecutors, sheriffs, even judges elected on party political lines – has no equivalent here. 

I would ask if Mr. Coyne has been paying attention for the last decade.  Literally every appointment, every official action of the Trudeau government has been attacked and politicized - from committees and judicial appointments to things that have nothing to do with Trudeau himself.  We see a constant stream of invective directed at undermining Trudeau.  Here in Alberta, what is the first thing the UCP has done to attack the newly selected leader of the NDP?  Oh, they try to make him out as "Trudeau's Lackey".  

In fact, in my lifetime, I have never seen a Prime Minister subjected to such a constant stream of attacks - both legitimate and petty.  All of this has been clearly in the name of undermining Trudeau and making it as difficult as possible to govern.  

So it is more than a stretch for the Prime Minister to pretend that his own troubles are part of some worldwide trend to instability, or to insinuate that democracy is on the ballot in the next election. And if it were? If the Conservatives, or Mr. Poilievre, represented the same threat to democracy as Mr. Trump’s Republicans, or the same far-right philosophy as France’s Rassemblement National?

Here we come to the point where Mr. Coyne shows us exactly how wilfully blind he really is.  His position here ignores a whole bunch of facts and factors which are at play. 

As much as I would like to simply point at the Harper-led International Democrat Union (IDU) which really is a central piece of the worldwide movement towards fascism that we are seeing, it's not that simple here at home. 

First, there is a long-standing history of collaboration between conservatives in both Canada and the United States.  Canadian conservative politicians regularly attend major conservative political conventions like Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in the US; likewise they often attend US-based training at places like Morton Blackwell's "Leadership Institute" (LI).  There are a number of notable Canadian conservative politicians who have attended courses at LI - like Stephen Harper, Jason Kenney, and others.  Similarly, in Canada, we have the Canada Strong and Free Network (CSFN) conference, and mysteriously US conservatives attend and speak at it.  

A significant number of Canadian conservative politicians have worked for campaigns in the US - most notably recently being Alberta's Devin Dreeshen who was active in Trump's 2016 campaign, but we can't ignore guys like Rob Anders whose political career starts with being a paid heckler for a Montana GOP candidate in the early 90s.  

All of this is to evidence that there is a long history of collaboration and sharing of ideas, people, and skills between US and Canadian conservatives.  So, it is no reach at all to observe that what is done by conservatives in the US almost always appears in Canada in some form or another. 

So, let's look at the last decade of conservative attacks on the government led by Justin Trudeau for a moment.  From 2008-2016, we watched as the GOP in the US did everything it could to obstruct President Obama.  It was stunning to watch as the GOP basically refused to cooperate with anything that the Democrats attempted to do whether it be legislation or matters like judicial appointments.  

What have we seen in Canada? Exactly all of the same strategies. Either attacking the Prime Minister and his government for any action taken or anything even remotely associated with Trudeau was open to attack.  As has been shown with the WE scandal, no matter how unfounded the attacks, they were persistent to the point of breaking the target - anything to erode the credibility of the government.  While there are clear differences in the particulars, the fundamental strategy is consistent - do anything you can to discredit the target. 

There's no doubt in my mind that the fact that the Liberal Party of Canada (LPC) chose Justin Trudeau as their leader that the conservatives lost their collective minds.  The hatred of Pierre Trudeau in the modern day CPC is as ripe today as it was in 1980s Alberta in the wake of anger over the NEP. They just directed all of that anger straight at Justin Trudeau. So, when the government passed a new environmental assessment into law, it was immediately reframed as an attack on Alberta, and the first Convoy protest was assembled.  In many ways, it was the trial run not only for the 2022 Freedom Convoy, but also for the January 6 attack on the Capitol.  Similar messaging, similar organizing techniques were used, and they were refined over time. 

More recently, we have seen the US GOP legislators implementing a vast array of legislation designed to attack transgender people and restrict their rights and ability to move through society.  Is there a parallel happening in Canada?  Absolutely there is.  We have several conservative Premiers who are implementing anti-transgender legislation, complete down to invoking the Notwithstanding Clause to insulate what is obviously a violation of fundamental rights from being challenged in the courts.  While the legislation in states like Florida or Texas is leagues more malevolent than even what Danielle Smith has proposed in Alberta, there is no doubt that the approach is basically figuring out how to impose similar legislation in Canada.  Conservative Premiers like Ford, Moe, and Smith have been more active in invoking S33 to insulate their legislation for some time.  The effect is predictable:  although people get outraged with the legislation initially, over time, they stop paying attention when it doesn't affect their lives directly.  

How does this connect to the Federal picture with Poilievre?  Let's pay some attention here.  Poilievre has already hinted that he is willing to invoke S33 to insulate legislation.  On top of that, he has also indicated that he doesn't think that trans youth should have access to puberty blockers and other medical interventions.  This is not an accident. 

I think it's also important to note here that conservative politicians have long histories of engaging in voter suppression strategies - and Poilievre's one piece of legislation was basically an attack on voting rights, and let's not ignore the history of the Harper era conservatives engaging in all sorts of shenanigans like redirecting voters to incorrect voting stations (Robocalls Scandal).  Where do you think those ideas are being imported from?  If you guessed the GOP, you're partly correct. 

It's easy to dismiss similarities between Trump and Poilievre as simply being "populism", not when it's clear that there are shared tactics and strategies. 

That's a lot of words to point out that Mr. Coyne is profoundly wrong when he suggests that the situation in Canada is not the same as that in the US.  In fact, the increasing alignment of the Trump aligned GOP and the CPC says otherwise.  

Reviewing The Cass Review Report

The subtitle for this should be "How Cass Weaponized Science".

Now that the Cass Review has published their final report, it is possible to look beyond the apparent issues in how the report was assembled, and examine the report, its recommendations, and see just how bad it really is. 

On Coded Language and Political Policy

In the last few years, coded language has become a significant factor in how political parties present themselves.  This is especially prevalent among  parties who are adopting policy positions that if they said them in plain language most people would be horrified about.  

Today's examples come to us from the BC Conservatives.  I'm not going to slice and dice all of their policies and language, but I am going to pull a few up and point out where they are clearly using coded language to mislead people about the nature of their policies. 

First, let's turn to their "Our Ideas" page. 

There is a ton of coded language in here:  "Support Parents' Choices", "Remove Ideology From the Classroom", "Protect Free Speech on Campus".  Each one of these phrases is a coded reference to policies which if they said it directly most reasonable people would look at them and say "what the hell are you thinking?".  

For example, "Support Parents' Choices" would effectively result in dismantling public education by directing resources away from public schools to a variety of "alternatives" which largely benefit those who are significantly better off in society.  Usually this gets implemented as a voucher system of some sort, where funding is "per student" and the same amount goes to the school attended regardless of whether it is public, charter, private, or homeschool.  The problem, of course is that this necessarily dilutes the resources available for public schools which have to take in all students who come to them, while the other options can pick and choose (and often have additional fees or tuition which can place them out of reach for all but the most well-off).  

The cry to "Remove Ideology" is, of course, a sop to various players who believe that anything from comprehensive sex education to critical thinking exercises represents some kind of "ideological bias".  This is reflected in the Alberta UCP's overhaul of school curriculum to reflect a "memorized 'facts'" model reminiscent of the 1950s and 60s.  We're going to focus on "facts" but not really talk about the implications of them because that's going to make someone uncomfortable (and sex education always makes a certain subset of parents get very uncomfortable for <reasons>).  

The cry to "protect free speech" is always a bit specious.  They aren't really talking about free speech per se, but rather they're talking about enabling the often most radicalized of speakers.  This is a derivative of the so-called "Chicago Principles" - which more or less argue that students protesting someone being given a platform is somehow "impeding free speech".  The Chicago Principles are basically what you get when you apply free market logic to public speaking, with the end result that whoever has the deepest pockets suddenly gets the megaphone, no matter how hateful or otherwise inappropriate their beliefs might be. 

But, it gets better, because they come along and present this little gem under "Culture and Freedom":  

The problem with this should be pretty obvious.  The argument is that various minority groups receive "preferential" treatment because of their minority status, and somehow this is wrong because it's "reverse discrimination".  What these positions inevitably mean is a return to what was the status quo before the impact of discrimination was acknowledged.  

Proponents might argue something along the lines of "when are these programs no longer needed?", and the answer to that is "when the wrongs of the past and present have been remediated".  One need only look to the United States, where BIPOC people were (theoretically) liberated during the civil rights era, and yet by no means can we say that they are treated equally in all facets of society.  Economic disadvantage continues to be pervasive, uneven treatment in the legal system has meant that far more BIPOC people are incarcerated, education opportunities are still limited even though on paper everybody is 'equal'.  Equal on paper does not mean equality in fact - that last bit takes a long time to achieve. 

Under healthcare, we find a cry for "conscience rights".  Speaking of coded language, this is almost always targeted at those who oppose abortion, 2SLGBTQ rights, transgender treatment etc.  In Alberta, we  have had one go around with this in 2019.  The problem with so-called conscience rights is they really turn out to be a means for medical practitioners to deny people needed medical care.  

"Oh, you're gay?  Well my religion tells me that you're an irredeemable sinner, so I won't treat you". I wish I was kidding.  It's a very real possibility with this kind of legislation on the books.  It also makes it very easy to deny a woman a D&C in the event of a miscarriage or other medical emergency that might require termination of a pregnancy.  

The language is cleverly obtuse - it never really says what they mean, but when you scrape away the surface layer, you very quickly learn that the intended implementation can be very, very damaging. 

When you delve into their policy declaration, things get so much worse because they start talking about how they're going to go about things.  A large proportion is probably a massive violation of Charter Rights, but with conservatives increasingly willing to shield their laws from scrutiny by invoking S33 (The Notwithstanding Clause), I think it's safe to say that we have to be much more careful to scrutinize the language being used.  However, that's a post for another day - this one is already getting a bit lengthy. 

The Cass Review and the WPATH SOC

The Cass Review draws some astonishing conclusions about the WPATH Standards of Care (SOC).

More or less, the basic upshot of the Cass Review's analysis is that the SOC is "based on shaky evidence".  They attempt to buttress this by applying the AGREE II framework to assess various SOC like frameworks (Taylor, Hall, Heathcote, Hewitt, Langton, & Fraser, 2024).  

Let’s Talk About Data Quality For a Moment

The recently released Cass Review Final Report (Cass Review) has criticized the absence of “high quality evidence” supporting the use of puberty blockers to treat transgender youth (as well as in other areas of transgender research).  

The systemic reviews performed as part of the Cass Review applied a “modified” version of something called the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (NOS).  A brief review of several of the reviews (there are several of them) performed by the Cass team mention “modifying” the NOS, but they do not disclose the nature of the modifications made. Broadly speaking, they classify the vast majority of studies as “low quality”, while the final report spends quite a bit of time talking about “double blind” studies as the “gold standard” for high quality data. 

Let’s talk about that a bit further, shall we?  ( This will be one of several posts on the Cass Review Final Report)

Trans Athletes ...

So, wayyyy back in 2021, I wrote a piece pointing out that a lot of the arguments about whether transgender athletes (and particularly trans women as athletes) have "intrinsic advantages" in sport are very questionable, and there simply isn't a lot of good science that backs up the claim.  A big part of the issue is that most of the studies seen to date were either comparisons between cisgender men and women, or if they involved transgender people at all, they did not necessarily involve transgender athletes.  

Yesterday, Outsports.com reported on a recent study that actually compared cisgender and transgender athletes in a cross-sectional study.  I would urge you to go read the study (actually, even the Outsports article is a pretty decent summary if you don't feel up to wading through the proper study).  

However, there are some interesting findings in the study that warrant further consideration when examining alleged advantage on a sport by sport basis:  

Transgender women presented lower absolute jump height than CM and lower relative jump height, normalised for fat-free mass, than transgender men and cisgender women (figure 4). These results in this study cohort suggest that transgender women lack lower body anaerobic power compared with the other groups. Transgender women’s higher absolute peak power than cisgender women (figure 4C), coupled with higher fat mass potentially driven by higher oestradiol concentrations (figure 1B), suggest that transgender women had more inertia to overcome during the explosive phase of the countermovement jump, which may lead to decreased performance. [Emphasis Added]

This one little quote is interesting because it aligns with my own personal experience with sports performance over the course of transition, and it contains much of the same basic reasoning that has led me to argue that any claim of "advantage" has to exist on a sport by sport basis, and must be underpinned by solidly done science that actually quantifies the claim instead of merely asserting it.  

Therefore, based on these limited findings, we recommend that transgender women athletes be evaluated as their own demographic group, in accordance with the principles outlined in Article 6.1b of the International Olympic Committee Framework on Fairness, Inclusion and Non-Discrimination based on Gender Identity and Sex Variations.4

In other words, the findings of this study demonstrate that most current studies that are often bandied about to claim that transgender women athletes have "massive advantages" don't show that at all, and a whole lot more evidence needs to be gathered before the various governing bodies go jumping off in all directions.