Alberta's Anti-Trans Legislation

So, now that the UCP has rolled out their anti-trans legislation, we can take a long look at it.  Yesterday, they tabled 3 related bills and earlier in the week they tabled their amendments to the "Alberta Bill of Rights".  I'm not the fastest read of law, and I suspect that some of the legislation has been created to tangle the courts up.  So ... this is probably part 1 of a series.  

Anyways, let's dive in.

I'm going to start with the Bill of Rights amendments contained in Bill 24, because there's some important and peculiar pieces here that need to be discussed.  Much of the amendments are given over to assuaging the paranoid conspiracy theories that seem to have become dominant in the UCP's base.  I'm going to ignore those - because I need to focus your attention on the more significant bits of the legislation. 

First, we have this curious little change to the preamble.  There are a couple of phrases I particularly want to highlight:  "fostered by tradition" (whose traditions are we talking about?), and the addition of "the position of the family ...".

Both of these phrases are concerningly vague and they have the whiff about them of an attempt to wedge in a nod towards creating a rights regime derived from religious nationalism.  It is unclear what precisely is meant here by "position of the family", and the rest of the document doesn't really do a lot to clarify this.  Were I to speculate wildly, I'd guess that this is intended to create a legal construct wherein the rights of a child or other person deemed "not legally competent" are going to be suborned to the will of others - particularly their families.  In other words, it's sneaky wording designed to arbitrarily limit various people's access to fundamental rights based on ill-defined characteristics and a model of family that treats minors as chattel, and not emerging adults. 

This is an interesting bit of change to the legislation because not only does it appear to place the Bill of Rights above other laws in Alberta, but then the legislature has given itself a "clobber power" to override it more or less at will.  (If this reads a bit like S33 in The Charter of Rights and Freedoms to you, you're not wrong). The preceding version of S2 reads quite differently, and is in fact much more constraining of the ability of the legislature to simply override it:

Were I to make bets, I would put good odds that some of this is designed quite specifically to make it easy for the government to simply use a legislative sledgehammer to override your rights under this legislation.  The framing language in the preamble is curiously at odds with the Charter, which is clearly oriented towards individual rights and not collective rights such as those one might assign to a family unit. 

The actual "anti-transgender" components are embedded in the following three bills:  

Bill 26 - Health Statutes Amendment Act

Bill 27 - Education Amendment Act

Bill 29 - Fairness and Safety in Sport Act 

Of these, the most complex is Bill 26, which has tendrils into numerous pieces of legislation.  I will explore these bills in more detail in subsequent posts.