Anti-Transgender Hate Arguments

So, the other day, I ran across a new anti-trans group here in Alberta (shocker, I know).  This one calls itself "Women and Girls Alberta".  As you might expect, they make the usual assortment of arguments as to why transgender women have to be shoved out of society.  

Now, a few things caught my attention, and I think warrant a moment or two of my time to comment on.  

First is their discussion about crime and in particular violence towards women.

The opening assertion here is that recognizing trans women somehow erodes women's safety.  I want to be clear here:  I don't think anybody is here to discount the impact of violence on women - least of transgender women.  There's a "yabbut" here though: they are going to proceed to claim that transgender women present unique dangers to women because ... they had a penis once. 

There are a series of claims made in this type of argument to establish alleged danger, and I'm going to go through them and explain the problems with the claim and the evidence upon which that claim is based.  

Alberta, BC, and Ottawa All Walk Into A Bar ...

This is mostly going to be me processing yesterday's announcements in Alberta and BC.  I haven't quite worked out what I think of it all yet, and maybe by the end of this I will have come to some kind of conclusion ... I'm not sure.  What follows is going to be, at best, slightly ordered stream of consciousness writing.  

So, what was announced?  Well, basically, BC got a whole bunch of Federal funding for some major infrastructure projects with a guarantee that the Tanker Ban would remain in place; and Alberta got a commitment to build what amounts to a third line along the TransMountain pipeline route.  

But that's far from the whole story here.

About “Forced Treatment” and Homelessness

I need to comment on the political pressure to force people experiencing addiction into treatment. Superficially, it seems to address a problem in society, but the reality is that this is a political approach to the wrong problem. 

Is addiction (and the deaths resulting from a toxic drug supply) a problem?  Absolutely.  Is this a solution to the social issues that are being assigned to addicts?  No.

Let me explain myself. 

Let’s assume for a moment that forced treatment will actually work, and produces a stream of people who are now former addicts.  Most of the people we are going to push into these programs are likely homeless, and therefore living fairly rough lives.  If they’re “lucky” they might be able to sleep in shelters, or have a room in a decrepit old hotel now being used as housing.  (Neither environment is exactly a good place to live - and a lot of the same factors that lead to drug use exist in both). 

At the end of the treatment program, we (theoretically) are going to release these newly sober people back into society.  Guess what?  You’ve just released a “newly sober” homeless person back into the same environment they were in before.  How long do you think it’s going to be before they relapse when suddenly all their old buddies are around, and urging them to participate in the same activities?  

Sure, creating these “shiny” facilities that we can sweep the homeless people into makes all the suburban types happy -  they don’t have to look at the people who have ended up at the bottom of the social and economic ladders any more. 

But, unless you are addressing all of the issues that lead to homelessness in a constructive manner, guess what?  You’re just creating the same “revolving door” problem that we complain about in the criminal justice systems.  Once that door starts spinning, not only do you have problems with relapse, but the risk of overdose goes up as well.  Oh, and let’s not ignore the effects of “institutionalization” that happen when someone spends extended periods in an environment where they have little or no control over their daily existence.

There are a myriad of issues that need to be addressed:  housing, income, mental health, addiction, socialization (including integration with society), and a dozen other factors.  Treatment for addiction is but one facet of a much more complex problem that we need to think about intelligently.  Reactionary politics aimed at people freaking out over seeing a discarded syringe somewhere is missing the point, entirely.  

These problems didn’t appear overnight, and they won’t “go away” overnight because suddenly we give police the ability to round people up and force them into treatment.  At best you’re sweeping things under the carpet and hoping they’ll go away on their own after that.  They won’t.  They don’t.  The solutions to these problems require all of us to take notice and realize that the systems we live in aren’t working the way they should and major change is needed. 

When a person working full time can’t afford a decent place to live, we have created a problem - and no, the “invisible hand” of the free market isn’t going to fix that.  There are fundamental problems in our society that are the precursors to homelessness and addiction.  

The UCP Is Being Petty and Vengeful

The UCP government is now becoming vengeful - openly so.  In the 2023 Alberta Election, rural Alberta voted UCP, and urban Alberta didn't (at least not the kind of sweep that the UCP seems to think they are owed).  Now, it's not unusual for political parties to "reward" ridings that vote for them, but this is taking on a whole new tone that I think we need to discuss.  

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. 

A Muddled Mess

So, this past week, Federal Court justice Mosley issued a ruling on a group of cases attacking the Federal Government's use of the Emergencies Act as somehow illegal/unconstitutional/whatever.

Let me start off by saying that I've read a good number of rulings from Canadian judges, and usually they're pretty readable.  This is not one of them.  In fact it is shockingly unclear in so many respects. In other words, to be utterly charitable, it feels like the judge had a horribly unclear picture of the evidence before him and that is reflected in the utterly muddled outcome. 
Let's start with the end where we get a clear statement from the justice as to how muddled his thinking really is. 

It's A Confession

In the wake of Rachel Notley stepping down as leader of the Alberta NDP,  the geniuses over at National Post decided to publish an "opinion" piece that tries to lay all of Alberta's political problems at her feet. 

Besides being partisan drivel, it's interesting to go through this particular example because it's so revealing of the rhetorical acrobatics that the writer engages in to twist things to suit his particular worldview. 

First, wearing a watch - any watch - is not a statement about someone's politics and policies.  If that's your evidence for her being "woke", and "ideological", it's pretty slim pickings.  Calling a leader whose government operated to the political right of where Peter Lougheed sat "ideological" and "Marxist" is more of a confession of how far to the extreme right today's conservatism has slid since Grant Notley was alive. 

Uh yeah - here's the thing about that.  Oil patch executives ASKED for Tzeporah German to be part of the panel.  So, if that was a "provocation", it was only a "provocation" to Alberta's political conservatives.  Considering the hundreds of thousands that the UCP has thrown at people who have led their various faux-consultation panels since 2019, the $20,000 or so that Tzeporah Berman took home seems like a pittance. 

Ah yes, the requisite whine about Bill 6 - and misrepresentation of it Bill 6 that the conservatives have used as a bludgeon since day one to rile up rural Alberta followers.  Bill 6 was intended to address one key thing about farming:  workplace injuries.  Period.  Alberta is decades behind other provinces in recognizing that farm workers are disproportionately affected by workplace injuries, and leaves those workers without any kind of coverage for recovery.  The claim is made that this is about "families" - it's not.  The family farm is a cutesy little myth that conservatives trot out when it's convenient, but then they ignore the "corporate factory farm" model that dominates today's agricultural world.  A world where the people working the land are employees, and unlike other heavy industries, those employees have between few and no protections if working conditions are unsafe. 

So, yeah, real divisive there.  The divisiveness was sown by, and fed, by the conservatives who jumped on it to spread fear among rural Albertans that the government was coming to take away their lifestyle.  

That was a scorched earth campaign?  Wow - did you pay attention to the 4 year long rage campaign that Kenney and the nascent UCP conducted starting in 2015?  The one where everything the NDP ever said or did was attacked no matter what it was?  

Yeah, I don't think the divisiveness was the NDP here.  Again, the conservatives chose the path of anger, rage, and fear mongering.  Alberta sees the consequences of this every day, whether it is the regular outbursts from the idiot Convoy organizers, or the closed arrogance of a UCP government that has chosen a "burn it all down" approach to governing. 

Alberta spent decades voting as if it were some kind of political monolith.  That wasn't democracy - it was single party rule, and that party got pretty rotten over the years.  It took decades for Albertans to even notice.  Healthy democracy lives not by unity of ideas, but by a willingness to see the ideas that differ from your own as valid and worthy.  Conservatives have eschewed that in Canada, becoming increasingly insular and closed-door, only saying what they think will get them elected in public. Other approaches to politics and governance are sneered at and derided.  

The UCP is moving to isolate Alberta from the rest of Canada, against the wishes of the vast majority of its population on matters like the CPP.  And we're supposed to believe that somehow or another this is all about Rachel Notley?  Wow. 

For National Post and its writers to claim that "it's the NDP's fault" is laughably silly.  

The CPC Went Full SoCon

The brief summary of yesterday’s policy votes at the CPC 2023 convention was published by CBC. Go there first, and read it - but I really think they missed more than a few things, so this is going to be a bit more of a deep dive into the policies they passed and how much worse for women and minorities it really is.

Tougher Laws = More Justice … Or Do They?

So, yesterday, a police officer in Ontario was killed.  Inevitably, we get cries of “this could have been prevented”, largely on the basis that one of the accused in the murder was out on bail awaiting trial for a series of charges.  

There’s a problem here:  the claim that this could have been prevented implies that the accused should have been in prison already. Yet, it’s relatively rare for a bench warrant to trigger a manhunt unless the charges are such that the accused is assumed to be a danger to the public - which most accused aren’t.  The police generally seem to sit back and wait for the person to turn up either of their own volition, or in a more mundane incident like a traffic stop. 

However, I’m not here to blame the police for not being aggressive in enforcing the bench warrant.  Just enforcing those could chew up a lot of resources that regional police forces probably don’t have. 

So what are the likely alternatives?  

Do Away With Bail? 

Doing away with bail - even in situations where the accused has convictions for similar charges in their past - could be enormously problematic. First, it violates the fundamental presumption of our legal system that the accused is innocent.  You are effectively “pre-punishing” someone by keeping them in remand in advance of any trial.  Generally we have sought not to do so because that detention is really for the “worst of the worst” cases. (Serial killers, extremely violent offenders, etc.)

Also, doing away with bail would have multiple knock-on effects in our justice system.  It would drive up the costs associated with Remand detention.  Keeping someone in remand is expensive, and taxpayers generally are going to be antsy about those costs. 

Given the often lengthy amount of time to get to trial, the time served could easily exceed any prison sentence that would be handed down.  That would almost inevitably result in a lot of people being released “for time already served” the day sentences are handed down. Not only does this miss the point of a justice system entirely, but it renders any notion of “punishment” academic at best. It also likely as not is going to turn the remand facilities into “criminal colleges”, whose graduates will go on to commit more crimes. (Remand is already bad enough for that effect due to a lack of rehabilitative programming)

Shorten The Time To Trial

Getting a criminal case to trial has been a problem for years now. To some extent, this is a matter of resourcing the justice system better.  The courts have also ruled that there is in fact a window of time that is allowable for a case coming to trial, after which the rights of the accused are deemed to have been violated. 

While improving the throughput of the courts is certainly a laudable objective, it’s not going to solve the problem of an accused offender going on to commit other offences while awaiting trial.  

Make Punishments Harsher? 

We could enact laws that impose ever harsher sentences, but to me that’s a failed experiment in 19th Century thinking. The argument that “harsher sentences are a deterrent” is simply false when you are looking at crime and punishment.  There is a validity to there being a significant penalty associated with criminal acts.  I’m good with that. We should never make the assumption that a particular punishment is in any way a deterrent to a criminal. 

In general doing so assumes that the prospective criminal is even thinking about the potential consequences of their actions at the time of committing (or even planning) an offence.  If that were the case, then there are entire countries where crime should be all but non-existent, and yet those countries continue to have the same, or worse, problems with crime.  

To be clear, I don't think there is a singular solution to the problem at hand.  We already know that our prison systems are overburdened, and vastly under-resourced when it comes to inmates and programming to help inmates become productive members of society post-sentence.  Far too much emphasis has been placed on punishment, not enough on rehabilitation, with the result that prisons in some ways become "Universities for Crime", and parolees their graduates. 

There is a need for society to address issues like systemic oppression, poverty, etc in an effort to reduce the long term negative consequences of those issues that so often lead to people committing offences.  

On the other side of the coin, while punishment needs to be punishment, we also have to look at how we prepare prisoners to function in the real world. Simply kicking them out at the end of their sentences with little or no supports is practically begging for them to return to the life of crime they knew before. That means making skills training, psychological supports, and safe housing available. 

In terms of prison structure and management, I think we should take a much closer look at the approaches used in countries like Sweden and Norway - with the caveat that those approaches will need to be adapted carefully for the kind of cultural mosaic that exists in Canada. Simply trying to pivot to it will fail. 

I think some of the ideas around the aboriginal concepts of restorative justice warrant further exploration, as do more flexible approaches to managing justice in ways that are culturally sensitive for the variety of cultural groups that live here today. 

None of this is easy, and all of it costs money. We need to stop acting like there are simple solutions to matters of crime and punishment. There aren't, and there never will be.