appendix 1 Power to the Parents: A Vindication of Bill 208

In retrospect, subsequent political developments have vindicated my warnings about the threats to freedom of speech and religion that Bill 208 was designed to mitigate. Same-sex marriage is now a fait accompli in most Western democracies. Tellingly, in both Canada and the US, this is the result of decisions by unelected, unaccountable judges.

I still think, as I did twenty years ago, that same-sex marriage is a dangerous social experiment. It ignores the basic biological and psychological differences that define the two sexes. It has never been adopted in any societies in human history prior to the last two decades. It will increase the number of children who grow up without either a mother or a father in their household. As I and others have written (see Appendix 2), this will be to the detriment of both children and society at large. Critics will quickly point out that we will not know whether these risks become realities for several more generations. My response: Yes, but we don’t know that they won’t become realities, and that is a risk I do not think we should have taken.

What we do know now is that the push for same-sex marriage was not the endgame for gay activists and their woke allies, but a staging area for an even more aggressive campaign not just to “normalize” what quickly became known as “LGBTQ” behaviour and relationships, but to silence and, if necessary, to punish any public disagreement with this “new normal.” What now passes for the “progressive” or “woke” agenda of sex and race issues is eroding the traditional rights of freedom of speech and religion; the rights of parents to choose their children’s education; equal protection of the laws; and due process of law.

Out of the 193 countries in the world today, only thirty-four countries have legalized same-sex marriage, and virtually none in Eastern Europe, Asia, or Africa—which constitute over 80 percent of the world’s population. It is interesting—and a bit frightening—to ask: What are the conditions in Canada and the other Western democracies that gave birth to same-sex marriage and the LGBTQ movement? Are we the pioneers of a brave new world, one that the others will follow into a more egalitarian future? Or are we at the beginning of the decline and fall of the European-Anglo-American empire, a small handful of nations that have been too wealthy, too powerful for too long, and have forgotten the social and political foundations of their success? Have we started down the rabbit hole of George Orwell’s 1984 and the “thought police”? I don’t know the answer to those questions. But I do know that Canada, unfortunately, is in the vanguard of the woke authoritarian movement. How did we get here so quickly?

Universities

The place to start is with our universities. This is where “identity politics” and the “social justice” agenda originated and has gone the furthest. With the defeat and demise of communism in the 1990s, the academic Left developed a new “narrative” and a new set of categories to retool their critique of Western liberal democracies. In postwar Western democracies, the most dynamic agent of social change has been not Marx’s industrial proletariat but an “oppositionist intelligentsia,” drawn from and supported by the well-educated, more affluent strata of society.¹

In post-industrial democracies such as Canada and the US, the “knowledge industry” has become a new source of political power. The socio-economic base of this new knowledge industry consists of “the well-educated and affluent, academics, journalists, professionals and civil servants.”² But since these groups still constitute a minority of voters, they choose to pursue their policy goals through the courts and human rights bureaucracies rather than through the electoral process.³

In the new social justice vocabulary, equity has replaced equality. Justice is no longer equality of opportunity, but equality of result. Justice for whom? The working class? The many poor? Not any longer. Now it is for “historically disadvantaged minorities.” Women and “BIPOC”—Black, Indigenous, and people of colour—all of whom are now deemed to have unjustly suffered from sexism and the “white supremacy” that defines Canadian and American “colonialist” societies. Heterosexism—the term invented for prejudice against homosexuals—fits comfortably into the new war against racism and sexism. It was soon expanded to “transphobia” to include transsexuals and bisexuals—newly defined “gender minorities.”

Identity politics is not just wrong as a matter of history. It is also dangerous. It promotes the very differences that modern liberalism made secondary because they have been the source of so much conflict—race, religion, and ethnicity. As Andrew Sullivan—himself an out-of-the-closet gay man—has written, “The goal of our [woke] culture now is not the emancipation of the individual from the group, but the permanent definition of the individual by the group.”⁴ The belief that adopting these policies will somehow promote greater equality and toleration among groups in the future is delusional.

This is a huge step backward. Legally defining individuals by their religion, race, or ethnicity is what fuelled a century of civil wars between Catholics and Protestants in Europe. More recently, Third-World versions of “identity politics” have fuelled the bloodshed and human tragedies in places like Kosovo, Turkey, Rwanda, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, and now Gaza, Israel, and Sudan.

I saw the identity politics / social justice movement coming back in the 1990s. I described it in my 2000 book, The Charter Revolution and the Court Party: how the new progressive left was using litigation and the courts to do an end run around elected “responsible” governments.⁵

By the time I returned to university teaching in 2012, the new woke agenda had gone from a vocal minority of faculty to the dominant institutional culture. In 1995, I was awarded a prestigious national fellowship in “human rights research.”⁶ In today’s new “woke” environment, this could never happen. A snapshot of this new normal is captured by Professor Jordan Peterson’s 2022 public letter explaining his early resignation from the University of Toronto (where I did my PhD in the 1970s):

We are now at the point where race, ethnicity, “gender,” or sexual preference is first, accepted as the fundamental characteristic defining each person (just as the radical leftists were hoping) and second, is now treated as the most important qualification for study, research and employment.⁷

What are called the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity” mandates (DEI) now dictate who is hired and promoted. The result, Peterson continues, is that “my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students … face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions.” But it’s not just new hires. Existing faculty members—including senior professors with outstanding records of research and teaching—must now “undergo so-called anti-bias training, conducted by supremely unqualified Human Resources personnel, lecturing inanely and blithely and in an accusatory manner about theoretically all-pervasive racist/sexist/heterosexist attitudes.” He concludes that this, “combined with the death of objective testing, has compromised the universities so badly that it can hardly be overstated.”⁸

Peterson’s account of what has happened at Canadian universities mirrors what has happened in American universities. As reported in the Wall Street Journal,

The left has spent decades consolidating power across the institutions of American academic life. The crowning achievement of that effort was the diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy—constructed to perpetuate progressive dominance of higher education by keeping conservatives out of the professoriate.⁹

For those in Alberta, the 2012 “cancelling crusade” against my friend and colleague Tom Flanagan—“from respected political scientist to pariah”—was a wake-up call to this new dystopia.¹⁰ The more recent 2022 firing of tenured Professor Frances Widdowson at Mount Royal University is only the most recent example of suppression and punishment of professors who in their teaching and writing do not toe the new line of “political correctness.” Widdowson was fired for criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement and for stating that there were educational benefits for Indigenous youth in Canada’s residential schools system.¹¹

In 2023, the University Calgary announced its new “cluster hiring initiative”—a plan to hire forty-five new professors, all of whom must be members of “equity-deserving groups”—women, Indigenous people, visible minorities, or persons with disabilities.¹²

DEI’s consequence for our universities—and by extension, all Albertans—will be negative. More qualified candidates for faculty hiring will be passed over in favour of applicants from “equity-deserving groups.” Not only is this unfair discrimination against the more qualified candidates, it will also undermine the competitiveness of our universities—both nationally and internationally.

What happened to hiring based on merit and achievement? Imagine if the players on professional hockey or basketball teams were hired based on DEI rather than skill and merit. Guaranteed last place! For our universities—and our students, who are our future—it will be an academic and economic disaster. I wrote an op-ed for the Calgary Herald sharply criticizing the U of C for all of these reasons.¹³

Much to my surprise, the Herald did not include my op-ed in their online version, which has a much larger number of subscribers. When I requested that they add it to the online edition, they refused, saying it was a way to “reward” their home-delivery subscribers. I was not persuaded, and so subsequently published an expanded version of the same piece in the Western Standard.¹⁴ But I went further, and tried to make my arguments against the U of C’s new faculty hiring policy less abstract, more personal, more local:

The sort of reverse discrimination now being launched by the U of C is not a path that Alberta needs to go down. Over the past six decades, families from all over Canada—and all over the world—have come to Alberta for better opportunities. More importantly, they have stayed. And they stayed because they have prospered. … Alberta has prospered largely because it has been a classic meritocracy. With increasingly rare exceptions, Albertans don’t care where you’ve come from or what colour your skin is. At some point, all our families came from somewhere else. We care if you can do the job and do it well. If you can, you’re on our team. This culture has contributed to building the most productive and prosperous province in Canada. … The more diverse we become, the more imperative it is that the government treat everyone equally. It is not only morally right. It works. In Alberta it has worked for the past six decades. And it will keep working if we allow it to.

I ended by endorsing the policy recommendations proposed by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute to bring back freedom of speech and academic integrity to Canadian universities.¹⁵ These include freedom of speech codes for both students and professors; merit-based hiring of new professors; and the prohibition of mandatory DEI declarations as a condition of employment or research funding. And I added one more: “To provide funding for new institutions on university campuses that ensure students have access to the ideas and facts that rebut and disprove the new pseudo-progressive orthodoxies. Fight false speech with true speech. The historical facts are on our side.”

The irrationality and harm of this new woke culture is not limited to university campuses. It has spilled over into mainstream media, entertainment, and the corporate world. As Peterson warned, “What happens in the universities eventually colours everything.”

Human Rights Acts

The federal legalization of same-sex marriage in 2005 had immediate consequences for both human rights legislation and for education. It removes the concept of a natural parent from Canadian law; “It disconnects being a parent from its natural basis—the union of a man and a woman, a husband and wife, a father and a mother.”¹⁶ As Douglas Farrow notes, “At a stroke, it made parenthood a gift of the state—a legal construct—rather than a natural right.”¹⁷ Not only is this dangerous—what the state creates, it can take away—but it has also opened the door to endless new legal definitions of marriage and parenthood with no regard for biological realities. For woke progressives, the very term “biological realities” is itself proof of heterosexism and transphobia.

Feminists and gay rights activists were quick to pressure federal and provincial governments to add not just sexual orientation to their human rights acts but also “gender identity.” The general public, of course, had no idea what this meant or what such legal changes would entail, so most governments took the path of least resistance and quietly complied.

Alberta was an exception. The Supreme Court had already ruled in its 1998 Vriend decision that not including sexual orientation was a violation of the Charter of Rights, so Alberta had no choice but to add it. But not “gender identity.” Now a member of cabinet, I warned caucus that the term “gender identity” was a carefully constructed political and legal time bomb that, if put into legislation, gay rights activists would take to the courts to force precisely the kinds of restrictions on freedom of speech and freedom of religion that Bill 208 had been designed to prevent. Notwithstanding then Minister of Education Dave Hancock’s arguments to the contrary, caucus agreed with me. So when the Stelmach government introduced Bill 44 in 2009, we did not include “gender identity.”¹⁸ We also went a step further by adding a parental notification requirement if a class were to study “subject matter that deals explicitly with religion, sexuality or sexual orientation,” and gave parents the right to exclude their children from such classes.¹⁹

Other than Alberta, most other provinces went along with the radical new dispensation. At the federal level, to their credit, the Harper Conservatives did not. But in 2016, the newly elected Justin Trudeau Liberals were quick to incorporate such changes into federal law. The Liberals’ Bill C-16 added not just “gender identity” but also “gender expression” to the list of prohibited forms of discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act.

The intentional ambiguity of these terms makes them unintelligible to normal people. But for the woke activists, their meaning is clear. Similar phrasing in the Ontario Human Rights Act has already been interpreted to mean that “refusing to refer to a trans-person by their chosen name and a personal pronoun that matches their gender identity” will be deemed illegal.²⁰

As Queen’s University law professor Bruce Pardy warned in the National Post, “Bill C-16 will give transgendered and non-gendered people the ability to dictate other people’s speech.”

[F]ailure to use a person’s pronoun of choice—‘ze,’ ‘zir,’ ‘they,’ or any one of a multitude of other potential non-words—will land you in hot water with the commission. That, in turn, can lead to orders for correction, apology, Soviet-like ‘re-education,’ fines and, in cases of continued non-compliance, incarceration for contempt of court.²¹

Alberta has not been exempt from controversies over mandatory “re-education.” In 2021, the Law Society of Alberta adopted a new rule that required all Alberta lawyers to complete a five-hour online learning module teaching “Indigenous cultural competency,”²² Critics drafted a petition calling for its repeal. They argued that the Law Society’s job is to ensure competency and integrity, not to impose political indoctrination. At their 2023 annual meeting, members of the Law Society defeated a proposal to eliminate the mandatory course.²³

These types of mandated speech and professional re-education policies are the exact antithesis of one of the oldest and most important human rights—freedom of speech—and more specifically, the right to publicly disagree and criticize government policy. Pardy concludes that “we are in the middle of a culture war, and human rights have become a weapon to normalize social justice values and to delegitimize competing beliefs.” In Canadian and American universities, the woke warriors have prevailed. And now they are moving on to primary and secondary schools.

Education Curriculum

In 2021, Ontario escalated the culture war with Bill 67, later re-introduced as Bill 16.²⁴ Bill 16 seeks to incorporate “social justice theory”—a Canadian variant on its American counterpart, Critical Race Theory (CRT)—for all Ontario K-12 schools and universities.²⁵ CRT, as Barbara Kay accurately reports, “teaches that we should judge others and ourselves only by skin colour, gender identity, DNA (indigenous status), and other group markers.” The new goal is not equality of opportunity, but equality of results, now called “equity.” Equity is mentioned fifty-four times in Bill 16, but equality not once. This isn’t by accident.

Equity is about finishing lines for groups. If minority groups don’t achieve the same outcomes in proportion to their numbers in the population, there can only be one reason: racism or some other form of bigotry exercised by an oppressor group with privilege.²⁶

Like its federal counterpart, Bill C-16, Ontario’s Bill 16 means that racism need not be overt or intentional. “Those who ‘feel’ offended decide whether or not an act of racism has been committed. There is no objective threshold, no due process for the alleged perpetrator. If you say you are not a racist, this is deemed proof that you subconsciously are a racist.”²⁷

***

Alberta has not escaped the campaign to revamp provincial education systems to reflect the new social justice / woke agenda. With my departure in 2012 and the leadership turmoil that ensued (three different premiers in three years), the PC caucus became more susceptible to the lobbying efforts of the LGBTQ activists and their allies in the province’s human rights bureaucracy. Both were still angry about Bill 44’s omission of “gender identity” and its requirement for parental notification and the opt-out provision.

In 2014, Conservative MLA Sandra Jansen introduced Bill 10, innocuously titled An Act to Amend the Alberta Bill of Rights to Protect our Children. (Two years later Jansen showed her true colours and crossed the floor to join the new NDP government.) Bill 10’s benign title hid a cryptic and complex set of amendments to the Alberta Human Rights Act. These amendments were crafted to open the door to future, more explicit, and more intrusive policies through bureaucratic regulations, where the media and thus the general public were less likely to notice them.

Bill 10 retained the parental notification / opt-out provisions of Bill 44, but then added a requirement that all Alberta school boards add and support student “diversity” clubs if any student requested one. It contained a parental notification requirement, but only that such a club had been created. Schools were not required to notify parents if their child was participating in such a club. This provided a convenient end run around the parental notification requirement for classroom materials dealing with sexual orientation.

In 2015, the newly elected NDP government was quick to take advantage of Bill 10’s bureaucratic back door. In November, Minister of Education David Eggen introduced sweeping new “education guidelines.”²⁸ Ostensibly these “guidelines” were to assist school boards in implementing Bill 10. In reality, they were mandatory, intended to force local school boards to adopt the new “diversity” initiatives. If a school board resisted, unhappy students or parents could appeal to the minister for correction.

The guidelines required all schools—public, separate, Francophone, charter, and private—to adopt the LGBTQ maxim that “self-identification is the sole measure of an individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.” Following from this alpha principle, all schools were told to revise “policies, regulations and procedures” to ensure they “respected … sexual orientations, gender identities and gender expressions.” Sixteen pages then spelled out in detail what this entails. But the most dramatic change—and the one that sparked the most controversy—was the new requirement that prohibited schools from disclosing to parents any information about their child’s sexual orientation or gender identity without first getting that child’s permission.²⁹

These changes sparked a wave of protests. Bishop Henry, the Catholic Archbishop of Calgary, publicly denounced the guidelines as “the madness of relativism and the forceful imposition of a particular narrow-minded anti-Catholic ideology.”³⁰

Now back in my university office, I wrote a column for the Calgary Herald denouncing it as violating the freedoms of all Canadians, and most specifically parents. The NDP guidelines, I reminded readers, were in clear violation of Article 26 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights: “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that should be given to their children.”³¹ But the most effective and mobilizing resistance came from a new organization—Parents for Choice in Education—and its founder, Donna Trimble.

Schools are being coerced to isolate parents from their own children, thereby severing the parent-child bond that is essential to the mental health of every child. … This guideline will only serve to isolate children who are confronting one of the most difficult and confusing moments of their young lives with the cumulative pressure of having to decide when, if ever, to invite their parents into the discussion.³²

Undeterred—and sensing that they might lose the 2019 election (which they did)—in 2017 the NDP pushed through a second piece of legislation, Bill 24, which further entrenched the LGBTQ agenda in Alberta schools. Bill 24 abandoned the vague and innocuous “diversity” rationale for student clubs and made their purpose explicit: “Gay-Straight Alliance” and “Queer-Straight Alliance.” It authorized these clubs to provide sexually explicit materials and prohibited schools from informing parents if their child was participating in one of these clubs.

Parent Power: The DEI Backlash

In the United States, these same issues have sparked what is now being called a “culture war.” In the 2016 US presidential election, Hillary Clinton’s description of Trump supporters as “a basket of deplorables … racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic” elicited laughter and applause from her Upper East Side New York City audience. But it also contributed to her defeat, as millions of traditional working-class Democrats felt her contempt and voted for Donald Trump.

More recently, legislators in at least six states have passed laws that restrict teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools. Their supporters argue that these are decisions should be made by parents.³³ National columnist Peggy Noonan has described these developments as a “parents’ rebellion.” Noting political victories by anti-woke candidates in the recent Virginia governor’s race and a school board recall election in San Francisco, Noonan concludes, “There is a real parents movement going on, and it is going to make a difference in our politics.”³⁴ Noonan’s prediction has proven to be accurate. Initially these protests were ad hoc and local. But in 2021, a new national organization, Moms for Liberty, was formed to coordinate and advance the protection of parents’ rights in all fifty states.³⁵

The backlash against DEI has also grown at the university level. In 2023, Florida enacted a law that prohibits its public universities and colleges from spending public funds on DEI initiatives. A year later, the University of Florida abolished all positions related to DEI—including thirteen full-time administrative positions in addition to appointments for fifteen faculty members.³⁶ Similar anti-DEI policies have been introduced in thirty other state legislatures, seven of which have now been enacted.³⁷

In the United States, growing political polarization over issues like these has been described by Michael Lind as the “revolution from above.” Drawn from the more educated, more affluent, more urban classes of society, the new “progressives”—the “managerial elites,” as Lind describes them—have three central policy objectives: reducing CO₂ emissions to fight climate change; supporting affirmative action / reverse discrimination policies to promote the equality of results for disadvantaged minorities; and the gay marriage, LGBTQ, gender identity project. Lind neatly summarizes these as the Green Project, the Quota Project, and the Androgyny Project.³⁸ This “revolution from above,” writes Lind, is being implemented primarily by and through the following agencies:

• State bureaucracies—especially the human rights commissions and public schools / teachers’ unions
• The courts—especially final national appellate courts
• Universities and colleges—especially law schools
• Public school systems, run and staffed by graduates of universities and colleges
• United Nations and other supranational organizations

The common denominator of these institutions is that they are all unaccountable to voters and to the elected/accountable branches of government. They are aided and abetted by the national media and corporate America—which are also run and staffed by graduates of universities and colleges. Lind describes this as “the new class war,” and is blunt about the challenge it poses: “saving democracy from the managerial elite.”³⁹

The recent forced resignation of the president of Harvard University suggests that the political backlash to identity politics and DEI is gaining strength. On October 7, 2023, Hamas slaughtered 1,200 Israeli civilians, the most Jews killed in a single day since the Nazi Holocaust of the 1940s. Claudine Gay, Harvard’s black female president, refused to discipline Harvard students who publicly supported Hamas and its call for the genocide of Jews. In subsequent public testimony, Gay refused to agree that calling for the genocide of Jews is a forbidden form of hate speech at Harvard.

This triggered a public backlash and new scrutiny of Gay, her career, and her academic background. Subsequent research revealed that in some of her earlier academic publications, Gay had plagiarized work from other scholars without footnotes or attribution of her sources. When her plagiarism became public knowledge, she was forced to resign. As Christopher Rufo reported, “The truth finally broke through: Ms. Gay was a scholar of not much distinction who climbed the ladder of diversity politics, built a DEI empire as a Harvard dean, and catered to the worst instincts of left-wing ideologues on campus. The nation’s leading university had subordinated veritas to politics, compromising its mission. The only choice was to force Ms. Gay to step down.”⁴⁰

Culture War Comes to Canada

While what Lind and Rufo are describing has transpired south of the border, the parallels to Canada are clear. In the 2002 federal election, well before Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark, Liberal cabinet minister Elinor Caplan described Canadian Alliance supporters as “Holocaust deniers, prominent bigots and racists.”⁴¹ (No wonder the Liberals win no seats in Alberta!)

In 2018, Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson described the surprise election victory of Doug Ford’s Conservatives in the Ontario election as a “populist … reaction—or a revolt—against ‘identity politics’ … for whom the elites’ messages of ‘inclusiveness’ seems to include everybody but them.”⁴² And now the Ford Conservatives have been elected a second time, again with strong support from the suburbs, smaller towns, and trade-union families.

A recent study by Dave Snow found that while Canada’s media coverage of the Harvard University incident followed mainstream US media’s favourable portrayal of President Claudine Gay and DEI policies, Canadian editorial opinion did not. Of the fifteen opinion columns that addressed DEI or “woke” policies, fourteen were critical of their influence on universities.⁴³ Canadian public opinion may also be moving against DEI policies at publicly funded universities and colleges. Survey research by political scientist Eric Kaufmann found that “Canadians largely reject the woke ideology” promoted by so many university and government elites, which presents “a glaring opportunity for conservatives and a glaring risk for progressives.”⁴⁴

As well it should. When Jordan Peterson first blew the whistle on the harm that DEI was doing to the University of Toronto, he was a voice in the wilderness. Today, that voice has become a choir. An entirely new think tank has been formed—the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy—to challenge DEI and identity politics—in the universities, in the media, and in our schools⁴⁵ Their first book, The 1867 Project: Why Canada Should be Cherished—Not Cancelled, has been on the Amazon bestseller list since it was released in July 2023.⁴⁶

A recent survey of professors at Canadian universities found that many professors now self-censor, not only in what they say but what they teach. Their results supported the claim that “there is a serious crisis in higher education in this country”:

Canadian universities are political monoliths whose lack of viewpoint diversity contributes to serious problems on campus including a weakening of support for academic freedom, a hostile climate for those who disagree with left-leaning values, and significant levels of self-censorship.⁴⁷

These findings were confirmed by a recent article published by The Hub, a new and rapidly growing digital news and commentary media outlet. The article is by a senior administrator at a Canadian university. The author reports that “ideology trumps academic integrity” in what has created a “progressive race to the bottom” on campus: “Conformity and accessibility, rather than debate and excellence, define today’s university.” Tellingly, the author published this anonymously for fear of retribution (i.e., losing one’s job). The author ends with the hope that “as the public becomes more aware of what is happening in these elite institutions, there may be some incentive to change.”⁴⁸

The Hub has also published another article decrying “the growing disconnect between the ideas and languages of universities and the rest of society,” and the resulting tension this is creating: “University administrators and faculty members want it both ways—they want taxpayer funding but they don’t want taxpayers to have a say about what happens on campus. … One cannot help but think that this is no longer a sustainable arrangement. … Something will likely need to give.”⁴⁹

As in the US, backlash against DEI policies is also growing at the primary and secondary school level. In 2023, Scott Moe, the conservative premier of Saskatchewan, introduced Bill 137, Parents’ Bill of Rights, which requires schools to receive parental permission if a student under sixteen wants to change their chosen name or pronoun.⁵⁰ Predictably, this was immediately challenged in court by a “2SLGBTQIA+”⁵¹ advocacy group as a violation of the Charter of Rights. When a judge issued an injunction against the implementation of Bill 137, Moe invoked the section 33 notwithstanding clause to protect the new parental rights policy from any future judicial veto. For this, of course, he has been widely and loudly denounced by mainstream media⁵² and academics.⁵³

In Alberta, there is also growing support for policies and parties supporting parents’ rights. In addition to Parents for Choice in Education,⁵⁴ a new advocacy group—the Alberta Parents’ Union,⁵⁵ has been formed. This may help to explain why in February 2024, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced a series of new policies to strengthen parental rights.⁵⁶ Parental notification will be required for any classroom discussions of “gender identity, sexual orientation or human sexuality,” and all such materials will first have to be pre-approved by the Ministry of Education as age appropriate. Schools will not be allowed to change the name or the pronoun of a child under sixteen without prior parental consent. For older children, parental notification will still be required. Last but not least, transgender females (i.e., biological boys) will not be allowed to participate in girls’ sports. (As the father of a daughter who played three varsity sports all through high school, I especially appreciate this.)

In addition, Smith announced that her government plans to introduce legislation to ban “top and bottom” gender reassignment surgery for children under seventeen, and to ban hormone therapy for those under fifteen. Smith was explicit in her defence of these policies: “Making permanent and irreversible decisions regarding one’s biological sex while still a youth can severely limit that child’s choices in the future.”⁵⁷

As in the case of Saskatchewan, Premier Smith’s initiatives were widely denounced—by Prime Minister Trudeau,⁵⁸ the opposition NDP party, and the mainstream media.⁵⁹ But federal Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre defended Smith and challenged Trudeau: “He should let parents raise kids and let provinces run schools and hospitals.”⁶⁰ The parent power movement has definitely arrived in Canada.

In April 2024, the Alberta and Saskatchewan policies got a boost from the release of the Cass Report, a study on the use of puberty blockers commissioned by England’s National Health Service.⁶¹ The Cass Report found that there is no scientifically reliable evidence that puberty blocking hormones can help children with gender dysphoria. Accordingly, Great Britain has now banned the use of puberty blockers except for clinical research. Sweden has now adopted a similar ban.⁶² Predictably, the CBC and the Canadian doctors they interviewed are rejecting the findings of the Cass Report.⁶³

But it’s too late for Canadian Social Justice / Gender crusaders and their media allies to suppress the findings of the Cass Report. A new “non-partisan, non-religious coalition of Canadian parents, healthcare professionals and others” has formed to challenge the use of puberty blockers, sex-change surgeries and “gender-affirming care” practices.⁶⁴ They support policies of parental notification and/or consent and are urging governments to adopt “less radical, more science-based approaches to gender incongruence among minors.” Their efforts have been supported by a new study from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.⁶⁵ It reports how other Western nations (France, Holland, Finland, Denmark, and Sweden) and twenty-four US states are adopting similar reforms. This study ends with a clear message: “It is time for Canada to follow the advice of the Cass Review, rethink its approach, and redesign its policies around sensible evidence-based standards.”⁶⁶ Suffice it to say that Canada’s debate on these issues is only beginning.

While academics and the mainstream media have sharply criticized Moe, Smith, and Poilievre for their politically incorrect positions, recent studies suggest that mainstream Canadians are actually supportive of parents’ rights policies.⁶⁷ On issues such as age limits on gender-reassignment surgery, pronoun use, and restricting women’s sports competition to biological women only, Canadians support the “anti-woke” positions by about a 2 to 1 margin. One takeaway from this data is that “there is significant space for right-of-centre parties to increase the prominence of culture wars issues, and an associated electoral risk that left-of-centre parties must manage.”⁶⁸ The Cass Report will strengthen the position of the parents’ rights advocates in Canada.

I, for one, hope this is how things unfold in the coming years. The DEI egalitarians preach toleration, but they are the most intolerant voices in our society. They preach diversity, but then invoke government coercion to enforce a one-size-fits-all uniformity. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, equality of opportunity, the rights of parents to choose their children’s education—all can and are being sacrificed to achieve the new progressives’ Quota and Androgyny projects.

Protecting these historical rights—all of which are constitutional pillars of Canada’s free and democratic society—is what Bill 208 was intended to do.