Watching the state of political discourse these days, you might think that the most pressing issue facing voters isn’t that life is unaffordable, it’s that trans people exist.
Last week, the Canada Strong and Free Network (formerly The Manning Centre) met in Ottawa for their annual conference. Billed as Canada’s largest conservative gathering, the conference’s very first panel discussion was about so-called “parental rights,” an idea rooted in the transphobic belief that there’s a conspiracy to pressure children into being transgender.
New Brunswick’s Premier Blaine Higgs, a former Irving executive, also made a keynote appearance, having led the way for conservative premiers who have embarked on the politicization of trans lives. He lamented the characterization of his views as “far-right,” suggesting that politics have moved too far to the left.
The irony, of course, was that he was being interviewed by Andrew Lawton, an actual far-right media personality and failed Ontario provincial conservative candidate who reportedly believes that gender and racial discrimination should be legalized.
In another part of Ottawa, at the same time, a different vision. The largest gathering of progressives in the country was engaged in conversation about, in the words of Ed Broadbent, “making the good society.”
The Broadbent Institute’s Progress Summit panel on the rights of trans people was titled “Uniting queer, trans and labour movements.” Featuring Fae Johnstone, the panel platformed lived experience and focused on the common struggle of working class people, many of whom are themselves queer and trans.
What a POWERFUL couple of days at the @broadbent Progress Summit.
Honoured to have spoken on a plenary panel about our shared struggle against the far right – and the need for solidarity to address anti-trans hate. pic.twitter.com/aEdBqYi6Yj
— Fae Johnstone, MSW (@FaeJohnstone) April 12, 2024
Luke Lebrun, Fae Johnstone and Debbie Owusu-Akyeeah on trans rights as a part of the common struggle. Tweet from Fae Johnstone’s X account.
According to Trans Murder Monitoring, 321 trans people were reported murdered between October 2022 and September 2023 worldwide. Ninety-four per cent of those murdered were trans women. A majority were Black.
Listening to Canadian conservative politicians today, however, you would be led to believe that trans people aren’t victims of violence, but perpetrators of it.
The Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre made this clear when he said he would force trans women to use men’s bathrooms. This came after he made a transphobic speech espousing the conspiracy theory that the federal government is imposing “radical gender ideology” on children.
Pushing this kind of hate is sure to result in increased harassment of women, including cisgender women, as people begin to feel entitled to police whether someone is “woman” enough to use a bathroom.
Premiers Danielle Smith and Scott Moe have followed the lead of Premier Higgs and brought this extremist tactic of targeting trans people into their schools.
Premier Higgs has become such a darling of the far-right that even Rebel Media has fundraised for his re-election. Yes, the same Rebel Media, which has promoted white supremacy, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia for years.
Trans youth, when compared to youth as a group, are five times more likely to contemplate suicide, and 7.6 times more likely to attempt suicide. Yet, less than 0.5 per cent of the Canadian population is trans.
Read that again. Let it sink in.
This statistic alone should be a wake-up call for the politicians playing rhetorical games with these kids’ lives.
But the cynical calculation is clear. For today’s conservatives, if investing in hate can return votes, then it’s worth the lives it will cost.
Keep New Brunswickers debating whether a vulnerable minority has the right to exist, and Premier Blaine Higgs’ billionaire bosses can continue to plunder the public purse, control our access to news, and capitalize on inflationary prices.
If it suited our country’s conservative elites, they would target refugees instead like they did leading up to the 2019 federal election when they espoused conspiracies about the UN Global Compact. Or they would scapegoat Muslims like they did when they targeted niqabs in citizenship ceremonies and launched a “barbaric cultural practices” hotline to encourage racist targeting of immigrants leading up to the 2015 federal election.
For Fae Johnstone, this conversation has always been about solidarity. She reminds us that the question is, simply, whether we will show up for each other when it counts.
Next election, you decide.
Aditya Rao is an Ottawa-based human rights lawyer. He lived in New Brunswick between 2020 and 2022.
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