John Carpay: Claiming That Children Have Adult Rights Is a Perversion of the Canadian Charter

From the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms

By John Carpay

In August of 2023, the UR Pride Centre for Sexuality and Gender Diversity filed a court application seeking to strike down Saskatchewan’s “Use of Preferred First Name and Pronouns by Students” policy. The policy requires parental consent when children under the age of 16 wish to use opposite-sex names and pronouns at school, referred to as “social transition.” This “social transition” can lead to children receiving puberty blockers, opposite-sex hormones, and eventually life-altering surgeries that will render them permanently infertile.

In September, UR Pride persuaded the Saskatchewan Court of King’s Bench to grant an interim injunction to suspend the policy pending a full court hearing, which would not take place until February of 2024. UR Pride claims that the parental consent policy will violate children’s charter rights and will irreparably harm them.

Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe has introduced Bill 137, which uses Section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the notwithstanding clause, to keep his government’s parental rights policy in place, following the September court decision to suspend the policy temporarily, or any future court rulings to strike it down. Section 33 gives our federal Parliament and provincial legislatures the ability, through the passage of a law, to override a judge’s interpretation of certain charter rights for a renewable five-year term.

Opponents of Section 33 argue that politicians should not be allowed to violate our rights and freedoms. However, Section 33 is not all that different from Section 1 of the charter, which allows judges to override our charter rights and freedoms in much the same way that Section 33 allows politicians to do so. Section 1 empowers judges to approve and endorse the government’s violation of constitutional rights, if a judge in his or her personal opinion deems the violation to be reasonable and “demonstrably justified.”

In theory, Section 1 requires judges to force governments to justify any violation of charter rights and freedoms “demonstrably,” with persuasive evidence. According to the test laid down by the Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. Oakes (1986), governments must show that their violations of charter freedoms are actually doing more good than harm. Theory aside, judges have repeatedly used Section 1 to rubber stamp the government’s lockdowns and vaccine passports. This necessarily raises the question: who is more competent to understand, interpret, and protect our rights and freedoms—politicians or judges?

In striking down the Saskatchewan policy, the court seems to have assumed that all parents are somehow dangerous, abusive, and untrustworthy. The court believes that all parents should be kept in the dark when their own children embark on a dangerous and futile quest to become the opposite sex.

The court also assumes that the best way (or the only way) to help gender-confused children is to affirm any and all steps that a child may wish to take to adopt opposite-sex pronouns, names, clothing, etc.

This completely ignores the success achieved by Dr. Kenneth J. Zucker, who helped hundreds of children and teenagers to accept their biological sex while working for decades at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health as head of its Gender Identity Service. The vast majority of gender-confused children, when protected from political activists and ideologues and when supported by their parents, will be at peace with their sex by the time they reach the age of 18. Dr. Zucker saved these children from a lifetime of drugs and surgeries that would need to be administered in the futile quest to acquire a biological body of the opposite sex.

UR Pride claims that Saskatchewan’s new policy violates the rights of gender-diverse students under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But in fact, children do not enjoy privacy rights vis-à-vis their own parents. Because children are not adults, they legitimately have no right to drive, vote, get married, join the military, purchase liquor, get a tattoo, etc. Children are entitled to the love, support, guidance, and nurturing of their own parents. When parents are kept in the dark, they are severely hindered in providing these necessities. Claiming that children have adult rights is a perversion of the charter.

Placing great reliance on testimony from Dr. Travers, a Simon Fraser University sociology professor who uses “they/them” pronouns, the court appeared to embrace fear-mongering that children who are not “affirmed” in their “social transition” are at risk of suicide. This ignores a comprehensive Swedish study showing that “fully transitioned” transgender adults, after having had healthy body parts removed and new artificial ones created, have higher suicide rates than the general population.

The court considered irreparable harm to children only in relation to the very small number of children who might have truly abusive parents. Sadly, the court ignored the irreparable harm that is likely to result from keeping all parents in the dark, disregarding harm to children who are pressured, manipulated, and misinformed by political activists at school.

All in all, the court provided no compelling reason as to why or how it benefits children to keep all parents (not just the very small number of abusive ones) in the dark about their own children.

The Saskatchewan government should be applauded for using charter Section 33 to opt out of this court ruling.

Related Topics:#JohnCarpay #JusticeCentreForConstitutionalFreedoms #NotwithstandingClause #SaskatchewanPremierScottMoe feature

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Why Biden’s Gaza refugee plan is a hard hell no

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Why Biden’s Gaza refugee plan is a hard hell no

Published on May 12, 2024

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From Todd Bensman

As published May 7, 2024 by The New York Daily News

Just about all of the Gaza Strip’s two million inhabitants have gone through decades of institutionalized cradle-to-grave indoctrination into the ruling Hamas’ upside down 7th century Islamist value system, which features at its core and extremely violent religious ideology.

As President Biden considers bringing Gaza war refugees into the United States, he would do well to recall what happened when other good-hearted people took a similar chance – and paid with their blood.

Before the October 7 Hamas attack, Israeli citizens sponsored work permits for thousands of security-vetted Palestinians to earn money working on some of their farms in towns not far from the Gaza Strip.

Some of those Gazan day laborers are believed to have used their access to provide tactical information that helped Hamas terrorists kill hundreds of Israelis on October 7.

The bad apples lesson of that still developing story – and another where security-vetted Palestinian UN workers directly assisted the October 7 attackers – is central to the problem with an American plan to import Gazan war refugees. It’s an unacceptable national security risk.

That’s because just about all of the Gaza Strip’s two million inhabitants have gone through decades of institutionalized cradle-to-grave indoctrination into the ruling Hamas’ upside down 7th century Islamist value system, which features at its core and extremely violent religious ideology.

Hamas relentlessly preaches that humanity’s highest virtues are suicide bombing, armed combat, genocide, intolerance of difference, and a dehumanizing hatred of Jews and Americans.

Yes, there will be exceptions among Gazans who are independent-minded enough to rebel. But if Israel can’t readily suss out the tolerant, then certainly America’s refugee bureaucrats will have far less luck.

A large number of respectable academic and think tank studies have shown how Hamas indoctrinates the people of the Gaza Strip.

Recall the recent reports of jubilant children, women and men cheering, spitting at, and even beating both alive and dead Israeli hostages paraded through Gaza after the October 7 attack.

“These are the people you might be bringing here,” said Nayla Rush, a refugee policy expert for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies, who recently penned a column titled “Resettled Refugees Do Not Necessarily Leave Their Beliefs and Biases Behind.” “How are you going to vet them? What do you do, go to the Hamas authorities and ask? That’s a huge breach of any vetting. It’s impossible.”

Hamas starts things up in kindergarten and ramps up the ideological training all the way through the Islamic University of Gaza, a redoubt of hatred established by Hamas’ founding father in 1978 and which offers law degrees from a “Sharia Law Department” and whose engineering department is there to churn out combat engineers for Hamas tunnels.

As a 2013 New York Times report put it, the required school textbooks and curriculum “infuse the next generation with its militant ideology” as part of a required national education course of study in government schools.

The children are taught never to recognize modern Israel as anything more than a target of genocidal violence, Gaza school curricula is replete with thousands of examples of violent incitement against the Jewish state and Jewish people.

Tens of thousands have attended Hamas summer camps, where its armed terrorist operatives serve as camp counselors dishing out violent Islamist ideology and military training to prep them for conscription into Hamas’ armed forces.

Teachers and authority figures of every stripe teach the children that waging jihad that kills Jews is a solemn religious duty where martyrdom earns the believer paradise in heaven, a November 2023 analysis of collected Arabic television news segments shows.

“The next generation of Palestinians is being relentlessly fed a rhetorical diet that includes the idolization of terrorists, the demonization of Jews and the conviction that sooner or later Israel should cease to exist,” Yuval Steinitz, Israel’s minister of intelligence and international affairs, wrote in a 2013 New York Times opinion column.

He noted that, for instance, some Facebook pages of government-supported Palestinian schools glorified Adolph Hitler’s genocide against European Jewry and that “Jews and Zionists are horrible creatures that corrupt those in their vicinity.”

A 2021 European Union analysis of 156 Palestinian school textbooks found that many glorified suicide terrorists as role models and demonize Jews as dangerous and deceptive so as to generate feelings of hatred.

Hamas’ popular Al Aqsa TV gained international notoriety when its children’s show star, the Mickey Mouse-like character, Farfour, was outed for promoting radical Islam, hatred of Jews, and for urging children to take up AK-47 assault rifles.

The station’s response to international outrage was to depict an “Israeli” bureaucrat unjustly beating Farfour to death, then replaced the character with a bee named Nahool who continued to preach violence.

And so much for tolerance. Any Gazan at any age who might be brought to the United States can be expected to regard non-Muslims as sub-human after years of indoctrination backed by extreme violence against Christians in Gaza.

Islamist proselytizers have kidnapped thousands of Christians and forced them to convert to Islam and burned churches to the ground.

The tiny population of Christians that have not fled Hamas persecution remain subject to targeting “in ways even more acute and systemic than Christians in the West Bank and Israel,” a 2022 University of Notre Dame analysis concluded.

Christians feel coercion to covert to Islam, while Christian women are harassed and pressured to cover their hair and adopt Islamic forms of clothing.

Polling of Gazans consistently show majority support for the October 7 attack and for Hamas, whose backing has risen since the attack.

And large majorities have long viewed the United States as an enemy of Palestinian Arabs, one Pew poll showing that number at 76% a decade ago and soaring, if that is even possible, since the new war began

“The level of anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism is huge among Palestinians because of the positions they have taken regarding international humanitarian law and what is happening in Gaza,” pollster Khalil Shikaki told the Associated Press in December.

Absent even a national security risk in importing men, women and children deeply schooled in blood lust, why would the Biden administration think it wise to import such America-haters into the country?

But in the end, Gazans must be regarded as too great a national security threat for a US humanitarian gambit.

By all means, do facilitate their exits to friendlier and safer neighborhoods in the region. Provide humanitarian aid. Arrange for medical treatment elsewhere. Send doctors on the UN Navy’s Mercy hospital ship.

But importing them into the United States as refugees? These are not the people, and this is definitely not the time.

Todd Bensman is a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.

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As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump promised to “drain the swamp.” He didn’t.

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