Media melts down as Danielle Smith moves to end ‘transitioning’ of children in Alberta

After Alberta’s Danielle Smith put forth legislation to protect kids from being gender ‘transitioned,’ the Canadian media went on a predictable melt down, citing ‘experts’ who blatantly lie to advance the LGBT agenda.

A year after announcing her intention to combat transgender ideology and protect children, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has tabled three pieces of UCP (United Conservative Party) government legislation:

The Education Amendment Act 2024 will require parental consent for “socially transitioning” children under the age of 16 (changing a child’s name or “preferred pronouns”). The bill also gives parents an “opt-in” option for any sexual or content at school. Smith has emphasized that the Alberta Teaching Profession Commission has the power to discipline teachers if they decide to break the law.

The Health Statues Amendment Act 2024 will ban the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors, as well as prohibit sex change surgeries on minors.

The Fairness and Safety in Sport Act will ban trans-identifying men from female sports teams.

Together, these three bills represent the most definitive pushback against gender ideology in Canada by any premier. Smith’s decision to announce her intent to pursue such legislation and then wait has turned out to be politically savvy—it has given the UCP government a good look at the LGBT response, and during that time the U.K.’s Labour government has successfully fought to maintain a similar ban in the courts and publicly rebutted many of the scare tactics used by LGBT activists.

Smith and the UCP are thus walking into this debate with eyes wide open, and are clearly certain that the public is on their side (it is) and that the legislation can survive the court challenges surely coming from LGBT activists. The policies are clearly popular with the UCP party’s base, who handed Smith a staggering 91.5% approval rating in her leadership review at UCP gathering in Red Deer last Saturday.

The party also passed 35 policy resolutions, including several that indicate the UCP’s willingness to go further in fighting transgender ideology, with resolutions that would restrict “exclusively female spaces” like bathrooms and changerooms to females and designating transgender surgeries as “elective cosmetic procedures” not funded by the taxpayer. The motions received near-unanimous support.

The Canadian press, unsurprisingly, is working hard to present policies that the vast majority of Canadians support as an attack on fundamental norms (albeit norms that only surfaced in the last few years and were never presented to voters). Global News ran the headline: “Alberta unveils 3 sweeping bills affecting trans and gender-diverse youth.” It is important to note that the press accepts the premises of transgender ideology as the starting point for their reporting, with heavy usage of nonsensical phrases like “gender-diverse youth,” which implies that there are many genders.

In fact, Global News and other Canadian outlets trotted out talking points that have been definitively rebutted by the U.K.’s Cass Review and multiple medical studies—in fact, even the New York Times has been reporting on the permanent harms of puberty blockers over the past several years. An example from Global News:

Alberta parents of gender-diverse youth like Haley Wray believe the new laws will give kids less choice — especially when it comes to health-care that is not permanent but instead, gives kids time to work through their identity struggles.

‘Hormone blockers are a very valuable tool,’ Wray said, explaining they have a very small window of effectiveness to pause, but not prevent, puberty. ‘It is reversible because nothing changes. And what that does is it allows youth and families to have that that pause, that break to explore further, validate, understand what this means and know that permanent changes aren’t happening.’

Wray believes the proposed legislation will make the province a less safe place for tens of thousands of Alberta kids who aren’t straight. It’s why, Wray says, a growing number of families with transgender children are now grappling with whether Alberta is a place they can stay. ‘I know people who have, and I know people who genuinely feel like there is likely nowhere to go,’ she said.

This is incorrect. Puberty blockers cause permanent damage, and children may be rendered permanently sterile after taking them for a relatively short period of time. Puberty is not something that can be “paused,” and it frequently causes irreversible rather than reversible damage. Smith and her government understand this, which is why they have decided to pass this legislation—not, as nearly every press outlet claimed, to “target trans youth,” but to protect them.

The CBC chimed in with sentences like this one:

Terms like ‘biological female’ and ‘biological male’ can be used to imply that transgender people are still their assigned sex at birth, despite their identity.

To translate: a scientifically accurate and precise statement is now an ideological one, but inherently ideological language invented by the transgender movement over the past decade is, in fact, technically accurate. People can identify as anything they want; it is irrelevant to their biology. The CBC presents pointing this out as some sort of propagandistic attack on vulnerable people.

Jonathon Van Maren

Jonathon’s writings have been translated into more than six languages and in addition to LifeSiteNews, has been published in the National Post, National Review, First Things, The Federalist, The American Conservative, The Stream, the Jewish Independent, the Hamilton Spectator, Reformed Perspective Magazine, and LifeNews, among others. He is a contributing editor to The European Conservative.

His insights have been featured on CTV, Global News, and the CBC, as well as over twenty radio stations. He regularly speaks on a variety of social issues at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions in Canada, the United States, and Europe.

He is the author of The Culture War, Seeing is Believing: Why Our Culture Must Face the Victims of Abortion, Patriots: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Pro-Life Movement, Prairie Lion: The Life and Times of Ted Byfield, and co-author of A Guide to Discussing Assisted Suicide with Blaise Alleyne.

Jonathon serves as the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

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Alberta

Published on December 8, 2024

Todayville

Harshanedeep Singh from rozanaspokesman.com

News release from the Conservative Party of Canada

After nine years, the NDP-Liberal government has lost control of crime. Violent crime has skyrocketed by 50 percent since Trudeau became Prime Minister and 256 people were killed by a criminal who was out on bail or another form of release in 2022, the latest year available with full data.

On Saturday, Canadians witnessed the shocking, heinous murder of Harshandeep Singh, a 20-year-old security guard in Edmonton, Alberta. Singh was shot in the back while thanklessly doing his job as a nighttime security guard at a central Edmonton apartment building. A promising young life was snuffed out by a cold-blooded monster.

“One cannot imagine how Harshandeep’s family and friends feel,” said Tim Uppal, Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. “Our thoughts and prayers go out to his family at this incredibly difficult time.”

Edmonton Police have since arrested two individuals and charged them with first degree murder: “Evan Rain, 30, and Judith Saulteaux, 30, were arrested and charged with 1st degree murder in relation to Singh’s death.”

Early indications suggest that Rain has a known prior violent history, with media reports aligning with Rain’s current age. In 2018, an “Evan Chase Francis Rain”, then age 24, was charged for a violent kidnapping in Wetaskiwin, one hour south of Edmonton. A woman was forced into the trunk of a car at gunpoint. It is not clear from media reports how this case was concluded.

In 2022, “Evan Rain, 28, of Paul First Nation” (45 minutes west of Edmonton) faced twenty-nine charges for a violent robbery in northern Saskatchewan involving firearms.

This is from the 2022 RCMP news release at the time:

Evan Rain, 28, of Paul First Nation, is charged with:

-one count, robbery, Section 344, Criminal Code;
-one count, have face masked with intent to commit an indictable offence, Section 351(2), Criminal Code;
-eight counts, possess a firearm knowing it was obtained by the commission of an offence, Section 96(2), Criminal Code;
-one count, possession of property obtained by the commission of an offence, Section 354(1)(a), Criminal Code;
-one count, mischief under $5,000, Section 430(4), Criminal Code;
-sixteen counts, possess a firearm while prohibited, Section 117-01(3), Criminal Code; and
-one count, point a firearm, Section 87(2), Criminal Code.

The status of these charges is not readily apparent. The RCMP’s 2022 news release does make clear that Rain was already prohibited from possessing firearms: “sixteen counts, possess a firearm while prohibited, Section 117-01(3).”

“It appears that our so-called ‘justice’ system terribly failed Harshandeep Singh – just as it has outrageously failed so many others,” said Uppal. “Harshandeep Singh’s murder cannot be accepted as just an unfortunate, unavoidable reality in our society. Authorities should answer to Rain’s prior police interactions and potential criminal history, including whether he was out on bail or some other form of release order.”

Life wasn’t like this before Justin Trudeau. Since the NDP-Liberal government passed Bill C-75 and Bill C-5, which gave high priority to releasing repeat violent offenders and took away mandatory jail time for certain violent crimes, a crime wave has been unleashed across the country. This was evident in a report from the Fraser Institute which showed that Canada’s violent crime rate is 14 percent higher than that of the United States’.

Trudeau’s only response to this has been to crack down on law-abiding firearms owners and Indigenous hunters which has done nothing to improve Canada’s public safety. Instead, violent gun crime is up by a staggering 116 percent since the Liberals formed government.

Enough is Enough. Canadians deserve to feel safe in their communities. Only Common Sense Conservatives will bring home safe streets by ending Justin Trudeau’s catch-and-release justice system and bringing jail, not bail, for repeat violent offenders.

Alberta

Alberta passes bill banning men from competing in women’s sports   

Published on December 7, 2024

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

On Tuesday, MLAs voted 47 to 33 to pass into law the Fairness and Safety in Sport Act (FASISA). The New Democratic Party MLAs all voted against the bill, with Premier Danielle Smith’s UCP MLAs all voting in favour of it.

Alberta’s governing United Conservative Party (UCP) government has passed a bill that bans gender-confused men from competing in women’s sports, the first legislation of its kind in Canada.  

On Tuesday, MLAs voted 47 to 33 to pass into law the Fairness and Safety in Sport Act (FASISA). The New Democratic Party MLAs all voted against the bill, with Premier Danielle Smith’s UCP MLAs all voting in favour of it.

The proposed law, known as Bill 29, or the Fairness and Safety in Sport Act, will apply to all school boards, universities, as well as provincial sports organizations. It was introduced into the Alberta legislature last month.

Alberta’s Minister of Tourism and Sport Joseph Schow moved the third reading of FASISA, which now awaits Royal Assent which will be coming in the next few days.

Schow said about the passing of the bill that it will create fairness and safety in sports in Alberta for “young women and girls, and it is to them that I dedicate this speech and this bill because, Mr. Speaker, it is incumbent upon us as a government to create an environment that is fair and safe for all young girls and women who want to compete.”

“Sports teach you how to overcome challenges, how to strive for your personal best, how to respect your opponents, and that is something that even comes in handy in this house,” he added.

The Smith government says that the regulations created under the Act “will clarify specific requirements for these policies, including limiting eligibility for female-only divisions to female-born athletes,” but also added that it will “support the formation of additional co-ed divisions inclusive of transgender athletes.” 

The government said that it consulted sports organizations as well as schools and universities when drafting the bill.  

The exact details on how the bill will be developed practically speaking will happen over the coming months.

The move comes after studies have repeatedly revealed what almost everyone already knew was true, namely, that males have a considerable advantage over women in athletics. 

Indeed, a recent study published in Sports Medicine found that a year of “transgender” hormone drugs results in “very modest changes” in the inherent strength advantages of men. 

The passage of the law banning men from competing in women’s sports came at the same time the Smith government passed a bill banning so-called “top and bottom” surgeries for minors as well as other extreme forms of transgender ideology.