New Easy Mail Letter: Bill C-389
Please Note: The deadline to send this Easy Mail letter has now passed. See how each MP voted here.
Update: On Wednesday evening, Bill Siskay’s “transgender” Bill C-389 passed the final vote in the House of Commons, 143 for and 135 against. It now moves to the Senate where it has to go through the same process as the House of Commons. The bill could still be defeated if a majority of Senators vote it down, or if an election is called before it receives Royal Assent. Although Senators don’t represent ridings, they do represent provinces and you can still write them to share your concerns about this legislation. Click here for contact information. 
Update: We were surprised to learn that Bill Siskay’s transgender bill (C-389 – infamously dubbed the “bathroom bill”) is coming up for its final vote in the House of Commons on Wednesday. The legislation proposes to change the Canadian Human Rights Act and our Criminal Code by adding”gender identity” and “gender expression” as prohibited grounds for discrimination and as identifiable groups in the hate crimes law. You can read more about this in our previous coverage here and here. McGill professor Dr. Douglas Farrow called the bill a “trojan horse” focused on “reorganizing the way we approach sexual issues.” If common sense isn’t enough to oppose this bill, you can find numerous reasons from EFC’s legal commentary here.
ARPA Canada has an EasyMail letter prepared for you so that you can contact your MP about this bill in only a couple minutes. If you haven’t used EasyMail yet, you can watch a 3 minute tutorial here. You are also encouraged to pray for our leaders, that justice and righteousness would prevail.
If this bill passes, it still has to make its way through the Senate. But we have already seen that this bill can move very quickly (It was rushed through the committee stage without any investigation). Mr. Siskay has already publicly said that he doesn’t plan to run again in the next election. If an election is called before this bill becomes official law, it will be scrapped.
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Many of you were rightly concerned when reading about the swift passage of Bill C-389 through the Justice Committee on November 2nd. Put forward by NDP MP Bill Siskay, the legislation aims to add yet another group to the list of “prohibited grounds of discrimination” in the Canadian Human Rights Act. This time the group isn’t even based on any sort of objective criteria but rather targets any discrimination based on “gender expression” and “gender identity.” If it passes, it is likely that similar legislation will make its way through each of the provinces.
The consequences of moving in this direction are dangerous and unpredictable. If we see a man in a women’s public washroom, we rightly are concerned. But when the law recognizes this man based on how he “feels” he should be recognized (perhaps a woman), what assurance is there that the public can ever go into a public washroom with confidence that only people of their sex will be there?
Read more about the disturbing implications of the bill here. Read the text of the bill and more details here.
In response we have prepared the following Easy Mail letter that you can send to your MP with a few clicks through our new Easy Mail technology. . Click here to pick from 11 other letters.
Dear Honourable [Name of MP]
Thank you for your ongoing service as our representative in Ottawa.
I strongly oppose Bill C-389, which was rushed through parliamentary committee, with no hearings, in a matter of minutes. The private member’s bill proposes to add “gender identity” and “gender expression” to the ever-growing list of prohibited grounds of discrimination under the Canadian Human Rights Act.
The fact that it does not even define “gender identity” reveals how subjective it is. As the Catholic Civil Rights League points out “The standard diagnostic manual for psychiatrists, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-4th Edition lists gender identity questions as a disorder. The condition is very different from such objective states as race, colour, creed or gender, all of which the law quite rightly protects from discrimination in the workplace, and in the provision of goods and services.”
“To protect by law a quality that the law does not even define could have serious implications for employers in their hiring and assignment decisions. People who believe they have faced discrimination on “gender expression” grounds could file human rights claims. This system is already misused by those who believe the issue was discrimination when it was not; to complicate it by opening the process to more subjective grounds is not in anyone’s best interest.”
The consequences of moving in this direction are dangerous and unpredictable. If we see a man in a women’s public washroom, we rightly are concerned. But when the law recognizes this man based on how he “feels” he should be recognized (perhaps a woman), what assurance is there that the public can ever go into a public washroom with confidence that only people of their sex will be there?
Most important of all, it is not up to government to redefine gender to begin with. The civil government’s role is to promote justice and freedom, not reengineer society according to how people feel.
Instead of trying to appease every interest group, our nation should focus on strengthening the institutions in society that are pivotal to a healthy nation. Marriage and the family should be at the top of that list.
Please have the courage to vote against Bill C-389 and do what you can to strengthen the Canadian family.
Sincerely,
Send Easy Mail Letter In Seconds (Update the action meter at www.ARPACanada.ca – we are 95% of the way there!)
