Alberta Slowly Starts Waking Up from the Gender Ideology Nightmare

But there's a long way to go to roll back all the insanity

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith at the United Conservative Party annual general meeting on November 4, 2023.

I want every parent listening today to hear me loud and clear: parents are the primary caregivers and educators of their children. We cannot have a successful province or a successful society without strong and nurturing families. And regardless of how often the extreme left undermines the role of parents, I want you to know that parental rights and choice in your child’s education is and will continue to be a fundamental and core principle of this party and this government, and we will never apologize for it.

- Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.

It’s the moment I’ve been waiting for. This past weekend, my home Canadian province of Alberta finally joined New Brunswick and Saskatchewan in beginning to tackle gender ideology, particularly in schools.

Near the end of her speech at the annual general meeting, United Conservative Party leader and provincial premier Danielle Smith took a pause before saying, “I want every parent listening today to hear me loud and clear: parents are the primary caregivers and educators of their children.”

She received a standing ovation.

Many have been waiting for Smith to say anything at all about this issue, which she has been tight-lipped about and didn’t dare broach during the provincial election last spring.

But finally, we have reason to hope.

Later that day, UCP delegates also voted on and passed a resolution mirroring those in New Brunswick and Saskatchewan that requires parental consent for the social transitioning of children in schools.

The full text of the resolution is as follows:

The United Conservative Party believes the Government of Alberta should…

Require teachers, schools, and school boards to obtain the written consent of the parent/guardian of a student under the age of 16 prior to changing the name and/or pronouns used by the student.

Rationale: The Conservative governments of Saskatchewan and New Brunswick recently implemented the requirements for parental consent for schools to use an alternate name or pronoun for a student. Parents, not schools, are the legal guardians of their children. As was noted by Saskatchewan Education Minister Duncan, schools require a signed permission slip to take children on a field trip so it’s unclear why schools should not require parental consent for identification changes. Schools should not be in the business of going behind parents’ backs.

UCP delegates voting on the parental consent policy / X @TheRealKeean

I was also delighted to find out that delegates passed a policy to protect incarcerated women:

The United Conservative Party believes that the Government of Alberta should…

Protect inmates who were female at conception and are housed at correctional and remand centers for women operated by Alberta’s Correctional Services by refusing to house any inmate who was male at conception at said correctional and remand centers.

Rationale: It has become clear that some male predators are falsely changing their gender identity so they can be placed in a female penitentiary, where they engage in sexual predatory behaviors such as rape. Under this proposed policy, these genetically male prisoners will remain in male penitentiaries or be transferred to a facility for transsexual female inmates. The Government of Alberta has the responsibility of protecting all Albertans from harm, including those who are interned at our correctional facilities. By providing transpeople with their own facility, this will serve to protect the female inmates from the potential of sexual assaults.

I have hope that this is a good start for Alberta, but I am also painfully aware of how far we have to go to unravel the damage that gender ideology has already done to this province.

While it will be wonderful if the parental consent resolution becomes law (keep in mind that these policies are non-binding), Alberta also faces the problem of having SOGI 1 2 3 in our schools. This third-party program of the ARC Foundation pushes gender ideology and queer theory into the classroom.

When I investigated the program in my province two years ago, I found that it was largely funded by the Stollery family, which also runs a children’s hospital with a youth gender clinic.

Saskatchewan’s parental consent policy on name and pronoun changes also put a halt to the involvement of third-party organizations connected to sexual health education, including the ARC Foundation, in Saskatchewan schools. Let’s hope Alberta will consider the same move.

In a more recent investigation, I found that Alberta Children’s Services is completely captured by gender ideology as well. Its policies state that it provides strictly “gender-affirming” health supports and services, including social transitioning, hormonal transitioning, and surgical transitioning.

Then there’s the fact that Smith’s UCP may have won the last election but not by a very wide margin. In fact, the party lost seats and only hung on with the rural vote.

The situation is much dimmer in our two major cities. In Calgary, the largest city, and where I live, the vote was split between the UCP and the gender ideology-loving New Democratic Party. This represented significant inroads for the NDP, which also dominated in the capital city of Edmonton.

Not to mention that Calgary has an ultra-woke mayor who, earlier this year, created a bylaw that specifically targeted Drag Queen Story Hour protesters.

The Alberta Human Rights Act is also a mess when it comes to ensuring protections for women’s sex-based rights. As I explained in an article for Gender Dissent:

Disastrously, the Alberta Human Rights Act now protects gender, gender identity, and gender expression, but not sex.

The way it was originally written, “gender” was likely assumed to be synonymous with sex. However, Bill 7 then came along and replaced “gender” with “gender, gender identity, gender expression.”

Today, the Alberta Human Rights Commission defines “gender” as “the state of being male, female, transgender or two-spirited.”

By including “transgender” and “two-spirit,” this is not a definition rooted in biological sex. It is essentially just another way of saying “gender identity,” which means that women in Alberta aren’t actually protected on the basis of our sex.

So, Alberta is besought by a deluge of gender problems, including many more which I am probably not even aware of. But we have to start somewhere, and the UCP AGM is hopefully going to serve as that starting point.

Back in July, Smith revealed that she has a “non-binary family member” and stated, “I believe these decisions are very personal, and it should not be debated in public. We shouldn't be making any child feel like the issues they're struggling with are something that's a political football.”

That would explain the deafening silence up to this point.

Maybe I’m naive, but I have always had a lot of admiration for her, and I can’t believe that a serious look at this issue would not make obvious to Smith the great harm that is being done to so many children in the name of this reality-denying movement.

I suppose only time will tell.