Saskatchewan Stands Strong in the Face of Radical Gender Fanatics

Serving as a model for the rest of Canada

A rally against the Saskatchewan government's proposed pronoun policy in front of the Saskatchewan legislature in Regina on Oct. 10. HEYWOOD YU/THE CANADIAN PRESS.

The gender dam in Canada really did start to crack when New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs took a stance against gender ideology in schools earlier this year. In August, Saskatchewan also started standing up to the gender zealots who have captured so many of our country’s institutions. The Saskatchewan government has faced no shortage of obstacles in its fight to protect kids from this pernicious ideology, but it has stood strong so far.

On August 22, then-Education Minister Dustin Duncan announced a new policy intended to keep parents informed about what is going on in Saskatchewan schools focused on name and pronoun changes and sex education:

• Schools must seek parent/guardian permission when changing the preferred name and pronouns used by students under the age of 16 in the school;

• Parents/guardians must be informed about the sexual health education curriculum and have the option to decline their children's participation; and,

• Boards of education must immediately pause involvement with any third-party organization, such as ARC Foundation and the SOGI 1 2 3 Program, connected to sexual health education as the ministry undertakes review of educational resources to ensure alignment with curriculum outcomes. Only teachers, not outside third-parties, will be able to present sexual education materials in the classroom. This directive does not include professionals employed by government ministries or the Saskatchewan Health Authority.

The very same day that this policy was announced, the Saskatchewan Advocate for Children and Youth, Lisa Brody, said she would be reviewing it.

As I have written before, Canada’s Child and Youth Advocates act in the interest of the United Nations, not in the interest of Canadian children. When the New Brunswick Child and Youth Advocate Kelly Lamrock released a report slamming his government’s policy changes, he showed that these offices are fully captured by the fantasy of childhood sex change.

But critics of Saskatchewan’s policy don’t stop there.

The opposition leader of the New Democratic Party, Carla Beck, was quick to accuse the government of being motivated by politics and transphobia and to claim that the policy would “put already vulnerable kids at greater risk.”

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association chimed in a day later to call the policy “discriminatory” for singling out students who are “trans and gender-diverse.”

By the end of August, the Government of Saskatchewan was facing legal action. Legal teams from Egale Canada and McCarthy Tétrault LLP representing the UR Pride Centre for Sexuality and Gender Diversity at the University of Regina sent a letter to the government claiming that the proposed policy violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Egale describes itself as Canada’s leading “2SLGBTQI” organization. In a recent report I wrote for Gender Dissent, I discussed how Egale was on the verge of dissolution in 2007 before pivoting to focus heavily on trans issues. Since then, the organization has received millions of dollars from the federal government.

The Egale team sought an interlocutory injunction in order to “prevent imminent, significant, and irreparable harm to gender diverse young people in Saskatchewan.”

On September 28, a Regina judge by the name of Michael Megaw granted this injunction. In his decision, he showed that he, too, is a believer that there can be something so wrong with a child’s perfectly healthy body that they need to pretend to be the opposite sex:

I determine, at this preliminary stage, the public interest in recognizing the importance of the governmental Policy is outweighed by the public interest of not exposing that minority of students to exposure to the potentially irreparable harm and mental health difficulty of being unable to find expression for their gender identity. The Government’s expression of the public interest is reversible. UR Pride’s expression of these students’ public interest is, potentially, irreversible while possibly attracting irreparable harm. In summary, I determine the protection of these youth surpasses that interest expressed by the Government, pending a full and complete hearing into the constitutionality of this Policy. I find this to be one of those clear cases where injunctive relief is necessary to attempt to prevent the irreparable harm referred to pending a full hearing of this matter on its merits.

The injunction would have prevented the policy from coming into effect until a constitutional challenge could be heard in court. However, that very same day, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe said that he would use the notwithstanding clause to override the ruling. A rarely used provision, the notwithstanding clause allows Canadian governments to override certain sections of the Charter for up to five years.

Moe called the ruling “judicial overreach” and vowed to do everything in his government’s power to protect parental rights.

On October 12, that is exactly what the Saskatchewan government did when it introduced Bill 137, the Parental Bill of Rights. According to Education Minister Jeremy Cockrill, the new legislation “provides clarity that the policy will remain in place.”

"This policy is important to a large majority of Saskatchewan people," he added.

After the bill was introduced into the legislature, another gender zealot was waiting in the wings to make a fuss about it. On October 17, the Saskatchewan human rights commissioner Heather Kuttai announced her resignation in an e-mail to the premier, writing:

I can no longer continue. I strongly disagree with the proposed legislation that requires teachers to seek parental permission to change a child's name and/or pronouns when they are at school. This is an attack on the rights of trans, non-binary, and gender-diverse children.

Kuttai has a trans-identified teenage daughter.

Just a few days before the first reading of the bill, labor groups in Saskatchewan also pressured the government to back down. CTV reported that leaders from the Saskatchewan Federation of Labour and the Service Employers International Union West said they would “turn up the heat” if the province were to invoke the notwithstanding clause, calling the move “desperate and dangerous.”

They continued:

We will call, we will email, we will show up and we will make noise. They will know what they've done is wrong. And if the Sask. Party does not change course, we will make their support of the notwithstanding clause as uncomfortable as possible.

Despite all of these histrionics, the bill was passed and became law on October 20. It received unanimous support from the ruling Saskatchewan Party and complete opposition from the New Democrats.

In a media release, the government wrote:

The Government of Saskatchewan has passed the "Parents' Bill of Rights" and invoked the notwithstanding clause of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

This protects the important role that parents and guardians have in supporting their children.

By passing this legislation, the Government of Saskatchewan has shown that it cares about the well-being of children, and it has shined a stark light on those who care more about ideology.

The critics of the government and of its policy keep insisting that “vulnerable youth” are going to be “harmed” if schools do not encourage their identity crises. In reality, the people who harm kids are the ones who lie to them and confuse them in order to use them as ideological pawns.

No child can change sex, and no child needs to pretend that they have via name and pronoun changes. Saskatchewan got this right, and other provinces need to quickly follow suit.