Juno News - February 01, 2020


The renewed effort to get Bill C-16 modified or repealed

Mentioned
Bill C-63 Jennifer Ann Esmeralda V. Doing Jody Wilson-Raybould Jordan Peterson Candace Bergen Gerard Deltel Megan Murphy Diane Finley Gad Saad Ted Falk Matthew Tracy
CPC Leadership Candidates are following the liberal narrative of the day Canada's soft approach to the coronavirus

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

147.81

Word count

936

Sentence count

50

Harmful content

Misogyny

8

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Bill C-16 was introduced in the House of Commons in May 2016, and enacted into law the following year. It added the terms "gender identity" and "gender expression" to the Canadian Human Rights Act, and to our criminal code. Since then, there has been a growing number of women taking up the fight against the bill.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 There has been a recent grassroots revival of women taking on Bill C-16. To refresh your
00:00:10.260 memory, Bill C-16 was introduced in the House of Commons in May 2016 and enacted into law the
00:00:17.060 following year, in June 2017. Bill C-16 added the terms gender identity and gender expression
00:00:23.540 to the Canadian Human Rights Act and to our criminal code. A lot of the initial discourse
00:00:28.980 around Bill C-16 was centered around pronouns and compelled speech, not necessarily the tensions
00:00:35.040 or potential conflicts between the rights of trans people and the rights of women. Many high-profile
00:00:40.220 speakers, such as Jordan Peterson, Gad Saad, Megan Murphy, and others, spoke out against the bill at
00:00:45.940 Senate hearings. However, a lot of women are still concerned about how Bill C-16 might impact female 1.00
00:00:53.040 designated spaces, so particularly how biological males who self-identify as women become entitled
00:01:00.540 to enter female spaces, such as female changing rooms, washrooms, prisons, and shelters. Take 1.00
00:01:06.920 the example of Madeline, formerly Matthew, Harkes. Harkes is a serial sexual offender who began 0.92
00:01:14.020 identifying as a woman in 2014. It is unknown whether Harkes has undergone any kind of gender-affirming
00:01:20.520 surgery or process. And according to a 2006 psychiatric assessment, Harkes has an all-encompassing
00:01:28.880 preoccupation in sexually abusing young girls. Harkes was moved to women's prison after claiming to be 1.00
00:01:36.600 trans. And while he was locked up with female inmates, he was convicted of sexually assaulting
00:01:42.740 at least two women. Another example. Gyms such as Good Life Fitness allow members to use the changing 0.97
00:01:49.640 room of the gender that they identify with. But if a woman were to approach management to complain about 0.89
00:01:56.500 a male-bodied person being in the women's changing room, she would be violating the no-judgment philosophy 0.99
00:02:02.560 of Good Life Fitness, and she could have her gym membership revoked for bringing up her concerns.
00:02:08.480 The women's rights organization Canadian Women's Sex-Based Rights, or COSBAR, is one group that is
00:02:14.780 trying to get Bill C-16 repealed or at least seriously examined, according to COSBAR's creative
00:02:21.740 communications director Esmeralda V. Doing similar work is an Ontarian woman named Tracy, who has been
00:02:28.880 contacting members of parliament all over the country and asking them to modify or repeal Bill
00:02:34.640 C-16. Barely any political officials have responded to her. But one MP, conservative Ted Falk, wrote this
00:02:42.460 to her in an email. The Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights was tasked with studying this bill
00:02:48.300 to consider ways to improve it. Instead, the committee decided not to study the legislation at all
00:02:53.880 after hearing only from the Minister of Justice and her staff. While the normal procedure would be to
00:03:00.160 hear from a variety of witnesses so parliamentarians can consider if a bill should be improved upon,
00:03:05.940 no such interaction was allowed. And indeed, if you look at the public online records, they show that
00:03:14.380 the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights only hosted five witnesses during their study of Bill
00:03:19.580 C-16. One witness was then Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, who was the MP that first
00:03:26.420 introduced Bill C-16. And the four other witnesses were Department of Justice staff. So no outside
00:03:33.360 organizations or experts came to testify in front of the committee on the impacts and consequences of
00:03:39.220 Bill C-16, which is really quite unusual for a major bill like this one. And the weirdness around this bill
00:03:45.400 isn't limited to the lack of expert testimony. One activist named Jennifer Ann noticed a gender-based 0.99
00:03:52.660 analysis, so a GBA, also now known as a GBA plus, had not been performed on Bill C-16. But back in 1995, the
00:04:01.960 government of Canada had committed to performing a GBA on all future legislation and policies in order to
00:04:08.920 eliminate gender inequality. However, a GBA on Bill C-16 was nowhere to be found. A Quebec-based women's
00:04:17.320 rights group, Pour les Droits des Femmes, had asked the government way back in November 2016 to release
00:04:23.160 the GBA. But the entire report was deemed cabinet confidence material, and no pages were releasable.
00:04:31.560 Shortly after the October 2019 election, Jennifer launched a House of Commons e-petition. And as the first
00:04:38.040 step, she obtained the necessary 500 signatures. But as the next step, Jennifer has to find an MP
00:04:44.440 willing to sponsor and present the petition. But as the petitioner, Jennifer is limited to contacting a
00:04:50.360 maximum of five MPs, and each MP is given 30 days to accept or decline the petition before their
00:04:57.640 opportunity to sponsor it expires. Jennifer started contacting conservative MPs who had voted no to Bill
00:05:03.960 C-16 back in the day. When I interviewed her, she told me she thought finding an MP to work with would
00:05:09.720 be a walk in the park. However, her first choice of MP, Candice Bergen, did not respond in 30 days,
00:05:15.560 and the opportunity expired. The second MP, Diane Finlay, declined the petition. Her third choice, Alain
00:05:22.920 Reyes, sent her an email saying he would not take it on. Gérard Deltel also recently refused, which means
00:05:30.280 Jennifer can pick only one more MP before her e-petition is nullified, and that'll be it. 0.99
00:05:36.040 It appears that MPs might be scared of appearing transphobic by taking on this petition. But it is
00:05:42.520 explicitly stated in Parliamentary Resources that sponsoring an e-petition does not necessarily mean
00:05:48.840 that the Member of Parliament supports its content. So they're simply acting as an intermediary.
00:05:54.120 Will any MP take this on? Will any MP be willing to reopen the discussion on Bill C-16? Only time
00:06:02.760 will tell, and these women are on the front lines of getting us those answers. 1.00
00:06:07.320 Thanks for watching. I'm Lindsay Shepard for True North.