Juno News - August 21, 2025


Who’s really in charge Nova Scotia’s 'gender affirming' care policy？


Episode Stats

Length

20 minutes

Words per Minute

152.08713

Word Count

3,086

Sentence Count

171

Misogynist Sentences

4

Hate Speech Sentences

8


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Are underage boys in Nova Scotia getting their bits removed in sacrifice to the trans gods?
00:00:06.360 I've investigated the province transgender healthcare reforms, and the more I look into
00:00:11.980 this, the weirder it gets. True North received a heap of FOI documents telling the story of
00:00:18.460 trans healthcare policy changes in the province. And what I found was worrying. In 2023, Nova
00:00:26.260 Scotia's progressive conservative government approved a sweeping overhaul of its transgender
00:00:31.140 health policies. Today, aligned groups like Pride Health, Nova Scotia Health, IWK Health,
00:00:38.460 which is a hospital in Halifax, and a host of doctors and politicians, activists and bureaucrats
00:00:44.000 collaborated to fund and approve irreversible medical procedures for minors, and to train
00:00:49.520 doctors using activist materials and sell ideology as medical evidence. I'm Melanie Bennett,
00:00:56.260 this is Disrupted.
00:01:06.460 The information we received is pretty insane. It's a comprehensive compilation of internal
00:01:12.340 emails and policy memos, confirmed surgical data, all obtained with the assistance of
00:01:17.980 a group called the Citizens Alliance, Nova Scotia. The situation in Nova Scotia is so fraught that
00:01:24.180 the source couldn't even apply for freedom of information documents in their own name. They
00:01:29.460 had to use an organization like Cairns to act as representatives. So I asked Cairns why they decided
00:01:36.180 to help.
00:01:37.180 So Citizens Alliance of Nova Scotia is a public interest nonprofit registered in Nova Scotia, Canada.
00:01:45.380 One of our missions has always been to provide a kind of protective corporate vehicle to
00:01:52.740 assist in actions that might otherwise be risky for individuals to take by themselves. It's why I prefer not
00:02:01.140 being on camera. It's for the sole reason of protecting myself from harm meant to distract or scare me from
00:02:08.580 helping others. To give you an example of our mission in action. Researchers, therapists or doctors can face a lot of
00:02:17.780 difficulty retrieving data that is either perceived as being or is counter narrative. Openly requesting such
00:02:26.100 information for the purposes of critical analysis and distribution puts this group of truth seekers at risk of being
00:02:34.900 ostracized, professionally reprimanded, or even on the receiving end of legal difficulties. And it's all to
00:02:42.660 prevent information from being disclosed that may make the public question common narratives that are driven
00:02:48.420 by government or other publicly accountable organizations. The concept of a corporate entity acting as a shield to
00:02:55.940 protect those who are trying to uncover relevant information without censorship or obfuscation by the data holding
00:03:04.500 entity can be and actually has been very successfully applied, particularly in the arena of freedom of
00:03:11.700 information requests. In short, even requesters of publicly available information have to protect their identities to avoid
00:03:18.660 backlash. So let's get to the data. Let's dig in, shall we? Most people expect that health policy is shaped by
00:03:26.020 evidence and a healthy dose of caution when dealing with removing healthy body parts. But in Nova Scotia, when it comes to
00:03:33.300 transgender health, that's not in the driver's seat. So we're going to start with Lisa Lachance. Lisa Lachance is
00:03:41.140 an NDP MLA in Nova Scotia, and she was or is the president of Queer Momentum, a nonprofit. And she was
00:03:49.220 previously the executive director of a consultancy called Wisdom to Action. And together, these two activist
00:03:55.620 organizations received a lot of money from the feds. Between 2020 and 2024, both entities together
00:04:03.060 received about $1.6 million from the federal government in grants. And Lisa Lachance is listed
00:04:09.700 in the consultation documents as the facilitator of something called the Queer Forum. What we do know
00:04:15.460 is some of the details of the Queer Forum are redacted. And so we don't necessarily know all of the attendees,
00:04:22.340 but we do know that they discussed topics like expanding Pride Health and DEI policies.
00:04:28.980 That includes several mentions of something called cultural competency training, increasing surgical
00:04:34.260 capacity. So making more surgeries or approving more surgeries, basically funding activist aligned
00:04:41.220 research, adding preferred sex and pronouns to their clinical information systems, funding name changes,
00:04:48.980 freezing eggs, travel and accommodation costs in and out of province, and even funding something they're
00:04:55.060 calling cost of living supplement, which looks like it's an additional supplement to EI for those
00:05:01.780 who are off work for a longer period of time. So basically, it's all about making surgical transitions
00:05:06.900 as easy and fast as possible whilst being fully funded as possible. And for Lachance to be facilitating
00:05:13.700 this forum seems like a bit of a conflict of interest. Lachance is in charge of entities who receive funding
00:05:19.940 for the elimination of any kind of safeguards on trans medicalization. She's facilitating decision
00:05:25.780 making that will transform trans health policy into something that's fully aligned with her own agenda,
00:05:32.660 all while acting as a sitting MLA. It looks like Lachance isn't representing the public interest
00:05:38.900 as much as she's representing special interests. And the progressive conservative government in the province
00:05:45.380 appears to have noticed. Last year, they put out a statement calling out the obvious problem with
00:05:50.180 Lachance's activism while acting as a sitting MLA. They pointed out a lot of the funding that one of
00:05:56.580 the companies received, pointing out that she got paid for things like women's programs, victim fund,
00:06:03.220 a whole bunch of things that are not necessarily only aligned with the LGBT community, but the fact that
00:06:08.020 she was getting funded and pursuing that activism as a politician. But nothing seems to have really
00:06:14.980 come from it, though. The FOI shows that Health Minister Michelle Thompson was provided with a cheat
00:06:20.340 sheet to argue for this transformative health care policy in the legislature. And it went ahead.
00:06:26.500 I don't know. It seems like a damp squib if I ever saw one. Throughout all of this was Pride Health.
00:06:31.780 You've heard me mention it before. It's a partnership between Nova Scotia Health and IWK,
00:06:36.980 that hospital I was talking about in Halifax, and it brands itself as a support system for queer patients.
00:06:42.580 The Pride Health leadership team includes Gary Dart. He, she, they. His LinkedIn says that he's a
00:06:50.020 professional development consultant for IWK Health and previously acted as healthcare coordinator for
00:06:55.940 Pride Health. He also worked for the now bankrupt, among quite the controversy, I might add, Canadian
00:07:02.820 Centre for Gender and Sexual Diversity. Now, that's a whole story. And I think that you should go down
00:07:07.540 that rabbit hole. Eesh. But Gary is a self-proclaimed activist who also runs his own consultancy.
00:07:14.420 His email signature says it all, really. But if that's not enough for you, let's check out his
00:07:19.220 website. It says lowercase t they, uppercase she and he is a queer gender fluid Newfoundlander who
00:07:27.220 strives for systemic change through advocacy, activism, and the use of decolonial and anti-racist
00:07:33.540 practices. They've worked and volunteered for basically activist organizations for years.
00:07:39.620 So the guy is developing professional training for clinical staff. Gary has a degree in ecology
00:07:44.980 and conservation biology, which incidentally is the same undergraduate degree that I have.
00:07:49.620 And he has a certificate in some activist stuff on top of that. So to me, that doesn't sound like Gary is
00:07:56.340 really all that suitable to develop training for medical staff about surgical matters. Except, apparently,
00:08:04.980 it's just fine, because Gary greenlit mandatory training for clinical staff based on materials from the
00:08:11.140 community-based research centre, which is another federally funded activist nonprofit dressed up as a research
00:08:17.940 institution. The CBRC created training modules related to hormones, drugs, affirming practices, surgical
00:08:25.620 readiness, all for $5,000 a piece. From the looks of it, but I can't really tell how many actual modules
00:08:33.300 that they produced, only that this FOI contains mentions of three or four of them. Now, I looked it up
00:08:38.740 and the CBRC received over $26 million in federal grants since 2017, including $14 million in spiked in 2022.
00:08:50.420 CRBC received over $26 million in federal grants since 2017, including a spike in about in 2022 of
00:08:58.340 about $14 million. This is a group that's closely aligned with Lisa Lachance's Queer Momentum.
00:09:04.500 Here's Faye Johnstone, Lachance's business partner at the CBRC summit in 2024.
00:09:10.260 We can also reject the premise our opposition is putting on the table. This is not a fight between
00:09:16.340 children's rights and parent rights. Again, this is about schools where everyone has the freedom to be
00:09:21.540 themselves. If we allow them to set the narrative, we will lose these battles. Because shockingly,
00:09:29.780 the term parental rights is really appealing to people. Who would want to have the rights of
00:09:34.900 parents taken away? Of course we wouldn't want to take away the rights of parents doing their best to
00:09:40.660 raise their kids. And so we have fallen for their trap on this issue and many others. We need to be
00:09:47.700 speaking with one voice and shaping the narrative again about schools where everyone has the freedom to
00:09:55.380 be their authentic selves. And if and when we can, we need to make parallels to the experiences of others.
00:10:02.660 And there's a dangerous dance there because the experiences of queer and trans people of different
00:10:07.540 communities impacted by oppression are not identical and should not ever be equated with one another.
00:10:13.220 But we can help folks understand that many of us in our schools have experienced teachers who don't
00:10:19.220 understand who we are, have had teachers screw up our names or look at us and make assumptions about
00:10:25.620 our bodies, our faiths, our cultures, and how we live our lives because of identifiable traits.
00:10:32.980 And so we can reject the premise of their argument and use a frame that actually builds community
00:10:39.380 together and that rejects their narrative of exclusion, their narrative of division.
00:10:44.980 So Gary and CBRC created and approved and developed this training on a platform called
00:10:53.140 MaineProPlus, which is the continuing professional development or CPD platform for doctors from the
00:11:00.100 College of Physicians of Canada. Doctors need training from these guys to get certified in certain areas.
00:11:05.700 So it's a big deal. So why are they putting activists in charge of training doctors on medical
00:11:11.380 best practice that they might need to use to get certified? WPATH. Let's talk about WPATH.
00:11:18.660 The World Professional Association for Transgender Health is the group behind what's called the
00:11:23.780 Standards of Care or SOC or SOC. These are documents that advise doctors, clinicians, and policy makers on
00:11:30.660 how to approach transgender care. And up until recently, WPATH was considered basically the gold standard,
00:11:37.300 but things have most definitely shifted on this after details emerged of what they're up to.
00:11:43.620 Canada's very own Mia Hughes exposed the massively unethical and unscientific practices of these
00:11:49.940 doctors, activists. But if you haven't read the WPATH files, rather, I highly recommend that you go
00:11:57.620 and have a look through those. So here's what people don't always realize. WPATH isn't a medical
00:12:04.660 organization. It may have doctors among its members, but it's yet another activist organization
00:12:11.300 parading as a legitimate medical group doing legitimate medical research. Their latest version
00:12:17.780 of SOC 8 removes nearly all age minimums for surgeries, even for minors going as far as recommending
00:12:24.580 bottom surgeries for boys as young as 14. It promotes something called individualized assessment,
00:12:30.180 which sounds thoughtful until you realize that it gives clinicians a blank check to greenlight major
00:12:36.820 surgeries on teenage boys and girls with little or no safeguards. Internal chats within the WPATH files
00:12:43.380 that were revealed show that the doctors knew that many kids didn't fully understand what they were
00:12:49.220 doing when they agreed to these surgeries, especially kids with autism, trauma, and mental health
00:12:55.700 struggles. The WPATH members knew what they were doing wasn't exactly kosher, but they did it anyway.
00:13:03.380 Members admitted that puberty blockers might interfere with sexual development long term,
00:13:08.820 while others said that sterilization is a real risk. But the affirming model doesn't leave room to slow
00:13:14.660 down, and they just went on. So one of these doctors, Gail Knudsen, a former president of WPATH,
00:13:20.580 was consulted directly by Nova Scotia Health on two separate occasions. Knudsen co-offered WPATH's
00:13:26.420 identity recognition statement, which calls for the elimination of all barriers to transition,
00:13:32.420 including for minors, and explicitly pushes for government-funded surgeries. But it seems that
00:13:37.860 Nova Scotia Health were all too happy to oblige. The FOI reveals a sharp increase in approved
00:13:44.100 applications for surgeries, which doesn't look like it was going to erase anytime soon. As Nova Scotia has
00:13:49.540 the highest proportion of trans and non-binary people than any other province in the entire
00:13:54.020 country. The cost to the public for this care is significant. Nova Scotia is a tiny province,
00:14:00.260 but it budgeted $1.7 million for gender-related healthcare in 2023-24 alone, and that figure doesn't
00:14:07.540 represent a fixed cap. The internal memos from the FOI states that the department basically encouraged the
00:14:13.540 government to adjust the forecast upward, basically demanding that the funding increase should they
00:14:20.020 need it. So there's no cap on how much they're willing to put into transgender healthcare. Between
00:14:24.580 2021 and 2024, the province spent just over $2 million on 187 mastectomies for people of all ages,
00:14:34.260 including minors. That doesn't really include the other costs associated with it. So things like
00:14:39.460 binders or prosthetic genital devices, travel accommodation, so on, so forth. Then we have
00:14:46.980 Dr. Pierre Brassard. Brassard runs the GRS Montreal clinic. It's a private clinic contracted by Nova Scotia
00:14:54.980 to perform out-of-province bottom surgeries. And that includes vaginoplasties or chiostomies and phalloplasties,
00:15:02.580 amongst other surgeries. Basically, he amputates and reshapes genitals to resemble the opposite
00:15:10.180 sexes. When I reviewed the FOI data, I found that five vaginoplasties were performed on patients under the age
00:15:18.100 of 19 in a single year. Now, that doesn't mean that all of them were under 18, but it could mean at least
00:15:24.420 some of them could be. The data was compiled for MSI, which is the Nova Scotia health insurance provider.
00:15:31.780 So to me, it seems an odd choice to have a column that says under 19 and another column for over 18.
00:15:39.620 If the data is meant to show adults versus minors, and we're talking about surgery, why not just have
00:15:45.940 an over and under 18? That would make more sense. Were there kids in the under 19 category? I tried to
00:15:53.780 contact Stacey Burgess directly to ask her those questions. I wanted to see whether the minors were
00:15:58.820 actually undergoing surgery. And curiously, she said yes. According to Stacey Burgess,
00:16:05.460 this aligns with the provincial policy. This is where things get a bit gray though,
00:16:10.260 because the policy says that in some cases, minors 16 and over, which would be, I guess,
00:16:17.060 in the under 19 category, can access medical procedures if they show emotional and cognitive
00:16:23.460 maturity. But it doesn't really specify which procedures. I asked Dr. Brassard too. He told me
00:16:30.260 that his clinic only performs mastectomies on patients 16 and over, and never any bottom surgeries
00:16:35.620 on anybody under the age of 18. Curiously, the clinic responded to my request for comment weeks
00:16:40.180 after the deadline for the publication of my article. So that information never made it into
00:16:45.060 the original article. What the clinic is saying does track with the WPATH files revelations, where
00:16:50.340 he's discussing bottom surgeries on boys. Essentially, a bunch of doctors, including Marcy Bowers, who is
00:16:57.220 Jazz Jennings' doctor, are discussing whether it's appropriate or not to do bottom surgery on kids the
00:17:03.220 age of 14. And, you know, they're trying to settle on the age of 16 being the most appropriate age to
00:17:07.860 make them look as female as possible. And Brassard at the very end, Brassard at the very end, says that
00:17:13.540 his clinics don't perform any bottom surgeries for boys for anyone under the age of 18. So what's going
00:17:20.660 on here? The legal age of majority in Nova Scotia is 19. Does Stacey Burgess refer to 18 year olds as minors?
00:17:28.820 Um, I don't know. Why would you say that minors are being approved for genital surgeries?
00:17:34.020 Well, pointing me to a policy showing that 16 year olds can access these surgeries.
00:17:39.140 If not Brassard, are the genital surgeries on boys being performed by someone else?
00:17:44.820 Is Brassard's clinic telling fibs? On this particular issue, things are as clear as mud,
00:17:50.500 and I'm not quite sure what to make of them, quite honestly. And nobody will give me further answers.
00:17:55.940 I reached out to Premier Tim Houston and his health minister to get comments on this, but crickets,
00:18:01.780 they didn't get in touch. They didn't respond. Are they cool with this? Did they know about it?
00:18:06.100 If not, am I informing them of something new? Are they going to do anything about it?
00:18:10.660 Not a peep from any of them. And now Brassard's GRS Montreal clinic is facing heat.
00:18:17.540 Lois Cardinal and indigenous trans women from Alberta's filed a lawsuit against Brassard's clinic,
00:18:23.300 claiming he was rushed into a vaginoplasty without proper assessment. And his concerns post-op were
00:18:30.020 completely dismissed. Now in Canada, this is a landmark case. And it's one of the first to
00:18:36.820 challenge trans surgery model in the country directly. And it just so happens, it's the same
00:18:42.740 WPATH aligned clinic that may or may not, but probably is removing the genitals of young boys.
00:18:50.660 So while other countries are banning this kind of thing outright, Nova Scotia is fully in the business
00:18:57.060 of surgically altering kids. So that's where we are. A Canadian province is funding irreversible
00:19:03.700 surgeries for minors. They're doing it with the guidance of activist organizations masquerading
00:19:09.780 as medical authorities. The officials responsible can't or won't explain how these decisions are made,
00:19:17.300 what risks were assessed or why dissenting or critical views have been ignored. They've removed
00:19:23.620 clinical safeguards almost entirely, and they've embedded ideological training into the hospitals.
00:19:31.540 So why did the conservative government of the province ignore these revelations?
00:19:36.020 Are they fearful of the activists? My coverage of the story isn't over. If you want to download the
00:19:42.260 details of the FOI and read it for yourself, please go check out my article in which I include a
00:19:48.420 downloadable PDF copy for anyone to access and read. In the second part of this series, I will be joined
00:19:54.900 by Mia Hughes, author of the WPATH files and senior fellow at the McDonald Laurier Institute and one of
00:20:01.780 the few people in the country tracking the global fallout from trans ideology. I hope you enjoyed this
00:20:07.540 episode. Please consider liking and subscribing and hitting the notification bell if you want to
00:20:12.100 catch my next episode. I'm Melanie Bennett. This is Disrupted.