A number of queer and trans groups have been on Parliament Hill in recent weeks, making demands to advocate for the LGBTQ2S+ community, which is great to see, but not all demands are equal. On Sept. 28, groups including Queer Momentum, TransAction Alberta and Enchanté Network called on the House of Commons to conduct an inquiry into Alberta and Saskatchewan violating the Charter rights of trans youth in those provinces. This was followed a week later by a coalition of LGBTQ2S+ groups including Egale Canada, LGBT YouthLine and Dignity Network Canada, holding a lobby day on the Hill, advocating for the government to renew and expand the federal 2SLGBTQI+ Action Plan, the funding of which is set to lapse in the spring. While these are both important issues, only one of them is likely to meet with any success at the federal level.

The call for an inquiry is unlikely to be successful. The specific ask, which Queer Momentum is calling on the public to send messages to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights about, is for the federal government to engage in an inquiry on the violation of the Charter-protected rights of trans youth in those provinces. The stated goal is to bring forward their voices, those of their parents and relevant experts, to help Canadians and MPs to understand the harm of these policies, which would be an important goal in a different venue. Unfortunately, this effort is unlikely to succeed—having the public write into a committee to demand a study is not how these parliamentary committees operate.

The justice committee is one of the busiest committees in all of Parliament because it deals with a high volume of legislation, both from the government and the never-ending wave of private members’ bills that seek to make tweaks to the Criminal Code for one reason or another. MPs of all stripes love to make it look like they want to be tough on crime, and so they find one issue in particular to make themselves look particularly tough on. The notion that the committee could find time between these legislative studies, which are their priority, to conduct a study on an area that is ultimately of provincial jurisdiction, is going to be an incredibly tough sell, especially when they have some high-stakes files before them right now, including the legislation to stand up an entire new police force dedicated to financial crimes. Time is a precious commodity in Parliament, and there are a limited number of resources available, including interpretation staff, that they cannot just add more meetings.

Also, the committee’s mandate lists specific offices that they are responsible for overseeing, as well as specific pieces of legislation. While the Canadian Human Rights Act does include gender identity and expression as a protected grounds, that is only within certain contexts, such as in federally regulated workplaces. The committee’s mandate doesn’t cover what is happening in Alberta and Saskatchewan. In both of those provinces, the attacks on trans rights are taking place in areas that are squarely within provincial jurisdiction—provision of healthcare and education, as well as the regulation of sports bodies.

@xtramagazine The groundbreaking lesbian lawyer and activist barbara findlay died this past week in Vancouver at the age of 77, choosing MAiD after an extended illness. She leaves behind a five-decade career fighting for the rights of LGBTQ2S+ people, women, disabled people and other marginalized groups across Canada, and is one of the most influential figures of queer and trans rights in Canadian history. The video above—produced in 2016 by Nik Sheehan and Daniele Simone for Xtra’s B.C.-based iteration Xtra West—discussed the documentary “In particular, barbara findlay”, which premiered at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival that year. But it’s also a snapshot of findlay’s characteristic blunt humour and deep passion for queer and trans advocacy. findlay’s life was full of enough stories to fill multiple biographies and documentaries. Called to the bar in 1977—not long after homosexuality was decriminalized in Canada—her work spanned numerous landmark moments for queer and trans rights in Canadian history. She was an instrumental figure in cases the including the legalization of same-sex marriage in Canada and the right for two mothers to be listed on a child’s birth certificate, as well enshrining trans rights as protected human rights and fighting back against municipalities that refuse to declare Pride. She also notably represented Kimberly Nixon, a trans woman who in the ’90s was turned down as a volunteer by Vancouver Rape Relief due to being trans. While the court eventually ruled against Nixon in 2007, the case served as a landmark legal framework for trans rights within Canadian human rights law and bridged many divides between the fight for gay rights and for trans rights. #lgbtqhistory #canada #lgbtqnews #canadahistory #britishcolumbia ♬ original sound – Xtra Magazine

Advertisement

The nature of federalism in Canada is that under the Constitution, powers are divided between the provinces and the federal government around different spheres of influence on an equal basis. The federal government can’t simply bigfoot the provinces into doing what they want. People often have the wrong understanding of programs like healthcare and think that the federal government has these kinds of powers when they don’t—they can only control funding that they give to provinces and whether that funding meets certain conditions. These are not situations where that would apply.

Where the federal government can take action to protect queer and trans rights across the country is through funding the groups and activities in the Action Plan. Those groups who appeared on the Hill this week had a common message—that many of these organizations have seen a drop in funding from both personal and corporate donations as a result of the cost-of-living crisis and the impacts of the trade war on businesses, and that they need federal support to continue to deliver needed services to their communities. It’s important to let the federal government know that these challenges exist, but more importantly, that we need the government to rethink how it invests in these necessary services.

The funding model of giving time-limited and inadequate envelopes of funding is one that University of Calgary economist Lindsay Tedds has described in a blog post as being like a Victorian workhouse in a Charles Dickens novel. The precarity means that groups who get funding are expected to be grateful for the insufficient supports they get, and the government then interprets the gratitude as doing enough, because complaints would imply that the funding recipients—who are serving vulnerable communities—are “never satisfied” or are “moving the goalposts.” Funding doesn’t become sustainable, organizations who rely on it continue to exist in precarity, and are especially vulnerable to a change in government that seeks to cut funding on an ideological basis.

Even when the Action Plan was first launched, there were conversations about trying to create endowment funds so that they could be more sustainable and protected from a change in government. But years later, those discussions don’t appear to have come to any kind of fruition, and the workhouse model of funding continues because it’s convenient for the government of the day—especially for a government that has shown that it likes to mumble a few platitudes while doing the absolute bare minimum, and is performing the most tepid of actions to protect rights.

If we want to break out of the precarity, we need the community to be advocating for not only a renewal of the Action Plan, and to help expand it to better include international components but to also ensure that the entire funding model is reformed to be sustainable and protected. This could be achievable if the government has sufficient political will to do so, and they can be motivated if our communities’ voices are loud enough. If they’re not, we’re likely to see the workhouse model continue, while the government pats themselves on the back for it.