Independent senator Kim Pate says that after spending most of her life being deeply closeted, she is still learning how to take leadership in issues important to the queer and trans communities as part of her lifelong work of pursing social justice, particularly for people who have been involved in the prison system.
“My dad was in the military,” Pate, Canada’s only openly lesbian senator, says. “Michelle Douglas is a friend, and we all saw what happened with the gay purge in the military. In my first relationship—it was completely secret—and I remember a young man who came out—we were posted in Germany at the time. The whole family got transferred back to Canada. That drove us even further underground.
“I’ve only really been out for a decade,” Pate admits. “I lived with the internalized homophobia of how I was raised—not that my family has been anything but embracing, but it’s not the area I started the equality work in.”
I sat down with Pate just days after her sixth anniversary of her appointment to the Senate under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s system of appointing only independents to the Upper Chamber.
Pate got her start first through teacher training and then law school at Dalhousie University, with the sole intention of making money, but things didn’t turn out as planned.
“When I got to law school, I did work at the clinic and worked predominantly with young people and with women, in large part because nobody wanted to work with them,” Pate says. “What I soon discovered was that I was interested in social justice issues, for lack of a better term, and economic justice issues, health justice issues.”
Pate notes that she had done an independent research project in law school on the Young Offenders Act, which was new at the time, in the early 1980s, and when she went to work at the legal clinic—because she had studied it, while many of the lawyers and judges were still getting their heads around it—she began representing most of the youth.
“What I saw was that it was predominantly the Black and Indigenous kids who ended up going all the way through the system, didn’t get diverted either at the beginning or partway through the court process and it was disproportionately those, or if they were white, they tended to be kids who were in care or [from] families that were struggling financially,” Pate says. “That got me sensitized to the issue.”
From there, Pate moved to Alberta and lasted a couple of weeks at a law firm, unhappy with just writing legal memos, before taking on a position setting up literacy programs in the province on behalf of the public school board, the separate school board and the John Howard Society. She saw it as an interim step, but the more injustice she saw, the more she became involved in the system.
Starting in January 1992, Pate spent nearly 25 years at the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, which is concerned primarily with women in the penal system, and worked with them right up to her appointment to the Senate in 2016.
“I often say I spent the first 10 or 15 years in the system trying to figure out how to reform the system, and since then, I’ve been trying to figure out how to dismantle it,” Pate says. “Indigenous leaders got there way before I did, and they’ve been saying for a long time we need to decolonize, and I often now say we need to decolonize, decriminalize and decarcerate.”
To that end, Pate spent recent months trying to expand Bill C-5 to eliminate all mandatory minimum sentences from the Criminal Code, but was unsuccessful in her efforts.
“I see the same issues that the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls inquiry showed, that the very same issues that give rise to women being the fastest-growing prison population are directly linked the failure of every other system, and it’s also mostly likely why they are most likely to be disappeared, murdered or on the street,” Pate says.
While advocating for the rights of the incarcerated at Elizabeth Fry, Pate did work with trans prisoners for nearly 20 years, but notes that she mostly worked behind the scenes.
“When I was first approached about Bill C-16 [on gender identity and expression], one of the things I said to people from the trans community who were lobbying was that we should be focusing less on which prisons, and more on keeping people in their community,” Pate says. “What results in people being incarcerated, whether it’s those in the trans community, or those who identify otherwise in the queer communities, is fundamentally the inequalities that resulted in them being there.”
Pate says that it feels like her six years in the Senate have gone by very quickly, and that she also feels frustration with the political process. She notes that she was approached by a group of Indigenous women to apply for the position under Trudeau’s new process.
“When they did, it was certainly humbling for them to think that this was a role they thought I could contribute to,” Pate says. “When I started to look at it, I thought that this is an agenda I could get behind if we truly become the voice of those who aren’t often represented in the House of Commons, because their issues are seen as minority issues or not popular issues, and not issues that get you elected, then that could be a huge contribution.”
Pate’s main reason for applying for the Senate was to advance issues like a guaranteed liveable income (though not a system that displaces other social, health or economic supports, but as a starting point to achieve a more equitable society, which is a particular nuance in this discussion), and believes that the experience of the pandemic has made the need more apparent.
“We’re seeing the government inch toward it with the Canada Child Benefit, the Guaranteed Income Supplement for seniors and now the Canada Disability Benefit, and now it’s just saying let’s go the next step,” Pate says, and points to provinces like Prince Edward Island and British Columbia looking closely at such systems. “Much like the way that Medicare started in Saskatchewan and rolled out across the country, my hope is that we’ll see that sort of thing.”
Pate believes that a guaranteed liveable income is fundamentally about breathing life into the Section 15 equality provisions of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
A program that Pate helped spearhead is called “Senators Go to Jail,” where senators use their ability to visit any federal penitentiary to shine a spotlight on issues that otherwise go unnoticed. Pate says that when she was with Elizabeth Fry, she would get kicked out of prisons for raising issues that led to investigations and inquiries, and would often resort to getting the assistance of MPs to get back in.
“Thirty-four [senators] have gone so far,” Pate says. “We’re organizing another trip in January, and hopefully that will continue. A number of senators who have now retired have indicated they want to continue to monitor what’s happening. We monitor the conditions of confinement, we take photos and we report on it. We also provide that information to the Correctional Investigator and anyone else who’s interested.”
Pate also recently helped host a group of queer New Zealand MPs at the behest of NDP MP Blake Desjarlais.
“I had worked with a number of Maori folks in New Zealand around criminal legal issues and the mass incarceration there of Indigenous people, and in particular, women,” Pate says. “It was fantastic to co-host that.”
The opportunity came as part of Pate’s involvement in the “Pride Caucus” in the Upper Chamber, started by fellow queer senator, René Cormier. Pate says she is proud to be part of it, but notes that it isn’t something she has taken leadership in until now.
“I’m still trying to be the best ally,” Pate says.
Why you can trust Xtra
