Canadian Anti-Trans Fear Mongers: Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives

The economy takes a backseat to grievance politics

That’s one for the history books. The Conservative Party of Canada held their policy convention in Québec City this past weekend. As expected, delegates and attendees stayed razor-focused on the issues galvanizing Canadians across the nation: inflation, housing costs, grocery bills, climate change and out-of-control wildfires, and the need to reduce carbon emissions.

Just kidding, of course.

If you expected the equivalent of Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservaties of the 1980s, you came out of this sorely disappointed. If you’re in Canada and haven’t been living under a rock, then you know that since the pandemic and the ascension of Pierre Poilievre as party leader, the CPC has gone full MAGA.

The worst people in Canada, goaded on by a feckless opportunist in Poilievre, are relying on the professional grievance mongers at the National Post, The Toronto Sun, and Rebel News to tell them what to think. And they’re not telling them to think about the things that really matter.

The convention delegates and attendees did what everyone fully expected. Of the issues that they’ve spent the past eight years screaming about, and blaming Justin Trudeau for everything since the pandemic, they glossed over or ignored entirely. You could be forgiven for thinking that everything they’ve professed has been a long, tiresome, bigoted piece of performance art that we were all forced to watch.

First and foremost was the collective drive to single out and target children, in the name of “saving the children.” The CPC now officially endorses a position that denies medical care to trans children, while at the same time endorsing bodily autonomy for themselves when it comes to vaccines.

There was no mention of the guaranteed autonomy of children to consent to treatment, no mention of the state not meddling in the private decisions of families, no mention of seat-of-the-pants bigotry supplanting the expertise of teams of healthcare professionals.

Critically, there was also no mention of gender identity being a protected characteristic — confirmed as recently as this year at the Supreme Court of Canada — at both the federal level and in every province and territory.

An Edmonton delegate, apropos zero supporting data and being unfamiliar with best practices endorsed by every major medical profession and association, said children presenting with gender dysphoria have a “mental disorder” and begged the attendees to “Please protect our kids!”

The crowd of grown up, mature, self-declared “free thinking” adults raised their fists as one and roared their approval of this simultaneous contempt for, and targeting of, children. Statistics would suggest that there were at least a few parents and relatives of trans kids in attendance.

There was reliance on debunked tropes surrounding the “irreversible damage” caused by puberty blockers, and that minor children are receiving genital surgeries.

And, like the recent decision by the US Supreme Court to overturn affirmative action practices, the CPC endorsed a position to ensure minorities do not receive preferential treatment for federal job hiring, with delegates referring to the practice as “woke ideology.”

A vote to end “forced diversity training” in any workplace received overwhelming support. Attendees mentioned Jordan Peterson’s recent court case against his own professional College of Psychologists (which he lost).

One of Poilievre’s favourite talking points has been to complain about “elites” and “gatekeepers” making life more difficult for ordinary Canadians. Convention special guest Lord Daniel Hannan of Kingsclere — a Boris Johnson Conservative appointment to the UK House of Lords and current senior adviser to the UK Board of Trade — gave a speech excoriating the governance of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Whatever your thoughts on Trudeau, a senior member of the government of a foreign country visiting a sovereign state to speak like this is in stunningly poor judgment and a violation of the integrity of international relations.

Notably, Lord Hannan was one of the key founders of the Vote to Leave campaign that endorsed Brexit, which successfully ruined the entire British economy. Lord Hannan now opines safely from the comfort of a newspaper column and a hefty pension, when he’s not visiting foreign countries to criticize their democratically elected governments.

Pierre Poilievre has willingly, knowingly, and repeatedly played footsie with a veritable rogues’ gallery of extremists, domestic terrorists, misogynists, and bigots as he attempts to curry favour — and win votes — with anyone hoping to “own the Libs.” He couldn’t even be bothered to attend the raising of the Pride flag on Parliament Hill, as the summer of hate against trans kids and the LGBTQ+ community reached a fever pitch, saying he was “working late.” He lives ten minutes away, and has a government car and chauffeur.

Poilievre is demonstrating how easy it is for a narrow, extremist faction of a political party to run roughshod over our democratic Westminster electoral system of “first past the post.” The CPC has become a party that is more concerned with removing the human rights of marginalized groups and convincing itself that white, straight Canadians are hard done by than ensuring equity and equality for all Canadians to have equal opportunities to succeed.

You don’t need to be a fan of Justin Trudeau personally — I certainly am not. But I am incapable of comprehending how Canadians, that are otherwise so smugly convinced of their moral superiority over Americans, are also so completely capable of being swept up in moral panics and conspiracies. How they are so ready to vote against their own economic interests by a career politician (since the age of 25), with no experience outside of politics other than being a landlord, who famously told them they could simply “opt out of inflation” by sinking their savings into Bitcoin. Those who followed his advice would have lost their savings as the entire crypto market crashed soon after he said this.

Canada can and must do better than this charlatan.