Recently, Randall Garrison, MP and LGBTT critic for the New Democratic Party of Canada, reintroduced into Parliament a Bill to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA) and the Criminal Code of Canada to include gender identity and gender expression as prohibited grounds for discrimination.

As you may know, this Bill – Bill C-279 – had a previous manifestation, Bill C-389, which made it through Parliament but died at the Senate when the government was dissolved in March. Now, thanks to the re-introduction of the Bill by Randall Garrison, we have yet another chance to make these human rights protections a reality.

Here’s how you can help put the pressure on the MP’s and the Prime Minister to pass the Bill:

1. Do a canvass!
Print out some copies of Randall Garrison’s petition, grab some friends, and hit your local neighbourhood hotspots. Then, mail copies of the petition to back to MP Garrison so that he may bring it to the floor. The best part of this is that postage is FREE!

Click here to download a copy of the petition [PDF Format].

2. Contact your Member of Parliament (MP)
Call, write, email, tweet or snail-mail your MPs, and the Leaders of the Conservative, NDP and Liberal Parties of Canada. Let them know that you support fundamental human rights, and that passing this Bill would provide explicit and unequivocal human rights protections to transsexual, transgender, intersex and gender variant individuals in Canada.

Don’t know who your MP is? You can find them easily using this online tool and your postal code: http://bit.ly/mfMkVq

Call, write or email the Minister of Justice, the Hon. Rob Nicholson, P.C., M.P.
Telephone: 613-995-1547       E-mail: Nichor@parl.gc.ca

Call, write or email the Prime Minister, The Right Honourable Stephen Harper, P.C., M.P.
Telephone: 613-992-4211     Email: pm@pm.gc.ca

Letters to all MPs, Party Leaders, the Prime Minister can be sent postage free to:

House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6

So call, write, and tweet away – let’s make this the winning Bill!

Queer Ontario’s first Annual General Meeting and Elections were held Saturday, November 5, 2011 at the 519 Community Centre in Toronto.

Elected to the steering committee were Chair Nick Mule, Vice-Chair Casey Oraa, Secretary Martin Otarola and Treasurer Richard Hudler, as well as At-Large Members Lisa Duke and Davina Hader. They join fellow steering committee members Alana Boltwood (Chair, Research and Education), Dwayne Shaw (Chair, Events) and David Demchuk (Chair, Governance and Media).

AGM Reports

The following reports are now available in the Documents section of the website, under Queer Ontario 2011 AGM, as well as via the links below:

Nick Mule – Chair’s report

Richard Hudler – Treasurer’s report

A.J. Lowik – Queer Liberation Theory Project report

Participation from Outside Toronto

To encourage participation from outside Toronto, Queer Ontario used Cover It Live to live-blog the event, streamed an audio webcast via UStream and created the hashtag #QO2011 for participation on Twitter. The archive of the Cover It Live live-blog is now available, as is the audio recording of the meeting (part one, part two – apologies for the ads).

Queer Ontario has learned that the Institute for Canadian Values (ICV) has chosen to continue its war on the province’s trans communities by running a transphobic ‘advertisement’ on SunTV that disingenuously attempts to raise fears around the trans-inclusive materials recommended by the Toronto District School Board for its students.

Just like the advertisement that was run in the National Post during the provincial elections and subsequently withdrawn from the paper because of its inaccuracies, the SunTV ad is grossly misleading and exploitative for callously throwing around and trivializing a set of identities that are used by non-stereotypically-gendered persons to give meaning to themselves and their lives. These include individuals who have struggled with their sex or gender identity in the past because of a lack of transsexual, transgender, intersex, and two-spirited representation in the Ontario education curriculum – struggles that often lead to depression and suicide. This also includes sex and gender identities that raise concerns and fears in less informed individuals because of their misunderstanding of these identities and the lived realities associated with them.

Indeed, these hardships only serve to underscore the need for such a frank discussion of sex and gender identities in the Ontario curriculum to teach Ontarians about the various sexes and genders that exist in this world. And we have faith that our teachers will be able to do this skilfully, using age-appropriate language, to ensure that students are not “confused” by these lessons like the ICV claims they will be.

We applaud Advertising Standards Canada’s decision to investigate the ad and encourage individuals to file their own complaints, drawing attention to Provision 14 (Unacceptable Depictions and Portrayals) of the Canadian Code of Advertising Standards:
http://www.adstandards.com/en/consumerComplaints/howToSubmitAComplaint.aspx

We also encourage individuals to write to Dr. Chris Spence, the Director of Education for the Toronto District School Board, to let him know that you support the Board‘s decision to use the Challenging Homophobia and Heterosexism curriculum resource guide, which is the target of the ICV’s ad. This can be done via:

Email: chris.spence@tdsb.on.ca
Mail: Dr. Chris Spence, Director of Education, Toronto District School Board
5050 Yonge Street, Toronto, Ontario M2N 5N8

This ongoing campaign by the ICV against Canada’s trans communities only highlights the need to include ‘gender identity’ and ‘gender expression’ as protected grounds in our federal and provincial human rights codes. Indeed, much like the case of ‘homosexuality’ in decades past, a prevailing ignorance about the lives of transsexual, transgender, intersex, and two-spirited people only serves to breed fear and misunderstanding in people – and, with that, discrimination and hate-based violence. We call on the Ontario and federal governments to step up and take action.