Latest news with #BillC-16

National Post

Mia Hughes: Canada's courts must protect women's sex-based rights, like the U.K.

Article content Within a week of the U.K. Supreme Court issuing a landmark ruling confirming that women are female, the Conservative Party of Canada has taken a small, but long-overdue, step in the same direction. The newly released CPC platform announced it would repeal a federal policy that allows trans-identified men to be housed in women's prisons and committed to ensuring that 'women's spaces and services remain protected in federal institutions and policy.' Article content Article content Article content After years of official political platform silence on the erosion of women's sex-based rights in Canada, this marks the first major promise by any federal political party to confront the legal consequences of gender ideology head-on. The Canadian legal system may also soon be forced to wrestle with the matter. Article content Article content Across the Atlantic on April 16, the U.K.'s highest court delivered clarity that remains sorely lacking in Canada. Five justices ruled that under the U.K. Equality Act, the term 'woman' refers specifically to biological females, and 'sex' denotes biological sex. Article content The ruling further clarified that when it comes to women-only spaces or services, men who identify as women — even those in possession of a gender recognition certificate denoting a female gender identity — do not have a legal right to access those spaces. The judges maintained this was the only interpretation that could be consistent and coherent within the law. Article content Such consistency and coherence have been absent from Canadian law ever since gender identity was embedded in the nation's legal framework. This happened through a gradual process that began with the Northwest Territories in 2002 and culminated in the federal Parliament's passage of Bill C-16 in 2017, amending the Canadian Human Rights Act and Criminal Code to include gender identity and gender expression as prohibited grounds of discrimination. Article content Protecting gender identity alongside sex isn't just contradictory — it's logically impossible. Ontario's Human Rights Code perfectly demonstrates this doublethink. It permits sex-based segregation in spaces like bathrooms and change rooms to preserve 'human dignity,' yet the Ontario Human Rights Commission's own interpretation of the Code states that trans-identified people 'should be provided access to facilities that are consistent with their lived gender identity.' This means men who identify as women are permitted into female-only spaces, rendering those spaces no longer female-only, while all concern for the safety and dignity of women is tossed aside in the process Article content Article content It should be self-evident that sex matters in contexts where safety, dignity, and vulnerability are at stake. Males in Canada (and elsewhere) commit most sexual offences, and females comprise nearly all the victims. That fact alone ought to justify single-sex spaces. But in Canada, evidence still takes a back seat to ideology.