The Alberta government has invoked the Charter’s notwithstanding clause to prevent court challenges to a trio of laws impacting transgender youth and adults.
The clause is part of a bill now before the house, and Premier Danielle Smith says the move is necessary to protect children’s health and well-being.
She says their health could be jeopardized if challenges to the laws are tied up in court for a long time.
The notwithstanding clause allows governments to override Charter rights if deemed necessary as a way to balance the authority of both politicians and the courts.
The clause relates to laws that put restrictions on student pronoun changes at school, on girls’ and women’s sports, and on medical therapies for young people looking to transition.
Two of those bills are facing court challenges on the grounds they are harmful and unconstitutional.
That’s bananas. So the only choice is to get a later provincial government to revoke whatever rule they passed using it?
The trick is it’s, to my knowledge, never been used to protect something so important before. Usually it’s to protect for more subjective cultural stuff, ie Quebec has used it the most in the name of protecting their French heritage.
I vaguely remember Alberta trying to use it in a similiar ass-backwards fashion once before, to define marriage as being “between a man and a woman,” but it got shut down federally somehow? It’s too late in the evening for me to care to do my research on this, but if you’re interested in how it may or may not be used, I’d look into that case.
Either way, I suspect if its gayphobic use got shut down before, it’s current transphobic use will get shut down too. But, it’s a different world today, so we’ll see.
Obligatory fuck Danielle Smith and everything she is doing to attack trans people and protect pedophiles.
it expires in 5 years as well. They claim they’re doing this because it’s of so much importance that they can’t wait for the court case to be completed which could be years, but if they lose that court case, you full well know they’d just invoke it again if they were still in power 5 years from now and say fuck it the court got it wrong.
Pretty much, yeah.