What does Trudeau's resignation mean for the queer community?
Be careful what you wish for
My Out In The World column at the Los Angeles Blade has stories from the UK, Russia, Singapore, and Australia.
I’m going to switch gears a bit today to talk about what’s going on in Canada.
On Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced he was stepping down as leader of the Liberal Party and thus as Prime Minister as soon as the party chooses his replacement. There’s a lot to unpack about how we got here and what happens next, but it’s important to note exactly how transformative Justin Trudeau was on LGBT rights in Canada.
When Trudeau came to power in 2015, he was following nearly ten years of rule under the Stephen Harper Conservatives. Harper’s Conservative Party was new force in Canadian politics, merging the old-school business-minded Progressive Conservative Party with the more radical and frequently explicitly bigoted Canadian Alliance/Reform Party. Harper was able to take advantage of Canada’s badly designed electoral system and fractured political left to win three elections with 36, 37, and 39% of the vote. Unbowed by the lack of majority electoral mandate, the Conservatives relished in forcing through their agenda without seeking support from other parties.
Harper immediately called a vote on repealing same-sex marriage, which had become national law only a year prior (the vote failed, which Harper’s defenders like to argue was the plan all along). He immediately slashed funding to civil rights defenders who had won a string of court victories for LGBT people. Arts, culture, and tourism boards were warned they’d come under scrutiny if they funded queer groups and programs. The Conservatives blocked justice reforms like equalizing the age of consent and protecting trans people in law.
After a decade of this shit, LGBT Canadians and progressives were exhausted and demoralized.
Trudeau swept into office in 2015 and set about immediately changing the tone. That first year was a lot of photo ops and press statements and cabinet appointments designed to ensure that every marginalized community felt that they were represented in the new government. Trudeau even became the first Prime Minister to march in a Pride Parade – something he did over and over in multiple cities.
Conservatives derisively called it all “virtue signaling” or and relentlessly told a certain segment of the electorate that they should be offended by it all.
But for the most part, the Trudeau government delivered, especially for LGBT people.
Two key reforms came about in its first term: an overhaul of the Criminal Code that removed a number of laws that were still used to target queer people, including a sodomy law that included a higher age of consent and a ban on gay sex if it involved more than two people. Also removed were several obscenity and bawdy house provisions that were used to harass queer communities.
The other was the trans rights bill, C-16, which included explicit protections for trans people in federal human rights law and included them as a protected class in the hate crime and hate speech provisions of the Criminal Code. It’s genuinely astounding in retrospect how much impact this bill had given how little it actually changed. Canadian courts had already ruled that trans people were generally protected under sex discrimination laws, and in any event, the federal human rights code doesn’t really cover much in Canada. The far more important provincial human rights codes had mostly been updated to include “gender identity” years before the federal code anyway.
But the passage of C-16 was also the launching pad for one of Canada’s most notorious far-right cranks, Jordan Peterson. An obviously disturbed and disgraced former university professor, Peterson gained a global following of anti-trans weirdos and incels by spreading lies about C-16. The community that formed around Peterson is now a core constituency of the Conservative Party under opposition leader Pierre Poilievre. Indeed, Peterson’s interview of Poilievre last week on YouTube was treated as some kind of Yalta Conference for cringey weirdos – and may be why Elon Musk took a sudden interest in Poilievre this week.
But that wasn’t all Trudeau delivered for the queer community.
The Trudeau government banned conversion therapy. It restored and expanded funding to civil rights groups, queer organizations, and the arts. It drafted and implemented a strategy to promote 2SLGBTQIA+ rights and inclusion across government (yeah, that the government’s official acronym). It issued an historic apology, expungement, and compensation scheme for people who’d been convicted or fired from the public service under old anti-gay laws. It added an “X” gender option for federal ID (passports). It ended the ban on gay/bi blood, tissue, and semen donors.
Trudeau also guided Canada through an unprecedented series of global and national crises, including the COVID pandemic, the first Trump presidency, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an insurgency against the government (fully supported by the Conservatives), and a national reckoning with Canada’s shameful treatment of its Indigenous people.
But he was unable or unwilling to reckon with a series of major problems that have only been exacerbated by those crises: a soaring cost of living, a crumbling health care system, and a growing sense that nothing seems to “work” in Canada – from a post office that refuses to deliver packages, to parks that refuse to unlock their bathrooms, to criminals that go free because packed courts can’t hear their trials in time, to infrastructure and defense projects that drag on years beyond schedule and billions of dollars over budget.
The fact that most of these problems are under the jurisdiction of provinces that are almost entirely being mismanaged by Conservatives – sorry, the feds have to wear CanadaPost – hasn’t blunted the people’s decision that Trudeau is to blame for every ill in Canada. Heck, that’s basically the Conservative slogan these days.
Trudeau probably should have stepped down a few months ago, to give the party a chance to choose a successor in an orderly fashion. Instead, he’s made himself a lame duck days before Trump takes office, threatening to annex Canada (and Greenland and Panama) through economic power, whatever the hell he means by any of that. The Liberal Party will soon announce rules for how a nationwide vote on the new leader will be held, and candidates are already jockeying into place. A new leader will have to be chosen by March 25, when Parliament is recalled and the opposition is likely to force an early election, likely in mid-May.
According to current polls, the Liberal Party is cooked, and the Conservatives are poised to pull a near-sweep of Parliament. Of course, it’s also possible that a leadership contest brings a fresh appealing face to the Liberals, and they’re able to recover some position ahead of the vote, whenever it is. Or Canadians will become concerned with the Conservative Party’s growing ties to Trump Republicans.
Poilievre, who cut his teeth in the Harper government as it’s most unscrupulous attack dog, is trying to position himself as the reasonable person who can unite and fix a fractured Canada. I have my doubts, given his entire public history. He’s also been notably palling around the worst anti-LGBT bigots in Canada and making vaguely threatening statements about banning trans women from bathrooms.
As Canadians get ready to head to the polls, it’s worth remembering what Conservatives do when they’re in power.