The United Conservative Party is treading dangerous ground by entertaining any sort of resolution in the party’s upcoming AGM singling out trans-persons for discrimination.
Last week it was revealed that the UCP would debate and vote on 35 policy resolutions on Nov. 1 that include banning transgender people from women's washrooms, prohibiting non-binary gender identifiers on government documents, and ensuring trans medical treatments are not publicly funded, among others.
This is a policy debate that should never have been allowed to reach the floor, let alone be taken seriously by providing a forum for potential public discrimination and hate speech.
History is rife with examples when a government body such as a political party, especially one in power, decides to create policies which discriminate against specific individuals or groups. It wasn’t too long ago Jews were ghettoized by the National Socialist Party (the Nazis), which eventually led to the horrors of the Holocaust.
It wasn’t too long ago official segregation against African Americans was upheld by both southern Democrats and Republicans.
Closer to home, it wasn’t too long ago all Japanese in Canada were declared hostile foreign nationals and interned in concentration camps under the auspices of the federal Liberal Party.
And it wasn’t too long ago in Alberta the governing Social Credit party enacted and upheld eugenics policies against people with disabilities, deemed them “mentally defective,” and forcibly sterilized 3,000 of our own citizens.
This is a dark and slippery slope the UCP is heading down if it passes specific resolutions discriminating against one group of Albertans, suggesting certain individuals, who have no criminal record or have not harmed anyone in any way, are effectively second class citizens in their own province.
This path is wrong, and the UCP leadership needs to turn back before it is too late.
