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Bill 44 - Human Rights, Citizenship and Multiculturalism Amendment Act, 2009

Ms Blakeman: Thanks very much, Mr. Speaker. I rise to speak in third reading to Bill 44, the human rights amendment act to the Human Rights, Citizenship and Multiculturalism Act. I do not see Bill 44 as a serious attempt to grapple with the threats to legal protection from discrimination. This should have been an attempt to enshrine protections, and instead what has happened is there has been created additional discrimination against the same group that it purported to start out to protect. In other words, the government is taking back what they purported to give. They purported to say, “We’re going to put in the grounds of sexual orientation as a prohibited grounds of discrimination,” and they have resulted at the end of this bill, in fact, in establishing an additional tier by which members of that group can be discriminated against. I think, additionally, the government has created chaos by introducing ideology into our education system, and it failed to eliminate the conflict of interest that existed in the resolution of human rights complaints. In moving from a commission to a tribunal, it did not deal with the advancement of human rights and with the adjudication of human rights.

Mr. Speaker, I want to acknowledge the engagement of Albertans in this debate, and I want to thank them for their engagement in this particular debate. I know we will have people watching this debate through the video streaming and Twitter and through various websites and reading Hansard after the fact. In fact, we have people joining us in the gallery tonight. I am always excited by that engagement of Albertans in the process of what we do on the floor, and I thank you each and every one, even if we disagree, in engaging in that process. I think it’s an important one for democracy.

What was interesting is that I think I could argue with great success that we are just starting the process of engaging the public in this debate. In fact, the debate will end tonight, and I get it that some members on the other side are eager for that moment to come, but I don’t think that’s appropriate actually. I think when you start to see the engagement of Albertans come up from the grassroots, you should be allowed to continue that debate to hear from them as much as possible and to understand the effect that what we do on this floor carries on outside of these doors into the lives of Albertans.

We had a number of ways of engagement. I want to start by recognizing the work of Oba Powis, who was a high school student from Lethbridge, who was against Bill 44 and within a couple of weeks at his school of LCI in Lethbridge collected 700 signatures and more than two dozen supporting letters in his petition against Bill 44 working through his MLA, the member for Lethbridge and it was, in fact, being presented in this House.

That was mirrored and carried on through a young women who contacted me late Friday, Katherine Creelman, a grade 10 student at Archbishop MacDonald high school, who actually approached me to ask about how to do a petition on Bill 44. When I wrote back and said, “You know, I don’t think you can get a petition done and me to get it through the parliamentary processes that are a necessity before we’ll be debating it on Monday night, but if you sent me a letter I’d be happy to table it in the House,” well, what was I thinking? I did not consider Facebook, and of course she had a Facebook group. She sent it out on Facebook, and by Monday morning I had 84 letters from students, many, many of them dealing with very personal stories. Some of them were more or less a template, but an awful lot of them were not. That is a wonderful kind of engagement, especially from younger people that are in junior high and high school and university to get involved and understand how legislation affects them. So thank you so much Catherine and all of the kids that were involved in that Facebook and in sending me letters.

I think we often see in this House – and I sort of put emphasis on how much work and effort you put into something is sort of how I give back to it. So someone that takes the time to come out here and sit on these hard seats for hours and hours gets a lot of credit from me. Someone that writes a personal letter or an e-mail, someone that comes and has a meeting with me or their MLA in some way: all of those are an investment of time and energy and thought into the process. Petitions, a little less effort involved, but still you’re reading the prayer, you’re taking the time to sign your name. Online petition is a little less effort again because it’s a little easier to hit the buttons, but still it is engagement, and it’s important that we recognize that. So thank you to Katherine and the 84 students that got engaged that way.

I was a little depressed earlier when I heard that there had been some 800 and 700 petitions that had been presented in the House, and then it was pointed out to me on one of the many electronic news outlets that it was an online petition which, as I say, still counts. I appreciate all of the effort that they put into it, but, boy, I really prize those students’ letters and e-mails.

I also want to note the effort that was put into this debate by the Wild Rose United Church, who tried hard to contact me on Friday to talk about what their minister Linda Hunter could put into her sermon on Sunday and talk about in the church, in the before and after activities. In the end we could not connect, but they did manage to write up quite an in-depth and thorough letter and 75 signatures from that congregation that signed on to that letter.

From the Alberta and Northwest Conference of The United Church of Canada a letter that was circulated last week noting that at their conference this resolution was overwhelmingly adopted by over 400 conference delegates asking for the removal of provisions regarding education in Bill 44, and then going on to talk about how important they think human rights is and protection against discrimination for certain groups. Again, thank you very much for those efforts.

I want to talk a bit about the larger issues that were put into play. Essentially, for those of you that are following along, the debate in third reading is a debate on the anticipated effect of the bill once it is passed. There is an assumption that once you get this far, it’s going to get passed in an amended state or as it was first presented. In this case the government did present amendments, and those amendments were accepted. They have a majority to make sure that happens.

What we had happen with this bill was we started out, as the minister said, to make some administrative updates and corrections to make it a better functioning commission and to include, finally, sexual orientation. We ended up with this additional somehow purported to be a balancing by putting in a parental opt-out clause, which is now commonly referred to as a parental rights clause. That slopped over into affecting an entirely innocent group of people, and that is our teachers and those working in our school system, including the trustees.

All of a sudden, something that if it needs to be – and let me underline that – and I would argue that the arguments are not strong that that needs to be the case. If it needs to be, that should be in the School Act. In fact, as we’re often told now, there is an ability to withdraw students from class if parents object on certain grounds now. That process exists, it should be in the School Act. But what the government chose to do was to put in a section in this act that then impacted an entirely different, and I would argue, innocent group of people, and that is our teachers. It put them in a precarious position. Some would call it a “chill” and that we’re likely to see a “chill” come into the classrooms because now there is a requirement that schools will identify sections of their curriculum that could stray into grounds that would be considered religious or dealing with human sexuality or sexual orientation.

They have to go through their curriculum and send out letters to all of their parents identifying that. They have to create a database. Just imagine how that’s money that’s going to be sucked out of your kids’ education because they have to create a database and keep track of all of this stuff. They’re going to have to deal with negotiating, mediating between divorced parents when one wants one, and one wants the other thing for their kid, in a class, out of a class. This school system now has to keep track of all of this, so some secretary is madly tearing her hair out trying to figure out how to organize all of this stuff now. That’s a cost that will take away from the education of our kids in classrooms, and frankly I resent that because I want my taxpayer dollars going into educating kids. I’m not into organizing how people can pull them out of public education.

This bill, by the way, affects public education, which includes our Catholic school system in Alberta, but my understanding is it does not affect the charter schools and the private schools because they are defined differently under the School Act.

We now put something in this act that flows over onto and into our classrooms. They now have to notify parents and get instructions back from parents about pulling their kids out of school. There’s still a very vague definition about what could be considered a subject matter that is dealing primarily and explicitly with religion, human sexuality, and sexual orientation. When I spoke in Committee of the Whole, I talked about how religion is often a sincerely held belief. So we have very little basis for definition to understand what we have now subjected our schools to and the problems that they will have to deal with as a result of what’s been brought up here.

I think families are important. We look for families to bring stability into our communities. Stability in our communities means, generally, stabilities in our cities and in our wider society. But where I differ, I think, is what my definition of a family is, that very core unit that starts to create that stability. In my fabulous constituency of Edmonton-Centre is the people that live there and they way they choose to build their family units and build their community and build our city and build our society. I am not willing to make that definition, as I have been reading about, as a natural family, which seems to be some definition that doesn’t match very well what I see out in my community. I think that’s very short-sighted and does not move us forward as a more tolerant society.

Back to the classroom. So we’re not allowing people to pull their kids out of school through some definition that’s not very clear around religion, human sexuality, and sexual orientation. But we don’t get into those larger issues, now, of dealing with difference and tolerance and analysis and critical thinking that we’re supposed to be bringing out kids through this system for. I mean, how do we get there if kids are pulled out of class whenever a topic might be offensive or troublesome for their parents?

I’ve already talked about different definitions of religion and religious instruction. Where do we end up 10 or 20 years down the road when we look to: what is our standard of education in Alberta, and what have we done with our society? Have we taken children in and taught them how to do critical analysis to deal with difficult subjects, to be challenged around their tolerance? That is how you become a stronger society.

When we look at what’s going to lead us forward into a new economy, they talk about creative economies, they talk about knowledge-based economies. That is about tolerance and diversity. That is about creating communities that people want to move to to have their families in whatever form that is, to build those communities, those cities, and those societies that will make us exciting for years to come and give us an alternate form of energy, if you will, and diversify our economy. So this starts to ripple out in a way that I think was not anticipated here.

One of the things that I was looking at was:

If we ignore things like abortion rights, same-sex marriage, employment equity, racial discrimination, and hate speech, how will we teach our children to ask hard questions when their liberty, equality, their dignity, and their privacy are under threat? How will they know when they are being treated unfairly? We must prepare them to ask the hard questions that people living in democracies must ask.

Indeed. That is from Cultivating Habits of Democracy: Asking the Hard Questions by Danielle McLaughlin from the Canadian Civil Liberties Education Trust.

We still haven’t particularly dealt with the issue of impromptu questions. Although the government amendment does indicate that it should not apply to incidental or indirect references to religion, religious themes, human sexuality, or sexual orientation in a course of study, I am not convinced that that is going to solve the problem that has been identified in so much debate.

We ended up putting in human rights what only belongs in the School Act, and I’m not convinced that it is appropriate there. I’m definitively not convinced that it is appropriate to put it there. The issue is not one of parental control at home. It’s what happens when we are now enshrining those parental rights into a public school system that is funded by taxpayer dollars, and that public school system has farther reaching effect. I think that is the issue that we’ve created, possibly unknowingly, but, hopefully, not deliberately through this act.

So in the end I’m not going to be supporting this bill. I started out with such hope and such enthusiasm and even such joy that finally sexual orientation would be included under human rights, and I could quit asking the poor minister when he was going to do it. Yay. I thought this was a point of celebration for me and for many in my community, and I have come, whatever it is now, six weeks later to urging my colleagues to vote against this bill. It does not do what it purported to do. It, in fact, creates two levels of discrimination, and although it includes sexual orientation under prohibited grounds in one section, it then goes ahead and says: but you can discriminate on the grounds of sexual orientation in the school system by pulling your kids out of any class where it might be mentioned. That to me is horrific. That is one step forward and two steps back, and we should be beyond that in this province. Frankly, I don’t think that intolerance is actually in the wider Alberta population. I think that intolerance is here on this floor, and that is my greater disappointment with the process that I have seen develop here over the last six weeks. I think as well we have engaged teachers in schools in activities that are far beyond what should’ve been appropriate and expected of them, and we have placed them, I think we will see in the future, in an untenable position.

I want to make sure that I thank again all of those who wrote and twittered and stayed engaged with this and came tonight, came the other night, stopped me on the street, the seniors that stopped me at the seniors’ teas this afternoon and last week, that engaged on Facebook, that created their own websites, that went to our websites here. For all of you I thank you again for your engagement. It’s very important that you do that; it’s very important that you continue to do this, and particularly for the students. You guys are going to vote soon. You may be voting in the next election. Pay attention. You’ve got sharper memories than some of the older generation, and I’m expecting you to remember what happened in this exchange. You’ll be able to hang onto that information for the two and a half years you need to hang onto it for.

Those are the bulk of the comments that I wanted to make. There was just a couple of other interesting e mails that I got along the way that I want to highlight as I go. One woman wrote to me and – I think I can identify her; I won’t give her name – wanted me to know that she was currently a student at the University of Alberta. She did not agree with Bill 44 and did not agree that parents should have the right to pull their kids out of human sexuality courses. Had she not been taught about human sexuality within the Edmonton public school board, she would not have known that she could escape a sexual abuser, and that had been very helpful information to her in her life. I thought: “Okay. Hadn’t thought of that one as a plus for why we need to have that kind of information available.”

Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker.