(LifeSiteNews) — Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is the gutsiest premier in the country – and Canada’s LGBT movement is throwing everything they’ve got at her.
Last week, she announced that her United Conservative government will be using the notwithstanding clause to ensure that three key bills – a ban on sex change treatments for minors, a ban on males in female sports, and a bill requiring parental consent for LGBT content in education – remain law and are implemented in Alberta.
“Children deserve the opportunity to grow into adulthood before making life-altering decisions about their gender and fertility,” Smith said in a press release sent to LifeSiteNews and other media outlets.
“By invoking the notwithstanding clause, we’re ensuring that laws safeguarding children’s health, education and safety cannot be undone – and that parents are fully involved in the major decisions affecting their children’s lives. That is what Albertans expect, and that is what this government will unapologetically defend.”
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Smith is a libertarian, not a social conservative. Throughout her career, she has clashed with social conservatives; in 2014, as leader of the Wildrose Party, she crossed the floor to the Progressive Conservatives and reduced Wildrose to a rural rump in part due to the strong influence of social conservatives.
This time around, however, Smith is steering a careful path. In the decade since her infamous betrayal, the LGBT activist agenda has gotten increasingly extreme – from same-sex “marriage” to sex change “treatments” for children – and left many non-socially conservative, common-sense conservatives behind. Smith saw an opportunity to create a conservative coalition that would keep social conservatives happy by delivering real results, while retaining the support of common-sense Albertans.
Smith has done something extraordinary: she has created a conservative “big tent” in which both the libertarians and the social conservatives get real legislative change. Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party makes it quite clear that they want social conservatives in the tent, but off the platform. Not Smith’s UCP.
It is strange that she is one of the only major conservative politicians in the country to figure this out. The fact that a pro-abortion, pro-gay libertarian premier is championing parental rights legislation and curbing the damaging insanity of transgender ideology reveals that there is a broad coalition of Canadians awaiting a leader who supports such action. Smith would not have moved if she was not certain the public was on her side, and she was right. She’s willing to fight because she knows Albertans are behind her.
Indeed, the LGBT activist attacks on Smith only strengthen her credentials with her base. She is not an anti-LGBT bigot, as they claim. Ironically, like JK Rowling, she agrees with social liberals on most major issues. Their extremism has pushed her into an alliance with people that she disagrees with strongly on many things – as her history with the Wildrose Party reveals. So when LGBT activist groups tried to stop her common-sense legislation with lawsuits, the troops rally behind her.
LGBT activists are used to being able to cow politicians, and it is not working this time. Last week, for example, NDP leader Naheed Nenshi demanded that UCP MPLA Shane Getson apologize for “comparing human beings to cattle” during the debate on the use of the notwithstanding clause. Of course, that’s not quite what Getson said.
Instead, Getson made the succinct and effective point that the legislation is designed to protect minors from permanent and irreversible treatments and used the example of castrating a bull. “You’re not going to grow back those parts if you change your mind,” Getson said. “If the steer changes his mind, too late; you’re a steer.”
Getson was clearly not attempting to compare people to cattle, and Nenshi just as clearly recognized that. Getson was pointing out, in distinctly Albertan terms, that these “treatments” result in permanent and irreversible damage – especially “top” and “bottom” surgery. Nenshi, of course, cannot address the actual substance of Getson’s point, because that would involve acknowledging dangers that he and his activist colleagues are ignoring.
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The UCP’s decision to protect Albertan children last week, and to use every constitutional tool available to do so, signals to Canadians that real action to combat LGBT extremism is possible – and that the conservatives who refuse to do so are acting out of cowardice, not good politics. Meanwhile, the newly-elected Conservative premier of Newfoundland and Labrador Tony Wakeham celebrated “Transgender Awareness Week” on social media.
Wakeham is 69 years old, which means that in all likelihood, unless he was a member of fairly fringe LGBT groups, he likely wasn’t aware of the transgender phenomenon until he was in his fifties. When he was in his forties, he likely would have pushed back hard against the allegation that when he was almost 70, he would be celebrating an agenda that included sex changes for children. Yet, here he is – like so many other conservative politicians, he transitioned. It’s genuinely pathetic to see.
Premier Danielle Smith has proven that there is another way – and that Canadians are in desperate need of leadership that most conservatives, including almost entirely useless premiers like Doug Ford, are simply refusing to provide.
