Send a note thanking Danielle Smith for recent pro-family policies today
(LifeSiteNews) — If you’re a parent living in Canada, please take a moment to watch this clip:
“There’s no such thing as parental rights in Canada,” says NDP MP Randall Garrison in response to Alberta’s plans for a parental rights bill.
“Children have rights in Canada, and these kinds of policies restrict the rights children have.”https://t.co/AY8uVnohmI pic.twitter.com/2Fvtcy8B4t
— Rebel News (@RebelNewsOnline) February 8, 2024
To summarize: a reporter off-camera asks Randall Garrison, the New Democratic Party MP from Esquimalt–Saanich–Sooke, if he is concerned about parental rights in Canada in a line of questioning about Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s recent parental rights policies: “Do you view this as a parental rights issue at all?”
Garrison’s response was admirably to the point: “Well, I’d like to say first of all that there is no such thing as parental rights in Canada – there are parental responsibilities. In Canadian family law, the primary responsibility is to support and affirm their kids. Children have rights in Canada, and these kinds of policies restrict the rights that children have in Canada.”
There are a few things that are important to note about this statement. First, who is Garrison to say what “supporting and affirming” means? It is clear what he believes it means: if a boy says he’s a girl or a girl says she’s a boy, it is important to affirm their stated belief rather than affirm their sex. I agree that parents should affirm and support their children – but in this context, what Garrison is suggesting is the precise opposite of affirming a child.
READ: Indiana launches website for parents to report gender, racial indoctrination in schools
Telling a child that their body needs to be fixed by drugs and surgeries to match their feelings is not “affirming,” although it was a brilliant propaganda move for transgender activists to begin using the term (it was the last of several terms that they tried out). Now, a parent who attempts to affirm that their child’s body is good and that it does not need to be mutilated or changed is “non-affirming” while the parent who puts their child on puberty blockers is “affirming.” Welcome to clown world.
As others have already noted, transgender drugs and surgeries are by literal definition “conversion therapy”; but in Trudeau’s Canada, the legal definition is precisely the opposite. Industrial scale gaslighting from progressive politicians who hate you and are beholden to delusional and radical activists. The Trudeau government has come down on the side of the transgender movement’s redefinition of both “support” and “affirmation.”
Parental rights boil down to who gets to interpret what those terms mean. According to Garrison, the transgender movement and the politicians get to decide what those terms mean. This means that parents have the “responsibility” to conform their behavior to a specific set of bizarre ideological principles imposed on this country within just the last few years and possibly even set their child on the path to lifelong medicalization.
READ: Now it’s time for Canada to ban ‘sex change’ surgeries for children nationwide
We have known for a long time that progressive politicians do not believe in parental rights, and I’m grateful that Garrison was so forthcoming. Back in the 1970s, Alex J. Proudfoot of the Alberta School Trustees Association openly stated that “When we get right down to the crunch, the child belongs to the state” – and this was in the context of a debate concerning whether an Alberta Christian school had the right to continue operating. Years later, Proudfoot, by then a professor of education at the University of Calgary, elaborated by saying that “The child is not your child. [Children] are property of the state, like our oil, like our gas, like our pipelines.”
The NDP still believes that, which is why Garrison told reporters with total confidence that “there is no such thing as parental rights in Canada.” We may, however, finally get to see elections fought over this issue, as premiers decide to back parents over progressives. Garrison may find himself running against Canadian parents who beg to differ with his assertion.
Send a note thanking Danielle Smith for recent pro-family policies today
