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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

OTTAWA, March 9, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — The Trudeau Liberals introduced a bill Monday that will make it a crime not only to give minor Canadians help to overcome same-sex attraction or gender confusion but to “remove a minor from Canada” to seek such help.

Tabled by Justice Minister David Lametti, Bill C-8 would ad five new crimes to the Criminal Code, the minister announced in a press conference Monday.

Lametti said that the bill will make it a crime to: 1) cause a minor to undergo conversion therapy, 2) remove a minor from Canada to undergo conversion therapy, 3) cause a person to undergo conversion therapy against their will, 4) profit from conversion therapy, and 5) advertise conversion therapy.

“As to minors, we are criminalizing this across the board,” Lametti said. The Liberals are also criminalizing “coerced conversion therapy” for adults and criminalizing activities around providing such therapy for adults.

“A competent adult could conceivably defend the right in court to receive this activity,” Lametti told reporters. The bill as written provides a “strong balance between progressive policies and constitutional [rights].”

If Bill C-8 is passed, “Canada’s law will be the most progressive and comprehensive in the world,” he declared.

Bill C-8 defines “conversion therapy” as “a practice, treatment or service designed to change a person’s sexual orientation to heterosexual or gender identity to cisgender, or to repress or reduce non-heterosexual attraction or sexual behaviour.”

It adds: “For greater certainty, this definition does not include a practice, treatment or service that relates (a) to a person’s gender transition; or(b)to a person’s exploration of their identity or to its development.”

Although the Liberals have reduced the age of consent for anal sex to 16, Bill C-8 defines a “child” as an individual under 18 years of age.

Those convicted of causing a child to undergo “conversion therapy”, either in or outside Canada, or forcing an adult to do so, face a maximum of five years in prison. 

Those convicted of advertising or profiting from “conversion therapy” face a maximum of two years in jail.

Minister of Diversity, Inclusion and Youth Bardish Chagger was also at the conference, as well as alleged “survivors” of “conversion therapy,” which Lametti described as a “discredited practice” and “not based in science.”

When a reporter questioned Lametti about Charter rights to freedom of expression and religion, the justice minister said the Liberals were concerned about the “devastating effects” of “conversion therapy.”

But pro-family advocates who have been lobbying against a similar bill in the Senate, S-202, are denouncing the bill as a totalitarian law that will prevent Canadian youth from getting therapy they want and need.

“Any kind of clinical therapy or spiritual counseling to help a person overcome their gender identity confusion and to accept their bodily reality, including the pastoral support … will be defined as ‘conversion therapy,’ and thus, become illegal,” says Jack Fonseca, director of political operations of Campaign Life Coalition, Canada’s national pro-life, pro-family political lobbying group.

However, the difficulty with opposing a ban on so-called “conversion therapy” is that Canadians have been misled by the mainstream media and the LGBTQ lobby to such a degree that they have no idea what the term means, Fonseca told LifeSiteNews in an earlier interview.

“At this very moment, dishonest media outlets and even more dishonest LGBT activists are running around the country, lying and claiming that gays and lesbians are being electroshocked, and forcibly confined, and tortured by churches and psychotherapists who practice ‘conversion’ therapy,” he said.

“And this is a lie,” Fonseca said. “We’re talking about loving, standard talk therapy. There’s nothing forcible about it; people are going there voluntarily.”

Dr. Ann Gillies, Ontario psychotherapist and author of the 2017 book Closing the Floodgates, an analysis of propaganda promoting the sexual revolution, echoed this when warning against similar legislation, Senate Bill S-202.

“The ultimate goal is to silence the Christian church in Canada. It is to silence us from talking. It’s totally totalitarian,” said Gillies, a retired expert in counseling survivors of complex trauma, at Campaign Life event last month.

“It’s about banning…the central ministry of the church, which is conversion… And it’s about banning the ministry to the brokenhearted,” she said.

She pointed out that Dr. Kristopher Wells, Canada Research Chair for the Public Understanding of Sexual and Gender Minority Youth at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta, is “the driving force” behind these bills.

Wells is an LGBTQ activist “who has, among other things, shared a cartoon comparing Christians to Nazis, posted sexually explicit content on social media, and relentlessly promoted curriculum and materials that promote a wide range of sexual acts and experimentation for minors,” noted Jonathan Van Maren in an earlier column warning about the Liberals’ intentions. 

Wells has “a strict agenda to go after the churches,” Gillies said. 

In an October 2019 press release announcing his booklet Conversion Therapy in Canada: The roles and responsibilities of municipalities, Wells defined “conversion therapy” as: “any form of treatment, including individual talk therapy, behavioral or aversion therapy, group therapy, treatments, spiritual prayer, exorcism and/or medical or drug-induced treatments which attempt to actively change someone’s sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.”

Wells also included “reparative therapy,” which, as Gillies noted, was developed by late American psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Nicolosi; “re-integrative therapy”; and “sexual orientation and gender identity change efforts” as forms of conversion therapy.

Developing…

Contact information:

Contact your MP (here) and senator (here) to respectfully express your concerns about the bill.

To sign the Campaign Life petition against Bill S-202, go here.