By a vote of 143-135, the Canadian Parliament has narrowly approved a bill granting transgender and gender identity anti-discrimination protections nationwide. The bill now goes to the Senate, where it faces a tough battle. Via Dented Blue Mercedes:
Bill C-389 now goes to the Senate, where it must go through three readings. Readings in the Senate don’t take months-to-years as they do for Private Members Bills in Parliament. However, as far as I know, a Senator still needs to be found who is willing to bring the bill to the floor. There could be some perils in the Senate. In the past, the Senate has mostly just ratified and tweaked legislation passed by Parliament, but as Harper has packed more conservatives into the Senate (rather than reforming it to create an elected Senate, which he once campaigned on), it has been sometimes used more undemocratically. In one recent such move, he used a lack of attendance of Liberal senators to kill a climate change bill. It is also still entirely possible that an election call could kill the bill before it is enacted into law. What would happen then is that as a community, we would need to press candidates and parties to pledge to finish what was started, and also to address other glaring omissions such as the absence of sex / gender from the hate crimes provisions from the Criminal Code of Canada.(Tipped by Rex Wockner)
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