Health Committee on May 7th, 2019

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Well, that's encouraging.

[Lorraine Grieves]

It really is.

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

It's not that you don't have enough, but that more people are reaching out.

[Lorraine Grieves]

Yes. We're working on a “train the trainer” network model so we can train more because some of the training has to be live training. Online modules only go so far.

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Good.

With regard to more education, this is something I've always agreed with. I went to school in the 1970s and through most of it we didn't have any sex education. Whenever someone brought in a sex education program you would have crowds of angry parents bearing torches at the school and saying, “How dare you pervert our children with this stuff”, and this was long before we were talking about non-binary things.

It's still an issue. A teacher friend of mine in B.C. very recently was told as she was starting the year, “We don't talk about people being gay or anything like that. The parents around here are very uncomfortable with it. If a student asks, just say that we don't talk about that here.” This was very recently. And I'm seeing nods. Shockingly, no one is surprised by this.

Even for GSAs, there is a lot of resistance. We know what's going on in Alberta right now.

I remember in Manitoba there was a provincial ruling that schools had to allow GSAs. In one local community there were 1,000 people who showed up to protest this because they said this was treading on their religious beliefs, the belief that was prominent in this community. Again, we have a long way to go.

How do you address this resistance? I know there is still resistance in the public and among parents to schools putting in this kind of education.

[Lorraine Grieves]

We're grappling with this in B.C. right now. There's been a fair bit of organized protest to the rollout of GSAs, and we think there's a ton of research to support that work. In B.C. we have a research centre called the SARAVYC. It has been able to show, by linking health data with the presence of GSAs in schools, that we see health outcomes improve not just for queer and trans students but for the heterosexual male population in schools and the cisgender population. If we can get into dialogue with people, I think we have some compelling evidence to support GSAs. Sometimes some of these groups aren't willing to engage in that kind of dialogue, but it's a particular problem in a lot of provinces right now.

I do think it's a sign that we're making progress.

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Good.

[Sarah Chown]

One thing that I would add, if possible, is that the federal government's role is really in creating policies that normalize the existence of those of us who are queer and trans and in representing us in things like the census and other federally funded pieces, and by normalizing our identifies. There is really a big role that the federal government can play in addressing that.

Schools are for students, and 84% of students in our province want sex education in their schools, and most of those students are not getting sex education that represents their sexual and gender identities. Anything the federal government can do to really normalize these identities, including providing information to newcomers and refugees about gender-affirming surgeries, for example, can really help to change that.

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Okay, thank you.

The medical specialists I interacted with, those who had specialized training in human sexuality and were experts on these issues, have said the notion that being gay or trans was a choice has been thoroughly debunked. Even if it weren't, why would that be an excuse to mistreat someone? But it's not a choice. The science is clear on this. Do you still encounter people who claim it is a choice? Is that still a common view in the community among those with whom you interact?

Again, I'll leave it open.

[Lorraine Grieves]

Not prominently. I think some of those groups that were protesting GSAs in schools would probably be some of the same groups that would invalidate the identities we're talking about and would suggest that it is a choice.

You've heard everyone talk about conversion or reparative therapy. That's where if I were to come out as trans, a professional might work with me to try to convince me out of that. We've seen that do great harm. Ontario has made it illegal. Many professional bodies outlawed or condemned that practice because we know it does great harm. It's not a choice.

That's a minority position, I hope.

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

I'm pleased to say that at least my home province of Manitoba is one of the provinces that does ban conversion therapy, or at least does so for children. I think that's something that needs to be rolled out nationally, and not just for children. I agree with you on the harm it causes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

That completes our seven-minute round. Now we're going to go to our five-minute round.

We're going to start again with Ms. Gladu.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

I'm going to finish off my one question. I'm assuming that because we don't have specific non-binary analysis in the health care system for HIV and hepatitis C, the same is true for the STBBIs to try to figure out.... Okay, good.

The second question, then, is with respect to two-spirited persons. We've had quite a number of people have a go at defining what a two-spirited person is, and we've heard quite a range. I'm interested, Sarah, if you want to take a crack at what you think a two-spirited person is and then, Lorraine, if you could have a crack.

[Sarah Chown]

I would defer to folks in the room who hold that identity, unless you'd like me to go first.

[Quinn Bennett]

Sure, I can go first. I'll just speak from my own teachings and ideas around what two-spirit means for me, also recognizing that it's very different in different nations and depending on communities and what their knowledge is about two-spirit.

For me, it's really rooted in indigeneity and having both masculine and feminine energy or medicine that I carry in the community and also realizing that there are responsibilities. In some communities, when we've done our indigenous engagement work, we visited rural, on-reserve communities where we ask folks what they know about two-spirit, what their language is around two-spirit. We hear some really amazing stories about how two-spirit folks have been lifted up in their communities and seen as folks with opportunity to support the community in different ways.

Then we hear other stories in communities, which are more heartbreaking, around the loss of language or a lack of safety around talking about two-spirit, like the example Lorraine shared earlier about the elder trying to access a workshop and then getting pushed back from that.

For me, two-spirit is all about having an experience of both of those energies, also matched with responsibilities in my own community around that.

[Lorraine Grieves]

I'd say two-spirit is a really simplified English term to represent a set of very complex concepts. For me, in terms of my own position around being two-spirit, I've been following the breadcrumbs to figure out, first of all, my Cree Métis history and whether there is a word for two-spirit within the people who I come from. I've been able to track my ancestry back to a particular territory in Montana where there is, from the colonizers who came to that community and researched the community, a very long word that I can't pronounce within that Blackfeet community that my ancestors come from.

It's a very complex concept. There were women, folks who were assigned female at birth, who took up roles that were seen as more masculine in the communities, very capable women who could tan hides as fast as the men, who owned property and didn't lose their property when they married a man. They sometimes had multiple partners. That's how the anthropologists at the time described those two-spirit people. There's probably a richer history to all of it that predates the records.

For each person, there's an invitation to search back to the people that one comes from and to figure out if there was a gender-diverse part of the community and what that was about in that community. I think we'd find it's very different from nation to nation. That's what we've heard when we've engaged with two-spirit researchers or two-spirit people themselves. It's unique to the indigenous person and the community they come from.

It's very hard to pin down.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

No, that's good. That explains why there's so much diversity in the definition.

Sarah, with respect to the indigenous people we heard, the intersectionality does have an influence on how people are experiencing it, especially with the indigenous population. I used to be the chair of the status of women committee. We were studying violence against women and girls, and we did also hear of huge violence issues against the transgender and LGBTQ populations.

I wonder whether you think it would be a good idea for the government to add that aspect to the murdered and missing aboriginal women inquiries and consultations.

[Sarah Chown]

There are two-spirit people in Canada who have been advocating for two-spirit folks to be included in the inquiry around missing and murdered indigenous women, because we know that a lot of that is related to gender, and two-spirit folks have their gender policed all the time by systems. There's definitely disproportionate representation of two-spirit folks in that. I think that would be an important issue to learn more about and respond to.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

I have one more question. This is about conversion therapy. In the different provinces that have banned it or not covered it provincially, there are different definitions. Is there a definition that is favoured by the LGBTQ community?

[Lorraine Grieves]

Not strictly; I think it's just any therapy that's not honouring who an individual is and which attempts to erase or convert that person to a cisgender or heterosexual identity. I don't know of a sort of boilerplate definition that is being used commonly across groups or provinces.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Thank you.

Now we go to Mr. McKinnon.

[Ron McKinnon, Liberal, Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you all for being here.

My riding is Coquitlam, so I'm going to focus on British Columbia here.

I understand, Lorraine, that genital surgery may be available soon in British Columbia. Do you have a time frame for this?

[Lorraine Grieves]

The clinic is supposed to open this summer, with surgery starting in the fall of 2019. It will be in Vancouver Coastal Health Authority.

[Ron McKinnon, Liberal, Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC]

What barriers were faced or are yet to be faced in the establishment of this facility?

[Lorraine Grieves]

I think our next challenge will be making sure that people have a very safe and smooth journey both into surgery and out of surgery. There's a lot of work to do to train, because our province is large. People are coming from many communities to Vancouver, so there is also travel within province, but a great distance.

There is also the question of how to ensure that people are getting safe aftercare and supports closer to home when they are recovering, because it's a long recovery journey for the most complex surgeries, many months of recovery.

There is, then, a lot of training and capacity-building work to do.