Good afternoon, Madam Chair and members of the standing committee. My name is Timothy Keslick, and my pronouns are he/him. I'm currently an ASL English interpreter in the province of Ontario.
I'm speaking today from the traditional and unceded lands of the Mississaugas of the New Credit, the Anishinabe and the Haudenosaunee, lands that are governed under The Dish with One Spoon wampum treaty.
Please do forgive my nerves. This is my first time speaking in this kind of forum, so bear with me.
I currently have a bachelor's degree in linguistics, with a focus on language and power, as well as a bachelor's degree in interpretation, ASL English, with a focus on message analysis and intercultural discourse. I'm also a Catholic Christian and someone who identifies as a member of the LGBTQ2S+ community. I identify with the labels of queer, same-sex attracted, and/or gay.
I am very grateful to all those who made today possible: to Natasha Filoso-Timpson for her patience in corresponding with me to arrange for a notice of meeting, to those who were involved in the tech set-up, and to you, the members of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, for your time and attention today.
When I was asked to speak on the bill today, I was a bit defensive, as you may imagine. Conversion therapy is definitely a very triggering concept for a lot of people in the queer community, me included. Even now, as I'm talking, I can feel my heart beating more quickly and my eyes are watering up a bit. That's because of the experiences of friends, and also those of people who I may not have met, but I've certainly heard the stories of people who have either tried to pray the gay away or beat them until they repressed their same-sex desires.
In a more personal way, at one point I had gone to confession to a priest. I wasn't confessing that my sin was same-sex attraction. Being attracted to someone of the same sex is not viewed as a sin by the Catholic church, but I was confessing to something different and separate. That meeting resulted in it coming out that I was same-sex attracted, and I ended up being kept in a room and kind of restrained in a chair, while the priest kept trying to pray over me, trying to exorcise this demon of homosexuality from me.
I can say from a very deep place of personal lived experience and hurt that conversion therapy in its actual sense does harm. I also want to make it clear on this note that while that kind of experience can and does happen, and happened to me, I don't want it to seem that it's reflective of the majority of views of Catholic priests. It certainly is not of those whom I have had the honour and pleasure of interacting with. It's also not the experience of most Catholics who identify as queer individuals or those with same-sex attraction, but it doesn't make it any less wrong or any less hurtful. I just want to be transparent on that point.
Again, when I was originally asked to speak on this bill, I was like, “Well, I'm certainly not going to be speaking against the bill because I would actually fully support it.” As I said, I don't think conversion therapy should be allowed, and I don't think people should be able to ship off their queer family members or loved ones to a different country and have them go through that form of abuse there if it's outlawed here in Canada. At the same time, as I said, I stand by the decision against actual conversion therapy, but after reading through the actual draft of the legislation, however, I cannot support Bill C-6 in its current wording.
The value of the proposed bill is that it wants to reduce harm and it wants to prevent members of the queer community from being hurt simply because of something that they do not have any control over: something that they don't have any control over choosing, and something that—at least based on the majority of scientific and peer-reviewed articles that I've read—they can't change.
The problem for me, however, as someone who would have access to my services limited by this bill, is that the passing of this bill would cause harm to me. Because of various instances of emotional neglect growing up, I have very physically and emotionally unhealthy relationships. At times, these relationships have led me to being sexually assaulted, as well as emotionally manipulated. I currently see a counsellor, and we talk about ways for me to have better boundaries and to protect myself, and to make sure that any relationship I enter into is free, happy and healthy.
Under this bill, this kind of therapy would be taken away from me. The bill doesn't make any distinctions between good therapy or bad therapy. The bill would capture my therapy as one that wants to reduce non-heterosexual attraction or, more specifically, sexual behaviour. Without realizing that my therapy isn't actually trying to stop me from dating any guy, it's simply trying to stop me from dating the wrong guy. It's there trying to help me avoid people and situations that would harm me and have already harmed me.
The bill may not want to take away this kind of counselling, and I would applaud it for that, but the issue, however, is that the language right now is much too ambiguous and too far-reaching. If I were working and were trying to interpret this bill into ASL for a deaf consumer, I would definitely need to seek a lot of clarification and do additional research outside of the context of the bill to find out what is and is not included.
That kind of ambiguity in a piece of legislation this important is very concerning to me. I think the bill needs to be amended to clarify the definition of conversion therapy. I don't want the good counselling that I have received to be taken away from me, and as it is right now, the bill doesn't guarantee that. The goal of this bill is to prevent harm from coming to the queer community and to prevent harm from being done to the queer community, but as it is right now, the bill would take my counselling away from me, and that would cause harm.
Again, thank you very much for your time and attention. After the other witnesses, with permission from the chair, I am open to any questions.
Thank you.