Mr. Speaker, in a particular sense, Bill C-6 is about people, about the trauma people have experienced but also about the ways they have overcome that trauma. Before I get into some of the arguments around the provisions of this bill, if members could indulge me for a minute, I want to engage in that human side of the conversation, as well, with stories of particular LGBTQ people whose struggles and victories have shaped our collective history and whom I personally deeply admire. Unlike some of the speeches, the people I am going to talk about are not friends of mine. In fact, they are heroes of mine. They are people whose courage and wisdom informed their public service and shaped the 20th century.
Just over 100 years ago, the greatest leaders from virtually every country in the world came to Paris for the making of the peace to end all war, what would become the Versailles settlement. This was a critical crossover in time. The transition from an era of Pax Britannica, European colonial expansion and the economic gilded age, into a new era in which post-revolutionary powers would dominate global affairs through heightened ideological conflict and an era in which the demands of nations that had been suppressed for hundreds or even thousands of years would re-emerge.
This moment in history has rightly captured the imagination of many, especially because discussions in Paris contained the spark of many of the great innovative ideas of the 20th century. Still, like the spark of so many things, the Versailles settlement got wrong more than it got right. It failed to deliver functioning international institutions, an effective global economic system or a durable peace.
In the midst of this generally failed exercise, there were two very notable British Cassandras, men who got things right in their areas of speciality at a time when those who actually held the levers of power were getting it wrong. These two men were T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, and John Maynard Keynes.
Lawrence wanted the British to keep the promises they had made to their Arab allies for the creation of a great, new, independent Arab state under Hashemite control. The Hashemite leaders already had come to a general understanding with Zionist authorities, which could have led to early peace and understanding between Arabs and Jews. Instead, the powers at Versailles opted to generally divide the Middle East into British and French control. Many of the tragic events in the Middle East that followed could have been avoided if Lawrence had had his way.
Keynes' area of focus was economics, not the Middle East. While in Paris, he advanced the critical importance of establishing the conditions for trade integration and shared economic prosperity in Europe if the settlement was to lead to a durable peace. He fought back against those who wanted, in his words, a Carthaginian peace. Despite his efforts, louder voices in Europe calling for punishing reparations to be paid by all belligerent powers and American assistance on the honouring of war debts created the conditions of economic vulnerability that allowed fascism to emerge. Keynes directly foresaw how economically punishing terms would lead to the rise of authoritarianism.
In Paris in 1919, Lawrence and Keynes were, in different ways, dramatically bucking the tendencies of their time. It is interesting then to wonder what characteristics set Lawrence and Keynes apart? What factors shaped these brilliant men and gave them the awareness, as well as the intellectual and practical courage, to challenge the currents of that moment. Although applying the term after the fact is a bit anachronistic, Lawrence and Keynes both almost certainly had sexual orientations that were either the G, the B or the Q in LGBTQ.
There was no proof of it in the case of Lawrence, but there is plenty in his writings to imply it. The first chapter of his famous book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, for example, alludes to non-heterosexual sexual practices that he saw as arising naturally from the circumstances of the Arab campaign. The opening dedication of Seven Pillars of Wisdom was written to “S.A.”, a likely reference to a young man named Selim Ahmed, who was close to Lawrence and who died during the campaign.
The dedication reads:
I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands
and wrote my will across the sky in stars
To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house,
that your eyes might be shining for me
When we came.
Death seemed my servant on the road, till we were near
and saw you waiting:
When you smiled, and in sorrowful envy he outran me
and took you apart:
Into his quietness.
Love, the way-weary, groped to your body, our brief wage
ours for the moment
Before earth's soft hand explored your shape, and the blind
worms grew fat upon
Your substance.
Men prayed me that I set our work, the inviolate house,
as a memory of you.
But for fit monument I shattered it, unfinished: and now
The little things creep out to patch themselves hovels
in the marred shadow
Of your gift.
Early on, Keynes was generally known to be gay by his close friends, known as the Bloomsbury Group, who expressed various forms of sexuality that were unconventional at the time. Much more is known about Keynes's sexuality than Lawrence's. While Lawrence couched his references to it in the subtlety and poetry that characterized his writing, Keynes catalogued his encounters with economic efficiency, but Keynes eventually surprised his friends, and probably himself, by falling madly in love with a woman. She was a famous Russian dancer who was actually married at the time, so Keynes was still bucking conventional orthodoxy, just not in the ways that his friends expected.
During the same era, many gay and lesbian people were not given the same opportunity as Lawrence and Keynes to serve their countries in important roles or, if they had been, they were removed from those roles once information came out about them. People were driven out of public service following intrusions into their private lives. It is indeed a great injustice that people were so denied the opportunity to serve their countries, and it was also a great loss to their communities. As Lawrence and Keynes demonstrate, sexuality is but a small part of the whole picture of what makes a person who they are. Imagine how much further behind we would be today if we had been deprived of the public service of Lawrence and Keynes, and imagine how much further ahead we would be if the public service of other LGBTQ2+ individuals had not been cut short by those who sought to reduce their identities to only one aspect and unjustly excluded them on that basis.
In the early part of the 20th century as well, we saw the emergence of something called conversion therapy: a particular set of dehumanizing practices that sought to rewire people's brains to make them straight. These practices sought to associate pain, violence and degradation with homosexuality and create positive associations around heterosexuality. Conversion therapy involved the use of pornography and heterosexual prostitution as well as shame and violence. These methods have been thoroughly debunked as to whether they lead to any change in sexual identity. Even more importantly, these practices are contrary to human dignity.
It is worth underlining that point about human dignity, because the idea of dignity is used in various debates in the House, often with little precise definition. There is this idea, critical to our modern concepts of human rights, that human beings have intrinsic value, not based on what they do or what they feel, but based on the fact that they are human. Dignity is essential to all human beings, and is a characteristic that denotes intrinsic worth and value. It is always present in human beings, by virtue of who and what they are, but social structures or other individuals may still falsely deny or ignore a person's dignity, or suggest it is contingent on some characteristic or circumstance. We must always firmly assert the immutability of human dignity: the fact that dignity ought not to be denied, even by the person themselves, and that subjecting people to violent or degrading treatment because of their sexuality is necessarily a violation of that dignity.
The practice of conversion therapy has been largely discredited, but for greater certainty and to give assurance to those who have been its victims in the past, I fully support efforts to ban conversion therapy. I hope to have an opportunity to support a bill that does that. I want to get to a yes on this. In fact, I think we can get to more than a yes for me: I think we can get to unanimity in the House, if we have a clear definition, because I do not believe there is any member here who wants to see the kind of violent practices that have been associated with conversion therapy for far too long.
As the lives of Lawrence and Keynes demonstrate, human sexuality is complex. It seems that, for some people, sexual expression varies over the course of their lives, with certain expressions predominating at different times. Others have fixed inclinations that do not change. For most, sexual activity changes under different circumstances, such as changing relationships. Any person, of any orientation, living out their sexuality obviously takes into consideration different aspects of their identity. The great writer and Catholic priest Henri Nouwen, for example, identified feelings of same-sex attraction and also sought to live out the commitment to celibacy that all Catholic clergy make. Nouwen's writings about his journey are both beautiful and haunting, illuminating a life rich in meaning and challenged by loneliness. Nouwen lived out a personal choice. All of us make personal choices that reflect personal decisions about how to reconcile competing desires, competing aspects of identity and competing concepts of what constitutes “the good life.”
So, while supporting efforts to ban conversion therapy, I am concerned that Bill C-6 misdefines the term. The definition is, of course, central to the matter. If we say we are banning conversion therapy, but in the process define conversion therapy as including things that are not conversion therapy, then we will end up banning things that are not conversion therapy. Good intentions here are not enough.
We hear members speaking about what this bill seeks to do, but it is also important that the bill does the things that it seeks to do and does not do things that it does not seek to do. This is where we have to engage with the substance and the details. Bill C-6 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.
This definition goes significantly outside of the practices referred to earlier, which seek to use pain, violence and degradation to force a change in sexual feelings. Such therapies are ineffective and repugnant, as mentioned, but this bill would heavily restrict all efforts for a person to reduce their sexual attraction or sexual behaviour or any conversations or interactions that seem to have the effect of changing a person's feelings of sexual attraction or behaviour.
If a parent tells their teenage son or daughter that he or she cannot have sex until they reach a certain age or until he or she moves out, that would amount to an attempt to reduce sexual attraction or behaviour. If an Orthodox rabbi, in good faith and with good intentions, simply shares his beliefs with respect to sexual activity, that would also be a case of encouraging self-imposed limits on sexual behaviour. If a group of LGBTQ evangelical Christians meet together to study and explore how to live out their faith, and they debate and discuss strategies for limiting or redirecting sexual feelings, those private conversations would certainly come under scrutiny if Bill C-6 is passed unamended. What about a young transgender person who wishes to preserve a relationship with his grandparents even though they tell him that they think his identity is just a phase?
Whatever we think of such interactions or conversations, surely they are not a place for law enforcement intervention. We are talking, yes, about conversations where people might encourage particular identification or sexual behaviour. However, they are conversations, not therapies, in which everyday people with goodwill simply are expressing their opinions with the best of intentions for family or friends. They are cases where people of like mind gather together in an attempt to support each other, or where people voluntarily seek counselling or support to live their lives as they choose.
It is not unusual for people to seek to reduce sexual attraction or behaviour. If a person is in a committed relationship and is compulsively cheating on their partner, I suspect that any counsellor or physician would discuss with them strategies for reducing sexual attraction or behaviour. In my consultations around this bill, I spoke to a father in a heterosexual marriage who had started to experience same-sex attraction. He chose not to act on those attractions and instead chose to preserve his marriage. I do not think anyone should force him to make that choice, but I do think he has a right to make that choice and to seek counselling and support in order to help him do that.
In general, I suspect that most parents and mentors encourage in young people some constraints on sexual behaviour or expression, and that applies whether those young people are straight or gay. Dan Savage, a leading American author and founder of the It Gets Better Project, made the following observation about parenting LGBTQ young people. He said, “The trap that people who have gay kids fall into is that they feel that they can't hold their gay kids to the same standards that they hold their straight kids to, that they will be perceived as homophobic if they don't let their gay child run off and do things that they won't let their straight kids do. But equality is what we're after. If your straight kids are not allowed to have their boyfriend or girlfriend stay the night, he's not allowed to have his boyfriend stay the night.”
By making efforts to reduce non-heterosexual attraction or behaviour criminal, this law as written forces a legal inequality into the home, where parents would be perfectly within their rights to require constraints on sexual behaviour for a straight son but not for a gay son. I do not think that makes sense. I do not think constraining the ability of parents to make house rules about sexual behaviour and applying them equally has anything to do with conversion therapy if properly defined. We are not just talking about the freedom of religious conservatives, the sexually unconventional people of our day. We are talking about any private conversations in which people might recommend limits to sexual attraction or behaviour for any reason, inserting the long arm of the law into those conversations.
I am not a regular reader of the Toronto Star, but in researching this speech I took a look at the relationship advice section, Ask Ellie. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it contains plenty of entries where strategies are suggested for reducing sexual attraction or behaviour. For example, last week, a woman whose husband was on a dating app, was affirmed for informing the people he was corresponding with that he was already married, and it was suggested that the woman tell her husband to stop spending time on the dating app and instead to seek a counsellor.
This kind of advice from the Toronto Star clearly does not constitute conversion therapy, properly defined, but it does involve an effort to reduce sexual attraction or behaviour and advice to see a counsellor, who would presumably encourage the husband in question not to cheat on his wife. This would constitute an effort to reduce or modify sexual behaviour.
I do not really think the intention of the legislation was to go after Ask Ellie, but it does underline the technical and drafting problems with the legislation as it is currently written. Parenthetically, it is a bit ironic that some of the same people who want to defund the police and replace it with social workers are now interested in having police intervene to ensure that conversations about sexually fit into defined parameters.
This odd and flawed definition goes a long way to limit what are likely often loving and sincere conversations people might have with parents, counsellors, friends and other authority figures about sexual identity and behaviour. Under the current definition as written, I wonder if John Maynard Keynes's friend would have had a case to bring against his wife for seeming to be the catalyst for his dramatic change in sexual expression. The circumstances are such that there may well have been a case, indeed.
The fact is that sexuality is complicated and the culmination of ways in which free people construct their identities, taking into consideration upbringing, culture, faith and sexuality, are often even more complicated. Therefore, let us ban coercion, violence and bullying and then let us allow free people to have conversations about how they want to identify and live. Our mistake at the beginning of the 20th century was, in a world of complex sexuality and identity, to try to prescribe legal limits to what people could think, say or do. Let us not go down a similar road with a ban that, in reality, goes far beyond conversion therapy.
I have spoken about ambiguities in the current definition. There are big questions about how the legislation would apply in certain cases. The initial definition is followed by a proviso that, for greater certainty, this definition does not include a practice, treatment or service that relates to a person's gender transition or a person's exploration of his or her identity or to its development. It is not at all clear what that proviso means, but it certainty provides no protection specifically for conversations or for parents, counsellors or religious leaders who want to provide guidance in terms of sexual behaviour to their congregations or those seeking that guidance.
With these gaps and ambiguities, the legislation, as written, would no doubt spawn a litany of legal challenges. Again, when we define something as being conversion therapy which is not in fact conversion therapy, then I think we have to be honest about it and honestly debate what we are trying to do. As written, this is not a bill that bans conversion therapy. Rather, it bans the expression of any opinion, in public or private, that suggests individuals should, in certain situations, exercise voluntary control and limits on their sexual feelings or behaviour. It is a far more expansive effort to constrain the thoughts and discussions that free people are able to have.
Efforts to ban conversion therapy are right and justified, but the bill, as written, is a trick, calling things conversion therapy that are not in fact conversion therapy. It is a trick which exploits the real suffering of some LGBTQ individuals and seeks to use them for political purposes and in so doing, limit their rights to have open conversations about their sexual feelings. The bill is the wrong response to a real issue. Let us have a better bill, a bill that is clearly drafted and that actually bans conversion therapy, no more and no less.
I recommend that the bill be amended to remove the current definition of “conversion therapy” and replace it with a definition that recognizes conversion therapy as a professional service that seeks to compel a change to a person's sexual orientation through degrading or violent means. This is, after all, what conversion therapy is, so let us ban conversion therapy. Let us fix the definition and move forward with this ban right away.
Some members think that these concerns are unjustified, that they are a red herring. Let us kill the red herring and then proceed in a united fashion by amending the bill.
I fear that I may have angered some of my political base with too many favourable references to John Maynard Keynes. I certainly do not endorse all his economic conclusions or the ways in which his ideas have been misused at certain times in history. I will now therefore now seek to mollify any potential critics with a favourable reference to Friedrich Hayek.
Hayek, who also argued for the repeal of laws restricting homosexual behaviour, noted that in economics, “knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” Like Hayek, I think individuals, and not paternalistic governments, should be allowed to make their own decisions about their own lives as much as possible.
Our goal should be to protect the ability of free people to seek, understand and integrate their identities, not to prescribe a hierarchy of identities. Therefore, let us ban conversion therapy and ensure we define it correctly.
