Distasteful complication: Jason Kenney and the LGBT community

Attacking Gay-Straight Alliances in schools was a bad move by Jason Kenney’s government. The former Premier’s actions were clearly nothing more than a virtue signal to his base, one that likely cost political capital amongst more moderate Albertans and one that could have been achieved a different way. For example, instead of attacking GSAs in general, Mr. Kenney should have created an exemption for GSAs in religious and/or private schools. I differentiate the two in order to account for the publicly funded Catholic system where the extent to which Catholic values can and should be superseded by secular values is more complicated, however, the exemption should have definitely existed for independent schools. It’s completely reasonable for a private Christian school to be allowed to prohibit GSAs. However, Bill 8 (The Education Amendment Act, 2019) went further than that. The Kenney government’s legislation allowed for parental notification when a child joined a GSA, which risks outing them, the results being dangerous for the child in all too many cases, and removed the guarantee of a GSA upon request by the student body. A year earlier the NDP via bill 24 (An Act to Support Gay-Straight Alliances) had prohibited parental notification in any case as well as mandated the immediate creation of a GSA in a school upon request by the student body.

Fmr. Premier Kenney objected to the parental notification ban on the grounds that there were times when it was reasonable to inform a parent that a child had joined a GSA. Of the hypotheticals given, Kenney alluded to circumstances of very young children or children with unique emotional needs and mental health issues. To his credit, however, Mr. Kenney did say that he supported GSAs as a concept. Neither Kenney nor his Minister of Education — Adriana LaGrange, seemed to have an answer for why their legislation removed the immediate guarantee of a GSA being created upon request by the student body.

Nearly four years have passed since this saga in Albertan history occurred and there’s no evidence of the “great outing” that the NDP and other opponents of the government’s legislation feared. Perhaps, because as I suggested, it was all a virtue signal. During the debate over the government’s legislation, the then privacy commissioner — Jill Clayton issued an advisory to Alberta’s school authorities that a student joining a GSA was considered “personal information” under Alberta’s two privacy laws (the Personal Information Protection Act and the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act). Commissioner Clayton noted that disclosure of information by school authorities could only be deemed reasonable when necessary to protect an individual or the public from harm. The NDP took issue with this. Who defines harm? That question alone reveals the flimsy legal patchwork that was complicated to navigate and still couldn’t ensure that a child would not be needlessly outed to unaccepting parents. This is why Bill 24 was introduced. The NDP feared that the UCP’s approach would result in a “Get outed now, file a complaint with the Privacy Office for unreasonable disclosure of information later” reality. It was a completely reasonable concern.

Jason Kenney’s relationship with the LGBT community started in turmoil. In college, Kenney was an ardent Catholic activist on a moral crusade. He was vocally opposed to abortion and the burgeoning LGBT rights movement in California where he had moved to study philosophy at the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit university. So bold was his activism that Kenney eventually dropped out of university spurred on by what he believed was the encroaching liberalism on campus. Kenney would return to Canada and take up work as a political staffer for Ralph Goodale, then Leader of Sasketchewan’s Liberal Party. Keep in mind that this was in the 1980s so the Liberal Party still had a large but waning socially conservative faction. Goodale himself was an opponent of LGBT rights at the time but would do a complete 180 later in his political career. Kenney’s opposition was unrelenting and lasted long after his election to public office. As a Member of Parliament, Jason Kenney voted against the legalization of same-sex marriage in Canada, arguing that marriage “by definition” was a divine union between a man and woman and that civil unions were a sufficient compromise. Things changed in the final decade and a bit of Jason Kenney’s time in politics. As Minister of Immigration and Citizenship, Kenney with his colleague John Baird, the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, introduced measures to help LGBT persons in homophobic nations like Iran and Russia get refugee status. In 2016, Kenney supported the removal of opposition to same-sex marriage from the Conservative Party’s policy platform, calling the policy obsolete and out of line with social customs. By the time he was elected Premier, you could find Jason Kenney at LGBT pancake breakfasts. However, despite moving in a conciliatory direction with a group that he’d once derided as the scum of the Earth, Jason Kenney could never escape the shadow of his college activities, and his last major political decision on the LGBT community — the loosening of GSA protections left a permanent black stain.

Kenney’s successor, Danielle Smith doesn’t have such issues. She is an unabashed social liberal and is pro-choice and pro-LGBT. And contrary to her predecessor, Ms. Smith’s spirituality, whatever that might be, is something she keeps to herself. However, despite this, there is an “association cost” to being in the same room with people of radically different ethical depositions than one’s own, especially if said stances are increasingly unpopular. While not as vicious as its federal counterpart, the Alberta United Conservatives find themselves also in a state of ideological friction over social issues. Ms. Smith knows this all too well, in fact, her frustration over the socially conservative aspect of Alberta’s conservative moment is what propelled her to leave her leadership of the then Wildrose party and join the Progressive Conservative government in its waning months. The P.Cs had their own internal friction on social issues but after Ralph Klein, became dominated by the socially progressive and economically moderate camp and moved to the center of the political spectrum. Jim Prentice who was the Premier of Alberta at the time was one of only three members of the Conservative parliamentary caucus who voted in favour of legalizing same-sex marriage in 2005. Prentice considered the matter one of “Individual liberty”(contrast this with Jason Kenney who during the debates in Parliament over the Civil Marriage Act stated that homosexuals could in fact get married and did so all the time…………. they just needed to find a partner of the opposite sex). But Danielle Smith is Premier now, she can’t just “defect”, she has to set the tone, to lead. The question is, can she on this issue, as she is trying on many others, break out of the shadow of Jason Kenney?