For Canada to be true world leader rights of all LGBTQ people need to be protected

[Prime Minister Justin Trudeau takes part in a pride flag raising ceremony on Parliament Hill, Wednesday, June 1, 2016 in Ottawa. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld]

A majority of LGBTQ Canadians believe Canada is a world leader when it comes to LGBTQ issues, according to a new Ipsos poll, but many issues still need to be addressed for that statement to true, activists say.

“It would be nice if Canada was a world leader in LGBTQ issues but the truth is we aren’t,” says Stephen Seaborn, North America co-chair of international human rights association ILGA. “It’s one thing to change laws, it’s another to change the culture that is so deeply ingrained in our lives.”

Seaborn was responding to an exclusive Ipsos poll commissioned by Yahoo Canada released Wednesday as Pride Month began in Toronto, in which 83 per cent of LGBTQ Canadians surveyed said they were more likely to agree that Canada is a world leader when it comes to LGBTQ issues. But only 29 per cent “felt strongly” about it. Furthermore, 62 per cent of LGBTQ Canadians said community issues don’t receive enough attention.

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True the federal government has introduced legislation to protect transgender Canadians and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau supports lesbian, gay, transgender and bisexual individuals in Quebec as well as across the country. Plus he’s the first sitting prime minister scheduled to attend the Toronto Pride parade in July.

But activists like Seaborn, 69, who is the former Solidarity and Pride vice-president at the Ontario Federation of Labour, argue many other serious LGBTQ issues remain unresolved. (Advocates are also drawing attention to the plight of intersex individuals, sometimes collectively referred to by the acronym variant, LGBTI or lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex).

Overall, the statistics behind these issues are alarming: 21 per cent of Canada’s homeless youth are LGBTQ; 35 per cent of transgender people in Ontario have considered suicide; and 64 per cent of LGBTQ students report feeling unsafe at school.

How can the Liberal government change deep-held biases inside Canada and uphold LGBTQ human rights globally?

“It is not as simple as protecting the rights of LGBTI people here in Canada,” Amnesty International Canada’s LGBTI co-ordinator Alexander Kennedy said, explaining that the government must commit to protecting the rights of all LGBTI people in order for Canada to be regarded as a true world leader.

“Canadian and American evangelicals have been linked to devastating homophobia in Africa and the Caribbean,” he said. However, “there are tremendous opportunities for Canada to show leadership by bringing this commitment to upholding the rights of LGBTI people to the world stage.”

Difficult to rank countries

Canada lags slightly behind Europe according to the 2014 Pew Research Center’s Global Divide on Homosexuality survey. It reported that 80 per cent of Canadians responded “yes” to the question, “Should society accept homosexuality?” compared to 88 per cent of Spanish citizens and 87 per cent of Germans. Support for equality is sluggish south of the border; in the United States, 60 per cent of citizens said “yes,” putting the country on par with Mexico and Brazil.

Kennedy said it’s difficult to rank countries on LGBTI rights because different parts of LGBTI communities face many issues, such as family issues, legal gender recognition, non-consensual intersex surgery in infancy, and asylum rights.

And Amnesty has repeatedly expressed its disappointment to the Liberals over its sale of light-armoured vehicles.

“The Canadian government recently decided to approve the largest arms sale in Canadian history to one of the world’s worst violators of human rights, Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality is a crime punishable by death,” he said.

Canada’s unsafe streets

The numbers show the clear and present danger. In 2013, nearly two-thirds (66 per cent) of crimes motivated by hatred of a sexual orientation were violent, according to the most recent data available from Statistics Canada. People and places are attacked, such as the May arson at the Centre Métropolitain de Chirurgie in Montreal, the only clinic in Canada that performs transition-related surgeries.

Alex Abramovich is an award-winning transgender scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto specializing in homelessness faced by gay, lesbian and transgender youth. In the last decade Abramovich has studied data and uncovered similar patterns of homelessness, lack of social support structures and despair in the U.S., Canada, Hungary and Cuba.

In Toronto, he’s interviewed many LGBTQ youth, who slept in a park for eight months because they weren’t safe from physical violence in city shelters.

“When young people are targeted because of what they look like, whom they love or what they believe in, it is a really big problem,” he said. “That is horrifying and shameful. And this is in a country that is a leader in LGBTQ issues.”

He worked for a decade before Canada’s first transitional housing for LGBTQ youth opened this February in Toronto at YMCA’s Sprott House. He’s since been disappointed, he said, because the mandatory LGBTQ cultural competency training for front-line staff in all youth shelters — scheduled to begin in March — has not yet been implemented.

As he prepared to attend this Friday’s White House policy briefing on ending LGBTQ youth homelessness in the U.S. by 2020, Abramovich considered Canada’s role on the world stage. He sighed and said: “I don’t think Canada is the safest country in the world for LGBTQ. Transgender people are often afraid to leave their homes.”

It’s important to note that in Canada, all provinces and territories protect transgender rights but only five provinces — Alberta, Newfoundland & Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Prince Edward Island — explicitly have a human rights act or code that protects both gender identity and gender expression for trans people.

1 in 3 trans Ontarians consider suicide

A June 2015 study that investigated transgender people in Ontario, found 35 per cent had seriously considered suicide, while 11 per cent had attempted suicide. Lacking family and community support, transgender youth were found to be at the greatest risk.

Despite these numbers, CAMH’s Abramovich believes Canada is doing a good job recognizing and advancing LGBTQ rights.

“But I wouldn’t say we are the leader,” he said. “I don’t know if anybody is. We’re just not there yet anywhere in the world.”

LGBTQ youth don’t feel safe at school. A 2011 joint study of 3,700 high school students by researchers at the universities of Winnipeg and Manitoba, found that 74 per cent of transgender students faced verbal harassment about their gender expression, and more than 21 per cent of all LGBTQ students reported being physically harassed or assaulted due to their sexual orientation.

As a result, ILGA’s Seaborn is adamant about the importance of introducing campaigns that will educate the public and help protect LGBTQ children: “We need to get at the social prejudice that exists because school kids are reflections of their parents and their attitudes.”

He sees the LGBTQ movement gaining support and momentum but he doesn’t want to become complacent.

“As we see, by looking south of the border where there’s pressure to roll back laws, everything you have can disappear relatively quickly.”