by felicia rembrandt
With the release of Statscan Census information for 2021 we now know how many people older than 15 call themselves trans in Canada – 59,460. Out of a population of 30.8 million.
Another 41,355 prefer to think of themselves as “non-binary”, a term with no definition, which is to say, without meaning. Together, this group comprises 100,815 people, or .33% of the population. Amongst the ”transgender” people, 31,555 are men who call themselves women and 27,905 women who call themselves men.
For this tiny fraction of the population the government has been handing out millions of dollars in cash. This spring the Women’s and Gender Equity Department (WAGE) announced $7.5 million in funding to 76 trans+ groups (the government still refers to them as lgbtq2+)
This was in addition to the $15 million handed out in 2020. This money was not given to help trans+ people in financial distress or with mental health issues. Rather it was given with the express aim of helping those groups increase their power in society. As Marci Ien, the Minister of WAGE said, the money was to “to build stronger infrastructure and networks of community organizations to advance LGBTQ2 equality across Canada.”
The government says that all this money is going to the entire “lgbtq2+” community but that is at best willful ignorance. It’s true that according to 2018 statistics, there were 1 million “lgbt” people in the country, about 4% of the population. One quarter of those were gay men, and 1/7 lesbians.
But there is no “lgbtq” community, as the British court case in which black lesbian barrister Alison Bailey is suing Stonewall is expected to make clear. Trans+ rights organizations have repudiated same-sex attraction and replaced it with same-gender attraction. Sexual orientation has been renamed “genital fetishism” or mere “sexual preference”. Both lesbians and gay men face increasing pressure to “date” people of the opposite sex.
So -- for the sake of 100,815 people who deny the biological reality of their bodies, the government has redefined “woman” to mean anyone who calls themselves one, and replaced Status of Women (“women” meaning adult human females) with the Department of Women and Gender Equality (“women” in this title referring to anyone who identifies as such).
All of this -- the redefinition of sex categories, the renaming and repurposing of WAGE, the creation of the federally-funded gegi.ca site directed at children, the near constant stream of pro-trans propaganda from the CBC, CBCGem and CBC Kids – begins to look like the government of Canada is actively seeking to market “trans identity” as a legitimate product which Canadians can aspire to possess.
Canadians might well wonder why.
The graph shows this is an adolescent and young adult fad. Had
Anyone polled people in the “don’t trust anyone over 30” 1960s
whether they identified as hippies, the resulting graph would
almost certainly have taken a similar shape.
The answer lies in part with a radical change in our economic system. For years western style capitalism has operated on a shareholder paradigm. Corporations are owned by shareholders, whose sole motive is profit. Democratic government controls business through laws and regulations reflecting the needs of individuals. All citizens are, in a sense, stakeholders of the government.
But that has changed. We are now living under an economic system of stakeholder capitalism, in which business leaders define who their stakeholders are. The wealthiest and most privileged men (they are mostly men) presume to decide what those stakeholders value.
Klaus Schwab of The World Economic Forum was the first to promote the idea that business should include ethics and values in its mandate through the Davos Manifesto. While that sounds laudable on the face of it, Vivek Ramaswarmy , in his 2021 book, Woke, Inc. points out at length how this is a corporate takeover of governments’ role – minus the bother of polling people.
The “will of the people” as directly asserted through elections becomes the “will of the people “ as interpreted by the one percent, through the lens of their own self-interest.
The Canadian mainstream media has begun voicing concerns.
Terence Corcoran wrote in the Financial Post in 2020:
“The growing popularity of government-run industrial policy is one side of a bad economic coin that’s circulating through Canadian and American political circles. The other movement taking shape simultaneously in corporate circles proposes to install corporations as global arbiters and enforcers of environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies.”
In a lengthy article published in the Globe and Mail last December, Jeffrey Jones and David Milstead wrote:
“Increasingly, investors have been wanting to speak to directors about matters that are under our purview – in particular, board composition, compensation and now we are getting questions about ESG,” says Sheila Murray, chair of miner Teck Resources Ltd. and a director of BCE Inc. and CI Financial Corp. “BlackRock, if they happen to be an investor in your company, have a whole ESG team, and they want to hear from directors.”
BlackRock, founded in the US by Larry Fink, is the world’s largest financial investment firm, controlling about 9 trillion dollars. BlackRock now requires all the companies that it invests in to sign on to ESG initiatives, the three broad categories or areas of interest for what is termed "socially responsible investors."
Trudeau has had extensive dealings with BlackRock since 2017 when the government made plans to set up the Infrastructure Bank, and has now appointed BlackRock advisor to the Bank of Canada to assist in the country’s economic recovery. If the investment firm requires the companies it invests in to commit to ESG policies, what does it demand of the governments it does business with?
In June 2020 the federal government’s Industry Strategy Council (ISC) was given a mandate “to identify the scope and depth of COVID-19's impact on industry, inform government's understanding of specific sectoral pressures, and serve as a means to receive the business communities' input on the impact of the pandemic.”
Here is Monique Leroux, chair of the ISC, in her forward to its report of October 2020 using BlackRock’s language. She states, “We want Canadian companies to be known for their ethical awareness and their values. They must embrace ESG principles and demonstrate their environmental, social, and governance responsibilities.”
Fink’s investments in the pharmaceutical industry are well known. And, as retired British academic and researcher, Alan Neale, has pointed out
He [Fink] is Co-Chair of the trustees of NYU Langone Health, which runs a Transgender Youth Health Program offering support for “gender-affirming medical interventions, including puberty suppression, gender-affirming hormone treatments, and gender-affirming surgery.” For the latter, young people are referred on to NYU Langone’s huge Transgender Surgery Services unit. Alongside plastic and reconstructive surgeons, urologists, psychiatrists and endocrinologists, the Transgender Surgery team includes 3 paediatric specialists.
It would appear that not only is BlackRock deciding government policies on behalf of the Liberal government, but it is also elevating these 100,815 people into primary stakeholders. It’s not a large group, but not to worry, the swamping of educational institutions with propaganda and money will nurse a growing crop.
The world we live in is not one undifferentiated vista. We recognize elements within it, and name them. We categorize what we see as “trees” or “buildings”, “roads” and “stores”. This is how we both order the world, and recognize the order of the world that pre-exists and includes us. Male, female, child and adult are essential categories of existence.
A new mammoth business-government alliance has eliminated those categories. Now the only important division between humans is “lgbtq+” and “cis”. That means 99.7% of us are undifferentiated, without category or class, invisible and powerless.
To put the .33% in perspective, about 3 million people (8.2%) are living with diagnosed diabetics in Canada. About 1 million Canadians (2%) have a vision impairment. 13.7% of Canadians live with a disability. Around 45,000 children in Canada are orphans.