Big Brother North of the Border

It’s no secret that Canada is often years ahead of the U.S. when it comes to capitulating to cultural collapse. That’s especially true regarding sociopolitical agendas that tend to manifest themselves as the latest iterations of political correctness — whether the subject is Muslim immigration, abortion, euthanasia, socialized health services, or the politics of sex. So, a quick look at what Justin Trudeau’s government is now proposing north of the border might give us a glimpse of where we Americans might be headed on the PC Express in the coming months and years.

Canada’s latest lurch is Bill C-16, which proposes to outlaw harassment and discrimination based on gender identity and gender expression under the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code. Of course, harassment and discrimination mean whatever the government says they mean. The code does, however, define what it means by gender identity and gender expression, but it is instructive to note that these definitions, articulated as they are by the Ontario Human Rights Commission, are neither objective nor based in reality. It defines gender identity, for example, as “each person’s internal and individual experience of gender. It is their sense of being a woman, a man, both, neither, or anywhere along the gender spectrum.” In other words, gender identity can be anything an individual wants it to be at any given point in time.

Apparently, we can discern someone’s gender identity through something called gender expression. The commission defines this as “how a person publicly presents their [sic] gender, which can include behavior and outward appearance such as dress, hair, make-up, body language and voice, as well as a person’s name and the pronouns they [sic] use.”

We hate to lean on this analogy again because it is now so overused that it risks slipping into cliché, but these terms, this bill, and the political correctness it demands beg comparison to the newspeak and doublespeak of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. For those who might have forgotten these Orwellian terms, they describe a situation in which language plays the primary role in shaping people’s thoughts and opinions, usually to direct their behavior according to the whims of the government.