The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) was among the parties pleased with the result of last week’s election in New Brunswick, which dispatched Blaine Higgs’ Progressive Conservative government in favour of Susan Holt’s Liberals. The CCLA had launched a legal challenge against the former government’s amendments to Policy 713, which says what schools should do when a child wishes to be referred to by another name or different pronouns.
Holt promises to roll back Higgs’ amendments to Policy 713, which made it more complicated for children to choose their own names and pronouns at school without parental involvement. But Holt’s majority win doesn’t spell total victory for those who believe children should be able to do that.
“Liberal government’s proposed revisions to Policy 713 prioritize cisgender comfort over transgender rights,” a headline at the “social justice” site NB Media Co-op blared this week.
The CCLA, and the opposition Green Party, which won two seats and 14 per cent of the vote province-wide in the election, want to go back to the original Policy 713, which the Higgs government enacted in 2020. “(A student’s) preferred first name and pronoun(s) will be used consistently in ways that the student has requested,” it stipulated. That is, without necessarily informing parents.
Holt’s Liberals instead plan to adopt recommendations issued by Kelly Lamrock, New Brunswick’s child and youth advocate, in August of last year.
The major difference in Lamrock’s recommendations for Policy 713 concerns children under 16.
The current version, implemented by the outgoing Higgs government, requires parental consent for “formal use” of a new name or pronouns. But “if it is not possible to obtain consent (from the student) to talk to the parent” — and especially if it’s determined it might “cause harm to them (physically or mentally) to talk with their parents” — the policy says “the student will be encouraged to communicate with … appropriate professionals to develop a plan.”
“The use of preferred first name for transgender or non-binary students under the age of 16 may be used without parental consent if the student is communicating with appropriate professionals in the development of a plan to speak to their parents,” the existing policy reads.
In other words, there’s a specific circumstance under which schools may use a child’s preferred name and pronouns without parental consent — and it’s a very reasonable one, in my view. “Don’t tell the parents” or “keep calling kids names they don’t like” are very short-term solutions for very long-term problems. What are the chances parents wouldn’t find out at some point anyway through the grapevine?
Lamrock, by contrast, proposes Grade Six as the threshold at which students be “presumed to have capacity to determine their own terms of … address,” unless “the principal has concerns regarding the child’s capacity” — “capacity” being defined as “the ability … to understand the nature and impact of a decision.”
If concerns exist over capacity, or if the child is younger than Grade Six, Lamrock suggests “the principal (should) develop a plan for the child in consultation with school personnel … school counsellors, social workers, doctors and psychologists.”
If Lamrock’s proposed policy doesn’t sound completely different to you than the existing one, that’s because it really isn’t. Neither is perfect, but both are pretty reasonable. Certainly none of the distinctions justify the wildly overheated culture-war rhetoric that has dominated this mostly unnecessary debate. If we can’t trust teachers, principals and counsellors to deal with situations like these using their best judgment without having a bloodless multi-page policy to follow, then we probably can’t trust them to follow the policy either.
It looks good on Higgs, frankly, that he clearly saw some populist gain to be had here off the backs of children in distress, and the school officials trying to help them, and it blew up in his face even within his own caucus, with plenty of blowback from the public and several MLAs.
Hopefully Holt can make a more articulate case for her preferred policy than Higgs did. I like that hers puts more discretion in school officials’ hands — not because I trust school officials implicitly, but because I trust them far more than politicians on the make. But I also like that it at least implicitly acknowledges parents should be involved unless there’s an extremely compelling reason for them not to be.
A tiny number of Canadians believe children should be able to “socially transition” at school under a policy of unconditional acceptance and no parental notification — just 14 per cent nationwide, according to an Angus Reid Institute poll published in August last year. Governments shouldn’t write policy according to opinion polls, of course, but sometimes, when 86 per cent of the population is against you, it’s you that’s in the wrong and the majority that’s in the right.
National Post
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