Morrigan Johnson is an independent journalist based in Calgary.In the fall of 2024, Danielle Smith introduced a policy package including three bills that covered new transgender rules. Those being Bill 26 Health Statutes Amendment Act, Bill 27 Education Amendment Act, and Bill 29 Fairness and Safety in Sport Act. They received royal assent on December 5. The bills covered medical safeguards for minors, parental authority in schools, and fairness and safety in women’s sports. Because Bill 26 alone restricts health interventions, it became the immediate magnet for constitutional litigation. There are two lanes of legal battle playing out. First, the case involving minors and youth brought by Egale Canada and Skipping Stone with five Alberta families, filed late in 2024, sought an interlocutory injunction before a full Charter hearing. On June 27, Justice Allison Kuntz of the Court of King’s Bench granted the temporary injunction, describing “irreparable harm.” This raises serious Charter issues — precisely the sort of language that signals a court unwilling to allow legislative or political Albertan dissent from a contested issue dictated by Ottawa’s agenda of extreme identity politics. .CARPAY: Neither freedom nor democracy is destined to live forever.Justice Kuntz’s order was narrowly focused. It froze the provisions of Bill 26 that criminalized or prohibited physicians from providing puberty blockers and hormones to minors. The injunction will stay in place until the appeal court rules on Alberta’s common sense policy. The Alberta government filed its appeal with the Alberta Court of Appeal on July 25, with a decision potentially next year. Secondly, now that common sense is suspended by an interlocular injunction, the Canadian Medical Association has filed a constitutional legal challenge to Alberta’s Bill 26. Filed on May 28 in the Court of King’s Bench, the CMA and three Alberta doctors challenge Bill 26 as an “historic and unprecedented intrusion” into the physician–patient relationship; they frame it as a freedom-of-conscience (s. 2(a)) case, i.e., a conscience-to-treat claim. The CMA case is timetable-driven by case management, but the filing and the public framing mean that we can expect it to be heard next year. .The purpose of a common sense policy package such as Alberta’s transgender rules isn’t to be absolutely correct or even win at the moment it was made. The point of the legislative package has arrived from the future to make a statement over the next year. Which is to develop public opinion, let the evidence situation develop, and their credibility collapse internationally, and watch how crazy the opponent gets when it is challenged in court. On July 8, the MacDonald Laurier Institute lodged a formal complaint now endorsed by 41 physicians challenging the Globe and Mail’s coverage of the issue as misleading, ideologically slanted, and violated the Globe’s own standards of fairness and balance. They remarked that there has been an international credibility collapse on many talking points. Comparatively, Barry Cooper, a Canadian political scientist, once mentioned that Alberta’s laws have been unconstitutional on purpose at times, as a strategy. Ottawa is in no condition to exert sovereignty over anything, and this is by no means a reckoning in which to assert a perfect law or position. The goal of Alberta is to raise a racket and watch how Ottawa loses its mind. .MCTEAGUE: ’Net-Zero' Carney's going to build new pipelines? I'll believe it when I see it!.Due to censorship and a media blackout in Canada, it remains a very misunderstood issue, not even a contentious one if people really understood it. Both the USA and the UK have rolled back substantially in blowback from the chaos that extreme identity politics and policy have racketed on society. In recent years, there have also been substantial evidence-based reviews that have called policies into question. From what is being given to the courts, they want youth under 18 to retain access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones under the old clinical model (doctor, family, consent discussions), without common sense caution suggested in Bill 26. Conversely, Bill 26 is now outdated compared to the US and UK civil liberty balance in which freedom of speech, open debate, and inquiry were allowed to take place. Morrigan Johnson is an independent journalist based in Calgary.
