radcanada

[radcanada]

In the summer of 2021, the Liberal Party of Canada dropped a bombshell of a bill, one that threatened Freedom of Expression and unfairly penalized women for speaking out against gender identity ideology. But as the fall federal election was called, the bill died on the floor; now, unfortunately, it has resurfaced under a new number – Bill C-261.

On March 28 of 2022, the 13-page long bill was introduced in the House of Commons of Canada. Buried deep within the text of the bill are “gender identity and expression”, which would be added to the list of characteristics protected from hate propaganda, hate crimes, and hate speech under the Criminal Code of Canada and the Human Rights Act. To do so could have severe consequences on the lives of Canadian women and our Freedom of Expression.

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[radcanada]

For Afsana Rahman, the nightmare began immediately after her wedding in 2016.

She says her family had arranged her marriage to someone she barely knew during the holy month of Ramadan. On their first night alone, she says her new husband began behaving in a way that scared her.

"I'm quite used to being a people's person …  and never had fear of people. But he's the first person I started fearing," said Rahman.

That night, Rahman says, he sexually assaulted her. She would go on to endure years of physical, sexual and verbal abuse at the hands of her husband in Bangladesh and in Toronto after they immigrated to Canada in 2018. She says a lack of support from family, cultural barriers and not knowing what resources were available to her prevented her from speaking out.

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#domestic violence #sexual assault

[radcanada]

A Toronto woman has filed a class-action lawsuit against Cadets Canada, alleging poor policies and a tolerant culture contributed to her sexual abuse.

Hilary Lockhart was just 14 years old when she joined the Army Cadets in Dryden, Ont. She says in the lawsuit that she was groomed by a male instructor and lured online, and that her attempts to report the abuse to a female instructor were allegedly ignored.

Lockhart said she would have gone to a hotel room with the male instructor, but her mother found and read the online conversations and put a stop to it right away.

“I didn’t know what to do,” Lockhart, now 28, told CTV News Toronto in an interview. “My mom ended up finding out and reporting it to the police herself."

The lawsuit, filed in a Newmarket, Ont. court, cites 245 cases of sexual assault and sexual harassment in the organization from 2006 to 2015. It says 27 per cent of all sexual misconduct cases across the Canadian Forces [44 out of 162 cases] in 2015 involved cadets.

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[radcanada]

Over the past six years, 267 victims of human trafficking have sought support through the Hope Found Project in Ottawa, a group that helps those who've been or who are being trafficked.

Only two of those survivors were from outside Canada.

Human and sex trafficking is a growing domestic concern according to advocates who work with survivors, and in Ontario, the 401 corridor between Windsor and the Quebec border is a common route for traffickers to transport young girls between communities, forced to sell sex.

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#human trafficking #canada

[radcanada]

The federal government is revisiting criminal legislation passed in 2014 that bans profiteering from prostitution, and anti-human trafficking advocates are concerned that the sex-trade law could be gutted and prostitution legalized.

The federal Justice Committee is calling witnesses to testify on Bill C-36, the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act. The law, passed by the Harper Conservative government, aimed to reduce the demand for and incidence of prostitution. It penalized those who bought sex, but not those who sold their own sexual services, regarding them as victims who are often trafficked into the sex trade.

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#prostitution #canada #human trafficking

[radcanada]

Women are the fastest growing segment of military veterans in Canada but the system of veteran support was historically designed with men in mind, a Mount Saint Vincent University researcher says.

“The problem with gender neutrality or as I would more accurately call it, gender blindness, is that this can have unintended and unanticipated discriminatory and inequitable outcomes for those who have not been included from the very beginning,” Maya Eichler told the Nova Scotia legislature’s standing committee on veterans affairs in an online meeting Tuesday.

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[radcanada]

When Lia Thomas won the 1,650-yard freestyle swimming event in Akron last month, she finished 38 seconds faster than her nearest opponent.

She also beat the 500-yard freestyle field by 14 seconds.

Those are astonishing statistics. They’re also an abomination for women’s sports.

The 22-year-old transgender athlete is competing in her first season as a female. Thomas had previously competed for two seasons as a male for the University of Pennsylvania. Then she underwent more than two years of hormone therapy and joined the women’s team, where she is crushing Ivy League and NCAA records.

It is not pretty. More crucially, it is not fair.

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#lia thomas #women's sports #not canada specific but it's a huge deal that the star published this

[radcanada]

An Indigenous woman who filed a lawsuit against the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation over alleged sexual misconduct while she was a researcher at the organization in 2018 is claiming they are now trying to prevent her from proceeding with the case.

“The Trudeau Foundation is pulling out all the stops, employing lawyers across the country to try to prevent me from proceeding with my lawsuit,” Smiley’s GoFundMe claims. “I suffered not only the trauma of sexual misconduct at the hands of my mentor, but the Trudeau Foundation continues to inflict pain by refusing to allow me to tell my truth and support my recovery.”

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#cherry smiley #sexual assault

[radcanada]

Sex assault survivor Rebecca Crane of Lac Seul First Nation north of Sioux Lookout, Ont., is finally able to tell her story — about a court system that allowed her alleged attacker to walk free because he wasn't given a timely trial.

"I yelled at them," recalled Crane of the phone call she received from Kenora-based Crown attorney Mary Anne Mousseau, along with a victim support worker and two police officers, who told her the news. "I was very upset, and then I probably cried the hardest I've ever cried once I was off the call."

Women's advocates say other sex assault survivors have also been affected by the Supreme Court of Canada decision in 2016 that's commonly known as the Jordan rule. The decision put limits on the amount of time an accused should have to wait to get their charges heard in court. For crimes considered by the provincial court, the limit is 18 months, while more serious cases considered by higher courts have a time limit of 30 months.

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#sexual assault #canada

[radcanada]

The Canadian Bar Association had issued a series of recommendations and directives to the Correctional Service of Canada demanding violent male criminals be accommodated in women's prisons, and to ensure their biological sex is never recorded.

In a letter dated December 4, 2020 the Canadian Bar Association (CBA) denounced a draft proposal by the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) that they claim was not lax enough in its treatment and transfer of trans-identified prisoners. The CSC Commissioner's Directive currently takes into consideration operative status and any overriding safety concerns for staff and other inmates in the movement of trans-identified inmates, but the CBA claimed those policies were discriminatory.

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#anna slatz #prisons

[radcanada]

For female patients, operation outcomes tend to be significantly better when their surgeon is also female, recent research out of Canada has found.

No one really knows why that is just yet, but a new model comparing the sex of the surgeon, the sex of the patient, and the outcomes of the surgery have now revealed an implicit bias that could be costing patients their health and even their lives.

The data is based on more than 1.3 million patients who underwent one of 21 common elective surgeries in Ontario, Canada between 2007 and 2019.

Overall, the analysis suggests that when a male surgeon treats a female patient, that patient is 16 percent more likely to experience complications, 20 percent more likely to remain in the hospital for longer, and 32 percent more likely to die than if they were treated by a female surgeon.

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#medical misogyny

[radcanada]

Three significant cases have arrived for consideration at the Supreme Court of Canada, each challenging Section 33.1 of the Criminal Code. That section, added by the federal government in 1995, addresses the “fault” element for crimes of violence. The section says that if a person voluntarily consumes alcohol or other intoxicants to the extent that they lose conscious control of their actions and commit a crime of violence, they are accountable for that crime, because they have failed “markedly” to meet reasonable community standards.

The Supreme Court will take some time to consider the cases, heard in the fall of 2021 – as well it should. If Section 33.1 is removed, it would make the “extreme intoxication” defence available in criminal cases moving ahead, and that would make realizing women’s right to equality and equal right to personal security even more remote.

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#canada #supreme court

[radcanada]

BREAKING: Pornhub/MindGeek faces yet another class action lawsuit in Ontario Canada on behalf of exploited victims. This is the 7th major lawsuit and the 4th class action lawsuit to be filed against the company since 2020.

[radcanada]

A program that has helped dozens of sexual exploitation survivors in Newfoundland and Labrador rebuild their lives is at risk of ending permanently, its director says.

The Blue Door program, run by St. John's-based non-profit Thrive, started five years ago with the help of funding from Ottawa.

That five-year contract, supplying cash to the tune of $450,000 a year, draws to a close in February.

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[radcanada]

Mary’s troubled daughter had talked about her changing sexual identity before, but when she announced at age 16 that she was a transgender boy, it seemed to come out of the blue.

Even so, a doctor later wrote her a prescription for testosterone after a pair of 15-minute appointments, the mother says. Within months, the teenager had also had a double mastectomy. She was now a trans male.

But Mary says her child’s long-standing depression and anxiety only worsened. And last year the young woman made a stunning admission to her mother: even as she was being wheeled into the operating room to have her breasts removed, she was having doubts about her decision.

Now the 21-year-old is “detransitioning,” reverting to her original female identity. And Mary is part of a nascent movement calling for breaks to be placed on a health-care system geared to affirming a young person’s transgender feelings with drugs and surgery, allegedly in some instances after little assessment of other psychological issues.

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#canada

[radcanada]

This, the third version of this Bill C-4 to be read in the House, was read and passed without debate. It now moves to the Senate.

today canada's house of commons unanimously passed a bill that would make it illegal for parents or professionals to challenge a child's transgender identity

[radcanada]

A new website aims to help women find affordable housing in Ottawa's red-hot real estate market by linking them with other women to either rent or own a home.

Like online dating, Nest Egg Canada matches those with similar interests, hobbies, income and demographics — women then decide if they would like to proceed to meet their match.

The goal of the site is to help defray costs of housing for single women by sharing a living space, according to co-founder Catherine Landry, who also owns a marketing company.

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#ottawa #female separatism