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Matt Burrows, The Georgia Straight, 16 February 2012
The B.C. NDP’s Vancouver–West End MLA wants explicit rights for B.C.’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth. Spencer Chandra Herbert told the Straight both Premier Christy Clark and Education Minister George Abbott could push “today” for a provincewide antihomophobia policy in schools to help accomplish that.
“I don’t know how many hundreds of times she [Clark] said she was going to crack down on bullying—ever since she was chair of the Safe Schools Task Force back in 2002—and yet had never committed to anything explicit in terms of protection for gay and lesbian and bi and trans youth, who face some of the highest rates of bullying and dropout in our school system,” Chandra Herbert said by phone from Victoria.
A private member’s bill is one way to go, but the MLA said he’s introduced many and “the government has ignored every one of them.” He said “public pressure” and “the overwhelming response” he’s heard in the community is what gives him inspiration for effecting change.
The West Coast Legal Education and Action Fund, B.C. children and youth representative Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, the Pride Education Network, and his NDP caucus are all aligned on the issue, Chandra Herbert claimed.
“I think that any school that receives public funds should be required by government to have a plan and policy, not just on paper, but actual action to get into the schools,” he said. “We’ve got 75 percent of our school districts that do not have policy specifically protecting LGBT youth. The education minister could very quickly say, ‘That’s unacceptable, we’re changing that, let’s do it today.’ ”
Abbott did not make himself available for an interview by the Straight’s deadline.
A 2007 ministerial order required all school districts to implement a code of conduct that referred to the prohibitive grounds of discrimination in the B.C. Human Rights Code.
The B.C. Teachers’ Federation found a few years later that only 15 of the 60 districts complied with adequate standards. The government, however, claimed that all districts met their standard. The BCTF took the province to court, but the B.C. Court of Appeal ruled in December 2011 that the BCTF could not use the grievance process to make the districts comply.
“You know, the government says, ‘Oh, the Human Rights Code is in all the codes of conduct [in all 60 school districts],’” Chandra Herbert said. “For one, it’s not. You actually go through some of those school districts and they don’t actually talk about the Human Rights Code. And two, transgender issues are not really in the Human Rights Code. That’s why I introduced a private member’s bill to add gender identity and gender expression into the Human Rights Code. Because currently it’s not there. Some judges have read it into the Human Rights Code, but when you ask anyone—the general person, teachers—and you ask government members, they wouldn’t even know that it’s in there. Certainly, the trans folks I talk to have no idea that they could, potentially, be covered already.”
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