Twelve years of struggle for one law
Twelve years of struggle, one law: in 2017 Canada enshrines trans rights in its Human Rights Act.
On 19 June 2017, the federal Bill C-16 became law in Canada on receiving Royal Assent. It added the terms "gender identity" and "gender expression" to the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code, creating for the first time at federal level explicit protection for trans and non-binary people against discrimination, hate speech and hate crimes.
The history of this law was long and gruelling. The first attempts to protect trans people at federal level go back to 2005, when the NDP politician Bill Siksay first introduced the proposal. Several attempts failed in the Senate before the Liberal government under Justin Trudeau made the issue a government matter in 2016. Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould symbolically introduced Bill C-16 on 17 May 2016, the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia. On 15 June 2017 the Senate voted in favour by 67 to 11, and the formal signing followed four days later.
In concrete terms, the law changed three things: it extended the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination in the Human Rights Act, brought trans people under the existing protection against hate speech, and established that hatred based on gender identity counts as an aggravating factor in sentencing. Senator Grant Mitchell, who had championed the law for years, summed it up like this: the law sent out not only protection but also a message from Parliament to all Canadians. Bill C-16 attracted international attention because Canada set a benchmark: in many other countries comparable protection was still missing years later.