i don't find this article entirely coherent but it's worth reading anyway.

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A Prairie alliance of trans advocates and unions should be a national model Right-wing premiers are using the notwithstanding clause to target trans kids, workers, Muslims, and drug users. Saskatchewan shows how a united front could stop them

by Saima Desai

Dec 5 2025

In the summer of 2023, as Saskatchewan’s Premier Scott Moe introduced a bill requiring teachers to inform parents when their children under 16 changed names or pronouns, he was met by an unlikely counter-blast.

“Outing children as part of a political gamble is violent and despicable,” tweeted the president of the Saskatchewan Federation of Labour (SFL), which represents 100,000 unionized workers in the province.

The post went viral, at least by Prairie standards, with hundreds of retweets.

The province’s LGBTQ2S+ organizations, it turned out, had an unexpected ally: Saskatchewan’s labour movement.

Since that initial tweet salvo, labour organizations have played a big role in the growing opposition to Moe’s policy, which also lets parents pull their kids from sex ed classes in schools and bars schools from bringing in organizations to provide education on sex or gender.

In the fall of 2023, the day Premier Moe prepared to invoke the notwithstanding clause to shield the bill from court challenges, a rally of over 1,000 people gathered outside the provincial legislature. Organized by the SFL and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the crowd was full of flags emblazoned with the logos of the province’s unions.

Labour leaders from across the country flew in for the rally, including the B.C. Teachers’ Federation, the Ontario Federation of Labour, and the Canadian Labour Congress.

Unions saw that Saskatchewan’s trans kids needed their support, but they also recognized something else: Moe’s use of the notwithstanding clause to shield his widening offensive was something that tied them together.

“We could see very clearly in Saskatchewan that it was kids today that the Sask Party government was attacking, and it would be workers tomorrow,” Kent Peterson, president of CUPE Saskatchewan who attended the rally that day, told The Breach.

And ramping up is exactly what right-wing governments across Canada have been doing, using the notwithstanding clause as they target not just trans kids, but public sector workers, Muslims, and people who use drugs.

The clause, which allows governments to pass laws that override Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, is being abused in new ways seemingly every month. But because the clause overrules Charter challenges, there are few tools that can stop them—except perhaps, the power of public mobilization.

That understanding underlies the alliance that has been growing between unions and trans advocates in this prairie province. As governments everywhere invoke the clause to lash out at vulnerable groups, it’s a model of solidarity that should be replicated across the country. Protestors rally in front of the Saskatchewan legislation in 2023 over Scott Moe’s use of the notwithstanding clause. A loophole once used rarely to bypass the Charter, the notwithstanding clause is becoming a favourite blunt instrument of right-wing governments. Credit: X/@bctf Taking the fight from the streets to the courts

UR Pride, a Regina-based queer and trans community organization, first issued a court challenge against Moe’s legislation, Bill 137, arguing it violates children’s Charter rights. But after a judge granted an injunction to halt the policy, the Saskatchewan government invoked the notwithstanding clause to force it into law.

Now the law is being challenged before the Supreme Court of Canada, thwarting the government’s earlier efforts to get the case thrown out. UR Pride is arguing that the law violates a different section of the Charter—the right to be free from cruel and unusual treatment—that the government of Saskatchewan didn’t cite when it invoked the notwithstanding clause.

CUPE Saskatchewan, the Saskatchewan Federation of Labour, and the Canadian Teachers’ Federation jointly applied to intervene in the court case. They’re adding their own argument that the pronoun policy would infringe on the teachers’ and education workers’ “professional obligations to place their students’ interests first.”

In addition to court challenges, it means unions have to be prepared to defend teachers and education workers who refuse to enforce transphobic policies.

“There are 7,000 to 8,000 CUPE members in the education system in this province who are now legally required to out trans and non-binary children, even if they think outing them will be harmful and violent to that kid,” said Peterson, the CUPE Sask President.

As far as Peterson knows, no CUPE-unionized education worker has been disciplined for defying Bill 137. But he says CUPE will protect its members who do, “through things like political action, campaigns, communication and, more directly, legal action.” The Sask Party successfully sold Bill 137 as a measure to “protect parents’ rights” to determine their child’s gender. “A lot of people bought that argument,” said Lori Johb, president of the SFL.

So undoing that narrative, in order to get union members on side, will be another area of work.

When they caught wind that the SFL was organizing a rally against Bill 137, “we did have a push-back internally,” said Johb. “So we had to do a lot of educating around that.”

Unions are some of the only groups that have successfully beat back right-wing uses of the notwithstanding clause—like in 2022, when Ford backed down from using the clause to bar a CUPE strike after education workers almost brought the province to a general strike.

In Saskatchewan, the labour movement has notched some initial victories. In 2007 and 2008, Moe’s predecessor Brad Wall passed a bill that would have prohibited some public sector employees like health care workers from striking. The SFL took the law to the Supreme Court and won a historic victory for the labour movement: the court agreed that the right to strike is a fundamental freedom protected by the Charter.

Wall later threatened to use the notwithstanding clause to pass the law anyways, but he eventually backed down.

Now, as the clause is being used to target trans kids in Saskatchewan and Alberta, Johb said, “we have to fight to make sure that win means something.” Defeating the notwithstanding clause—politically

A loophole once used rarely to bypass the Charter, the notwithstanding clause is becoming a favourite blunt instrument of right-wing governments in Saskatchewan, Ontario, and now Alberta.

Premier Doug Ford used it for the first time ever in Ontario in 2018 to stop his critics—especially unions—from running election ads. He tried it again in 2022 to prohibit education workers from striking. And this year, he floated the idea of using it to override a judge’s injunction that halted his plan to rip up bike lanes.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has used the notwithstanding clause for the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth time in the province’s history—all in the last two months. In October, she invoked the clause in legislation ordering 51,000 striking teachers back to work. In November, she used it to protect three laws restricting trans youths’ access to health care, their ability to change their pronouns in school, and trans women’s participation in sports.

Canada’s right-wing governments seemingly discovered the notwithstanding clause all at the same time. But it’s no coincidence. They’re passing notes.

Reactionary provincial legislatures are acting in concert to normalize overriding the Charter to target their chosen punching bags. Just months apart in 2024, the B.C. Conservatives and the New Brunswick Conservatives both mused about using the notwithstanding clause to involuntarily detain drug users.

In Alberta, the United Conservative Party government recently filed arguments to support Quebec’s hijab ban—which passed into law only with the help of the notwithstanding clause—as it’s being challenged at the Supreme Court. In that argument, Smith called the clause a “hard-fought and hard-won compromise” that safeguards provincial sovereignty.

The response from some opponents of these laws has been to try and restrict or ban the use of the notwithstanding clause. But, as political scientist Dónal Gill argues, if the left takes seriously our commitment to democracy, that means allowing elected governments (even right-wing ones) to have authority over our rights, not vesting all decision-making power in unelected judges.

With efforts to ban the use of the notwithstanding clause, Gill writes, “advocates of progressive causes can find themselves grasping for legal solutions to political problems.”

So the left must once again outmaneuver the right on the terrain of politics. That means that, just as right-wing governments team up to demonize trans kids, public sector unions, religious minorities, and people who use drugs, the left must come together in an even more powerful coalition to stop them.

Saskatchewan shows a model for how this might be done. With three new abuses of the clause in Alberta last month, it’s time to take it national.

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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/11856

Right-wing premiers are using the notwithstanding clause to target trans kids, workers, Muslims, and drug users. Saskatchewan shows how a united front could stop them

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