I wish I wasn’t exaggerating.

But everything for us is at stake right now.

Four days ago, for the first time in Canadian history, a member of a legislature proposed a bill to repeal an entire Human Rights Code. And 36 other members of said legislature voted for the same. BC MLA Tara Armstrong attempted to introduce Bill M233, the Human Rights Code Repeal Act, which outright repeals the B.C. Human Rights Code and abolishes the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal.

Here’s a copy of Hansard for convenience’s sake:

Bill M233 — Human Rights Code Repeal Act

Tara Armstrong presented a bill intituled Human Rights Code Repeal Act.

Tara Armstrong: I move that a bill intituled Human Rights Code Repeal Act, of which notice has been given in my name on the order paper, be introduced and read a first time now.

The purpose of this bill is to end the assault on freedom of speech by our Human Rights Tribunal. Last week, they fined Barry Neufeld three-quarters of a million dollars for refusing to believe that a man could become a woman, for his own personal opinions.

This bill will protect ordinary people with common beliefs from politically motivated financial attacks. The Human Rights Code Repeal Act is the only solution to this assault on our rights. This bill will protect the freedom of speech of Canadians. It will abolish the Human Rights Tribunal, a kangaroo court, and repeal the human rights code that the Left is using to punish and profit from anyone who doesn’t adopt their views.

The bill will terminate the position of a Human Rights Commissioner, who makes over $300,000 a year to police speech, and it will invalidate any outstanding orders made by the tribunal against Canadians like Mr. Neufeld.

Freedom of speech is the cornerstone of our democracy. The judgment last week was a wake-up call, and Canadians are demanding their freedoms back.

To the members in this House, this is our chance to answer their call. Therefore, I urge you to vote in favour of this bill.

[Division was called. 37 voted YEA: the BC Conservatives, as well as MLAs Brodie (OneBC), Kealy (ind.), and Armstrong (ind., ex-OneBC). 50 voted NAY, including the BCNDP and BC Greens. Bill defeated.]

It’s fortunate that this bill didn’t make it anywhere close to third reading. Yet, what this bill entails is horrifying. This would mean that an employer could refuse to serve someone for being Black (just like in Christie v. York Corporation, a 1939 Supreme Court of Canada case upholding “freedom of contract”). It would mean that a business owner can refuse to sell their business to a woman because they are a woman. It means that a landlord can refuse to rent to someone because they’re Indigenous. And of course, it would mean that dehumanizing speech against trans people — speech that can make a workplace untenable or even lead to incitement to genocide, as exemplified so well in Chilliwack Teachers’ Association v. Barry Neufeld (No. 10) — will face no sanction by the State.

If the notwithstanding clause is a five-alarm fire, this is even more unprecedented. It means regressing back to a vision of Canada consisting solely of a white, male, able-bodied, cisgender and heterosexual class that gets to participate in society, and everyone else, left by the wayside.

Human rights are the foundational building block of the post-World War II legal order. They exist in order to prevent some of the worst crimes against humanity ever documented from ever reoccurring — including domestic crimes against humanity here in Canada, such as the internment of Japanese Canadians, the Chinese Exclusion Act and the genocide of Indigenous peoples through residential schools. We can’t let human rights erode. It’s a matter of defending each and every one of us’ dignity.

Yet, this isn’t isolated. The callous disregard for human life and human dignity can be seen across the world. Last week, Kansas (USA) took away the drivers’ license and birth certificate of every single one of its trans citizens, only permitting said IDs to contain sex assigned at birth — an obvious marker of transness — officially making trans people second-class citizens, akin to how the Nazis did so with Jewish people’s passports in 1938. And just over the weekend, the United States and Israel decided to launch an offensive war against Iran — one obviously motivated by imperialist interests more than anything else.

Everything is indeed at stake for us now. To pretend otherwise is to live in a fictitious wonderland which doesn’t exist.