Image from left to right: Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland and Women & Gender Equality Minister Marci Ien
More than three years after first promising to take action, Prime Minister Trudeau’s party, the Liberals, has unveiled a plan to legislate changes to the Income Tax Act. The aim is to create a rule that charities providing counselling who oppose abortion must publicly disclose that they do not provide abortion services or birth control, nor make referrals. If they fail to do so, it could mean losing their charitable tax status, Canada’s Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland and Women and Gender Equality Minister Marci Ien have warned.
Joyce Arthur, executive director of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, who supports the legislation, believes the government amended it to reduce the risk of ending up in court for potentially violating anyone’s Charter rights. “We don’t want this struck down… so I think it is a good balance,” she said. A charity tax lawyer agreed with this assessment.
Similarly, Meghan Doherty, a director at Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights, chalked the change up to the government weighing the reality of having to enforce such a measure, which she welcomes. “It can be challenging to figure out how to do this in a practical way,” she said. “This is actually a good solution.” She also said that Action Canada has heard a range of concerns about these so-called crisis pregnancy centres, from women feeling pressured to carry a pregnancy to term, to having their access to an abortion delayed because of receiving incorrect information.
Others are concerned that this change would not prevent such centres from continuing to spread misinformation and telling lies about abortion. And indeed the article goes on to report that the director of one such charity, who is open about her charity’s stance on abortion, plans to challenge even the modified version of the reform. Difficult indeed!
Among the responses to the article from the public, one man wrote: “In Canada, abortion has been legal for decades. Pregnant women who support abortion can have an abortion. Pregnant women who don’t support abortion have other options as provided by the now demonized clinics. Trudeau supports diversity as long as you support his view on any topic. Apparently providing counseling to women who don’t want abortions no longer falls into Trudeau’s bucket of diversity.”
But another man responded to him as follows: “Stephen, these clinics are not meant to provide support to women who don’t want an abortion. They are designed to deceive women who are seeking an abortion so they can be talked out of having one.”
And that is indeed the crux of the issue.
SOURCE: National Post, by Stephanie Taylor, 1 November 2024, updated 3 days later.