Senate passes bill to ban conversion therapy

Conversion therapy will soon be banned across Canada, after the Senate agreed to the expedited passage of Bill C-4 on Tuesday. After multiple attempts to pass legislation banning the harmful practice failed in recent years, the bill has now cleared both the House of Commons and Senate without changes, in just over a week. Once it receives royal assent, the bill will become law.

After multiple attempts to pass legislation banning the harmful practice failed in recent years, the bill has now cleared both the House of Commons and Senate without changes, in just over a week. Once it receives royal assent, the bill will become law.

On Tuesday after a brief period of debate on the bill, Conservative Sen. Leo Housakos rose in the upper chamber to seek unanimous approval to move Bill C-4 through all legislative stages in the upper chamber, echoing sentiments from his Conservative colleagues in the House who led MPs to fast-track the bill through the House last Wednesday.

“I think we have to get to the reflex in this institution, that when something is in the universal interest, public interest, that we should not create unnecessary duplication and engage into unnecessary debates,” Housakos said, adding that politicians should also not be using legislation to divide or as a political tool.

Bill C-4 proposes to eliminate the harmful practice in Canada for all ages, through four new Criminal Code offences. It includes wider-reaching vocabulary of what constitutes conversion therapy than what the federal government attempted to pass in the last Parliament.