This petition asks Canada to grant asylum to transgender people from the U.S. Could it work?

Tens of thousands of Canadians are joining a call for the Canadian government to help transgender and non-binary people fearing the outcome of anti-LGBTQ legislation gaining ground in the United States and other countries.

Cait Glasson, an activist in Waterloo, Ont., launched an online petition to the House of Commons, asking the federal government to extend the right to claim asylum "by reason of eliminationist laws in their home countries, whatever country that may be."

She said friends in the U.S. are already preparing for the possibility that they will have no choice but to leave the country.

"I know a lot of people who are getting their passports updated, making sure their ID is up to date," Glasson said in an interview with CBC Radio's Day 6.

"They're making plans to be able to move fast if they need to. And that, I think, scares me more than anything."

Laws and bills targeting LGBTQ rights at the state level in the U.S. have already reached record numbers in 2023. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is tracking more than 400 anti-LGBTQ bills across the country, including restrictions on accessing gender-affirming health-care services, criminalizing transgender people's use of public bathrooms and bans on minors at drag performances.

Other bills aim to ban books about sexual orientation and gender diversity in libraries, or limit the use of chosen pronouns in schools. The ACLU warns years of progress is at risk of being undone.

"Over the course of the last few years, we have seen a race to the bottom in state houses across the country attempting to restrict trans people across nearly every area of our life," said Gillian Branstetter, a communications strategist for the ACLU.

"I think, taken as a whole, it is an effort to undo much of the legal progress that trans people have made, not just in the last decade, but in the last decades, and further entrench a very rigid and archaic understanding of gender."

Glasson's petition has garnered more than 135,000 signatures since it was started on Jan. 26 — the third highest number of signatures, behind two petitions regarding firearms legislation, since the federal government initiated e-petitions in 2015. Mike Morrice, the Green Party MP for Ontario's Kitchener Centre, authorized the e-petition and will present it to Parliament once it closes. He said he's surprised at how much attention it has received but that it speaks to Canadians having a "sense of wanting to be a safe haven."

He told CBC News the petition is a means of pressing the federal government to recognize what's happening with anti-transgender and anti-LGBTQ legislation in the U.S. and other countries. He wants the government to ensure there is a means for transgender and non-binary people to seek refuge, if needed — especially young people from states limiting gender-affirming care.

Morrice acknowledges Canada has a history of welcoming people from around the world, fleeing persecution based on their sexual orientation or gender identity, and that citizens of the U.S and the U.K. can claim asylum here. 

But even though American and British citizens are able to travel to Canada visa-free, unlike people fleeing a number of countries with repressive anti-LGBTQ laws, it's not as easy for them to successfully apply for protection.

"[The U.S. and U.K. are] deemed to be safe countries," Aleks Dughman Manzur, director of programming and advocacy at Rainbow Refugee in Vancouver, told CBC Radio's The Early Edition last week.