Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to the report on Bill S-250, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (sterilization procedures).

I also rise today to speak as an Albertan. Normally when I say that, I am speaking with pride, but not today, because today I want to start by telling you about one of the darkest chapters in Alberta’s history.

In 1928, the government of Alberta passed the Sexual Sterilization Act, which allowed the province to sterilize those with serious mental illness. It thus became the first and only jurisdiction in what was then called the British Empire to pass and aggressively pursue a policy of eugenics.

From our vantage point a hundred years later, it may seem hard to believe, but in the 1920s, eugenics was in many ways a progressive social idea, embraced by avid social engineers who thought they were doing the best thing for society and for those they deemed unqualified to bear and raise healthy families. Tommy Douglas, one of the founders of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, or CCF, was an enthusiast for eugenics. So was Dr. Elizabeth Bagshaw, a crusading feminist doctor lauded for her work as a pioneer of birth control. So too were the Famous Five, the pioneering Alberta feminists who led the fight to establish that women were legal persons, and whose statues we pass every day as we enter the Senate.

In 1928, Alberta was governed by the United Farmers of Alberta, or UFA, a party of populist progressives, many of them proponents of the social gospel. Irene Parlby, one of the Famous Five, was a member of the UFA cabinet — in fact, she was the first woman to serve as a cabinet minister in Alberta’s history.

And it was the United Farmers who established the Eugenics Board, which decided the fate of the patients who came before it. The board was headed by one John M. MacEachran, who was the founder of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Alberta and the university’s first provost. MacEachran, a Canadian with two PhDs, had studied with some of the leading philosophers and psychologists of the day in Berlin, Leipzig and Paris. His professors and mentors included Alfred Binet, the originator of the intelligence quotient, or IQ, test. MacEachran had been convinced to give up his academic life in Europe to come to Edmonton, to help establish a new university in a new province.

In speeches and articles, MacEachran loved to cite his favourite Greek philosopher, Plato, arguing that restricting the right to bear children was a way to move toward the perfectibility of the human race — the true Platonic ideal. He said in a 1932 lecture:

We should endeavour to get away from a very costly form of sentiment and give more attention to raising and safeguarding the purity of the race. We allow men and women of defective intelligence or of criminal tendencies to have children.... There is one remedy for such eventualities and we fortunately have begun to make use of it in Alberta — although not yet nearly extensively enough. This is the Alberta Sterilization Act. Since the state must assume most of the load of responsibility in connection with defective children, it surely is justified in adopting reasonable measures to protect itself against their multiplication.

Initially, the ostensible goal of the Sexual Sterilization Act was to make it easier to release people suffering from mental illness from asylums — including World War I veterans suffering from “shell shock,” or what we’d now call PTSD.

The premise was that you could discharge patients:

. . . if the danger of procreation with its attendant risk of multiplication of the evil by transmission of the disability to progeny were eliminated.

And initially, all sterilizations were to be voluntary — although the promise of being able to leave the asylum might have tainted just how voluntary those agreements were. Still, in its first year, the board only carried out three sterilization procedures.

Things changed, though, after the Social Credit government of William “Bible Bill” Aberhart took power in Alberta. In 1937, Aberhart’s quasi-fascistic government broadened the scope of the Sexual Sterilization Act to include people it described as “mental defectives,” and added that since those people were mentally defective, their consent was clearly no longer required.

In 1942, people with epilepsy, syphilis and Huntington’s disease were added to the list. At the same time that Hitler’s Nazis were consolidating power and implementing their own eugenics regime, in Alberta, 300 to 400 people a year were being sterilized under the act — with Professor MacEachran, that “noble” philosopher king and respected academic serenely presiding.

In fact, while the Nazi regime sterilized more people over a shorter period of time, Alberta had actually sterilized about the same percentage of its population over the life of the program.

Over time, Alberta’s Eugenics Board paid less and less attention to the validity of the evidence of disability, hearing each case in about 10 minutes. As rates of procedures climbed, a disproportionate number of those who were sterilized were new immigrants or Indigenous people, some of whom “failed” their IQ tests simply because they didn’t speak or read English.

Indigenous patients comprised 6% of all sterilization files brought before the board, even though they made up only about 3% of the population.

There were other notable demographic shifts. By the 1940s, case files involving women began to outnumber those involving men. Of the 2,832 sterilizations that were performed over the life of the Sexual Sterilization Act, 58% were performed on women.

By 1959, the number of cases had tapered off. Still, that year, the board examined 95 patients and authorized sterilization for 94 of them.

Dr. MacEachran chaired the board for 37 years and didn’t retire until 1965, when he was 88 years old — a “moral” philosopher who seemingly never doubted the righteousness of his grotesque crusade to “perfect” humanity, demonstrating a kind of intellectual and ethical hubris that takes my breath away.

The Sexual Sterilization Act wasn’t abolished until 1972, the year after Peter Lougheed and his Progressive Conservatives took office. David King, the young cabinet minister who introduced the motion to abolish the act, said at the time, simply:

. . . that the act violates fundamental human rights. We are provided with an act, the basis of which is a presumption that society, or at least the government, knows what kind of people can be allowed children and what kinds of people cannot … It is our view that this is a reprehensible and intolerable philosophy and program for this province and this government.

And that was how the story was told. That was what I learned: that the forced or involuntary sexual sterilization of vulnerable people ended in 1972. It was a rude and disturbing shock to me to realize — thanks to the tireless, crusading work of our colleague Senator Yvonne Boyer and of the Senate Human Rights Committee — that this was not so, and that the practice had simply gone underground. It was equally disquieting to realize that some doctors in the here and now, 100 years later, were still channelling the prejudices and arrogance of John M. MacEachran — performing involuntary sterilizations out of a patronizing belief, informed by racism, classism and misogyny, that they alone knew what was best for their patients.

Yet I must tell you that when Senator Boyer first proposed Bill S-250, in its original form, I was deeply concerned by the legislation. In its earliest incarnation, the bill might have effectively made all sterilizations — hysterectomies, tubal ligations and vasectomies — illegal, and any doctor who performed them liable to criminal prosecution unless a very specific rubric was followed to ensure informed consent. There was no exception made, even for a doctor who needed to perform an emergency surgery to save someone’s life.

I feared that such a law would leave Canadian women in the same position as so many American women find themselves today — unable to control their own bodies and exercise their own reproductive choice. I worried about a chilling effect, about doctors who would simply refuse to perform any sterilization procedures out of fear of prosecution. Also, I worried that women might bleed to death on the operating table while their surgeons worried about how to follow the law.

I was concerned, too, that trans people might not be able to access gender-affirming surgical procedures because doctors might shy away from the risk of criminal liability.

The original Bill S-250 would also have made it a crime to try to convince or counsel someone to have a sterilization procedure, which I feared would chill necessary conversations with doctors, nurses and social workers — or, indeed, between married partners, since even a wife who tried to persuade her husband to get a vasectomy might find herself in legal jeopardy.

The original draft was wholly well intentioned and a reflection of Senator Boyer’s passionate commitment to protect vulnerable women, particularly Indigenous women, from grievous bodily harm and assaults on their bodily autonomy. Yet in trying to stop one kind of human rights abuse, I feared the original Bill S-250 created the potential for all kinds of other human rights abuses.

So I am relieved and grateful to say that the bill before us now does none of those things. For months now, Senator Boyer has been working hard to redraft and recraft her bill, to find a way that protects vulnerable people from exploitation and high-handed medical arrogance while still ensuring that people seeking vasectomies, hysterectomies, orchiectomies and tubal ligations can receive the care they want and need without onerous delays.

It has not been an easy task, and I want to applaud Senator Boyer for her courage, commitment, and willingness to listen carefully and respectfully to her critics and work both with Senate colleagues and Department of Justice officials to come up with a bill that makes it clear that forced sterilization is a serious form of assault — without running the risk of criminalizing necessary and wanted medical care.

The version of Bill S-250 that stands before us now represents the best kind of compromise and is a tribute to the thoughtful work of Senator Boyer and the entire Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs. All its members gave the bill such thorough, respectful consideration and debate. Sometimes, even in this chamber of sober second thought, politics and partisanship can get the better of us. But in this case, the committee rose above all that and adopted, unanimously, a legally elegant solution that fits neatly into the Criminal Code. I hope now that the bill will move quickly through the report stage and on to third reading so that we can send it to the House in a timely manner.

This collaboration took a kind of humility and compassion which Professor John M. MacEachran — that Platonic monster, intent on engineering his perfect world — could never have imagined.

The story of the eugenics movement in Alberta, and in Canada, is a reminder of the dangers of embracing righteousness and purity at the expense of common humanity. Eugenics was championed by people on the left and the right, by partisans so blinded by moral idealism and moral superiority that they could no longer see the very real people whose autonomy they were stealing away.

A reminder, perhaps, to each and every one of us in this chamber, as we shape the laws that shape the lives of our fellow Canadians, not to let hubris and sanctimony cloud our vision.

Thank you and hiy hiy.