If current polling is any indication, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is set to lose the next federal election to Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre — but he will leave behind a Canada transformed. He will also leave his successor a nasty parting gift: an Upper House stacked to the rafters with progressive idealogues.
Canada’s unelected and unaccountable Senate has long been a target of conservative Canadians. In 2015, Prime Minister Stephen Harper simply stopped appointing new senators, stating that until the senate was reformed, he would leave the seats open. When Trudeau came to power several months later, that left over 20 empty seats – which he promptly filled.
To date, Justin Trudeau has appointed 86 “independent” senators. There are only 105 senators in the Upper Chamber, meaning that Trudeau has already appointed 81% of the Senate – and these are lifetime appointments. While the Senate, in theory, is supposed to merely provide a “sober second thought” to the elected House of Commons, in reality, they can refuse to pass any legislation they deem lacking and send it back to the House for revisions. The current Senate is packed with hardcore ideological progressives – it was the Senate, not the House, that called for expanding the euthanasia eligibility requirements to mental illness.
Unlike Harper, Justin Trudeau has been very deliberate in who he appoints, both to the judiciary – where he is careful to select pro-abortion judges – and to the Senate. Two of his recent appointments highlight just how extreme his appointments have been. One is the notorious LGBT activist Dr. Kristopher Wells of Alberta. Wells has advocated for shutting down Christian schools that refuse to violate their religious principles by accepting Gay-Straight Alliance Clubs and spearheaded so-called “conversion therapy bans.” When Catholic priest Rev. Jerome Lavigne of Calgary called the rainbow flag a symbol of lawlessness, Wells stated:
These kind of comments make it open season on LGBTQ youth, saying it’s OK to openly discriminate against them… These are the kinds of comments that breed hatred, violence and discrimination.
If you are an orthodox Christian in Canada, Wells thinks that expressing your biblical views is declaring “open season” on LGBTQ youth. That view is a feature, not a bug, of Wells’ appointment. The government website announcing his appointment included a laundry list of his activist affiliations:
Dr. Kristopher Wells is an educator and a champion for the 2SLGBTQI+ community who has used research and advocacy to help advance diversity, equity, and human rights in Alberta and across the country… Dr. Wells started his career as a teacher in St. Albert Public Schools, before completing master’s and doctoral degrees focused on sexual and gender diversity in education. He later worked as a diversity consultant for Edmonton Public Schools, where he helped develop the first standalone sexual orientation and gender identity school board policy in Western Canada. From 2012 to 2018, he was Assistant Professor and Faculty Director of the Institute for Sexual Minority Studies and Services at the University of Alberta. He then became MacEwan University’s first Canada Research Chair and served as the founding Director of the MacEwan Centre for Sexual and Gender Diversity.
That’s only a fraction of the citation – the bio goes on to list a half dozen other LGBT activist groups Wells is a member of. A petition has been started to oppose the appointment of Wells – and it includes a significantly different biography:
Alberta’s newest Senator is a gender-ideology activist who disapproves of parental rights, compares Christians to Nazi murderers, and is responsible for directing children as young as five to sexually explicit material.
Under Alberta’s NDP Government, Dr. Wells—then affiliated with a group called the Institute for Sexual Minority Studies and Services (iSMSS)—worked as the “driving force” behind the Alberta GSA Network, an initiative directed toward minor children from Kindergarten through Grade 12.
The Alberta GSA Network’s website was designed to assist children involved in Gay Straight Alliances at school and featured links to various “community supports.” One such “community support” was Fruit Loop—a Facebook page full of sexually explicit content. In other words, Dr. Wells’s Network allowed children to access graphic sexual material in just two clicks.
The material found on the Fruit Loops Facebook page includes articles with instructions on how to reach orgasm, tips on oral sex, and an ad featuring naked people who “share an erotic kiss on a tennis court”—all conveniently available for access by children aged 5 to 17. Dr. Wells shared Fruit Loop’s tennis court post on his own Facebook account, demonstrating that he was well-aware of the graphic content on the Fruit Loop page.
He is also quoted on Twitter/X as stating that “so called ‘parental rights’ are a dog whistle for an explicit anti-2SLGBTQ+ agenda…this is an organized hate movement.”
Another of Trudeau’s recent appointments is former radio host Charles Adler, who despises Canadian Christians as much as Wells. Over the past several years in particular, he has spent much time on social media viciously condemning anyone who holds conservative Christian views. When Jason Kenney refused to condemn Christians who opposed the LGBT agenda, for example, Adler insisted he disavow the “knuckle-draggers.”
When Trudeau released an ad attacking Pierre Poilievre on gender ideology – and it is worth noting that the federal Conservatives are to the left of the UK Labour government on the transgender issue – Adler tweeted it out, seething: “Canada’s Conservative leader, who wants to a PM when he grows up, is an impersonation of the moral basement dwellers populating Republican America.”
Consider: Of just two of Trudeau’s recent senate appointments, one referred to any group that supports parental rights – which would include most of Canada’s conservative churches – as an “organized hate movement,” and the other referred to Canadian Christians as “knuckle-draggers” and “moral basement dwells.” These are the sorts of ideologues Trudeau has been putting in the legislative body of “sober second thought” – which will actually function, in practice, as a cork in the process, preventing the Conservative Party from undoing any of Trudeau’s radical agenda.
Poilievre supports – and voted for – legislation banning euthanasia for mental illness. Do you think that will make it through this Senate? Poilievre opposes puberty blockers for kids. If the Conservatives were to put forward the sort of legislation that Danielle Smith has proposed in Alberta, do you think that folks like Kris Wells and Charles Adler wouldn’t do everything in their power to stop it? Of course they would. That’s why Trudeau put them there – to protect his legacy. Trudeau may lose the next election, but his successors may find themselves running into a brick wall he has spent nearly a decade carefully constructing.
