CLC Blog

At the recently concluded United Nations 56th Commission on Population and Development, the Canadian government’s overzealous support of radical sex-ed and gender ideology backfired on Justin Trudeau, Canada’s second failure at UN multilateral negotiations in less than a month.

While moral relativism and sexual perversion may be winning in Canada -- with drag story hours infiltrating our schools and public institutions, school administrators punishing teenagers for opposing males using female washrooms, and the Canadian government continuing to obsess over killing children before birth -- it looks like other countries have had enough of Justin Trudeau’s vision for the world.

The Trudeau government, together with its allies in the Biden administration and the European Union, tried ramming through Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) language into the commission’s outcome document, a text that guides the actions and budgets of various UN agencies, but countries pushed back, calling out the Western imposition of CSE, an umbrella term for radical sex-education, as a distraction from the real needs of the world’s poor.

On the eve of the final day of negotiations, after almost a month of back-and-forth negotiations, the Chair of the commission, caving to probable pressure from Western nations, undermined the entire process by parachuting in the controversial language, and what happened next was unprecedented.

A group of 22 nations banded together to stand firm, break their silence, and voice their objections and legitimate concerns. And how did Canada respond? With disdain. Referring to these countries as a minority, and instead, doubled-down on its support for radical sex-ed.

One of the Canadian delegates perfectly exemplified how disconnected the Trudeau government is from the rest of the world by sharing a bizarre story of how his mom tried to give him condoms ahead of a school trip when he was in Grade 9.

While hundreds of millions of children around the world can’t even go to school, let alone have "school trips," the Canadian delegate thought it would be a good idea to share condom stories during this high-level, multilateral discussion to justify the need for CSE. This is the sorry state of our government’s foreign policy.

When nations like Cameroon, Egypt, Nigeria, Senegal, and others from the global south, criticized the Chair’s attempts to undermine the negotiation process and reiterated their strong opposition to the inclusion of problematic language, Sweden chastised them; Australia praised Canada for sharing it’s condom story; the US administration dismissed their objections; and the UK smeared the opposition’s arguments as “baseless” and “dangerous”. Talk about tolerance!

When it comes to these issues at the UN, you have the West versus the rest, and this was on full display at the concluding plenary of the commission.

In the end, the backlash was too much for the Chair, who withdrew the outcome text entirely, forcing the commission to end without agreed conclusions, much to the frustration of all nations involved and to the greater embarrassment of the United Nations Population Division.

Following the withdrawal of the document, Western nations started to attack the 22 member states for their ‘lack of compromise’, accusing them of breaking consensus. The nations that broke their silence however, were tired of being bullied into submission, and they made it very clear that it was in fact the Western nations who refused to make compromises.  

The representative from Pakistan fought back, summarizing the sentiment felt by many nations, when she expressed her delegation’s “deep regret that for the sake of promoting a certain agenda, a select group of countries did not allow the adoption of the agreed conclusions.”

The representative criticized their accusations by reminding the commission that “nobody talked about those millions of children who are deprived of schools, who do not have books, who are malnourished, who do not have toilets in school, who do not have water and sanitation, who belong to poor families, who do not have access to internet, [and] who do not have access to technology.”

She concluded her nation’s statement by highlighting that the theme for this year’s commission and resolution was population, education, and sustainable development and not “population, comprehensive sexuality education, and sustainable development”.

The representative of the Holy See echoed the statement by the delegate from Pakistan, affirming that the “process was derailed because of an inordinate focus on issues related to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights and sexuality education”, adding that “from the positions articulated by numerous delegations, it is abundantly clear that many do not share this vision for their children’s education.”

For the second time in less than a month, the Trudeau government, together with the many CSE and 'abortion rights' organizations they work with, have failed to make gains at a UN commission. When the West pushed, the world pushed back.

As an active member of Civil Society at these UN commissions, it was quite remarkable to witness so many member states break their silence and stand up in solidarity against the ideological colonization that is being imposed upon them.

On the ground, in conversations with the various delegates, Campaign Life Coalition representatives were often met with shock and disbelief when introducing themselves as representatives of a pro-life organization from Canada. A delegate from an African nation was surprised that there are actually Canadians who believe in the right to life and the protection of the traditional family.  Some are initially apprehensive when they find out they are speaking to a Canadian. That is the reputation Trudeau has built around the world.

Within moments of the conclusion of the conference, UN agencies and activist organizations vowed to continue fighting for CSE and SRHR. With an infinite amount of financial resources, some of which is funded by the Trudeau government, they will likely return with a vengeance. Those 22 countries will now face an onslaught of pressure to abandon their position and fall in line with the West.  Unless more nations join them, this victory for life and family will be short-lived.