Almost immediately, the Edmonton chapter of the Gay Alliance Towards Equality (GATE), under the leadership of its founder Michael Roberts, began to lobby for the inclusion of sexual orientation. In just a few short years, GATE and Alberta’s LGBTQ2 population would meet their first major obstacle in the form of then Labor Minister Les Young. In 1979, GATE, now under the leadership of Bob Radke, was again presenting to the Alberta Human Rights Commission. The chairman of this Commission was Bob Lundgrian, an Edmonton lawyer who was notably opposed to human rights protections for LGBTQ2 people. Young defended his selection of Lundgrian, stating, “homosexuals must expect discrimination if they make their sexual preference obvious.” When asked about protections for gays and lesbians in the areas of work and accommodation, Young emphatically replied, “Why would the government enact legislation for a minority that would allow the public display in a workplace of a sexual orientation which as a generality is not accepted?” Douglas Goold, a formal Journal editorial writer with whom Young engaged in a televised debate, countered that “the government’s role is not only to reflect but to lead public opinion.” This outright rejection by the Human Rights Commission to bring this forward to the Legislature created what Rev. Philip Speranza of the Metropolitan Community Church called “a constant climate of fear” for Alberta’s LGBTQ2 population.

In 1981, the draconian police raid on the Pisces Health Spa further illuminated the need for equal protection under the law. In the years following the raid, a new organization was formed to help organize and orchestrate activism against the Alberta government’s unwillingness to amend the IRPA. This organization was Gay and Lesbian Awareness (GALA). GALA’s activism managed to sway many Human Rights Commission members, but the Commission could only make recommendations; actual changes to government legislation had to come from the Legislative Assembly. In January 1985, the Alberta Human Rights Commission proposed an amendment to the Individual’s Rights Protection Act to include gays and lesbians. Representatives from GALA, including Michael Phair—who would go on to become the city’s first openly gay city councillor—met with then Minister of Labour Les Young and other MLAs about employment discrimination against gays and lesbians before meeting with members of the press to discuss the issue. This amendment never came to fruition, but meetings like this are emblematic of the tireless fights for justice that activists like Michael Roberts, Bob Radke, Michael Phair, Maureen Irwin, Liz Messiah, Murray Billett, and others fought for on behalf of the LGBTQ2 community.

Fear around AIDS impacted the fight for equal rights at the Legislature. Employers, ignorant of how HIV was spread, wanted the ability to fire people. GALA representative Tom Edge said, in 1987, that “the fact that you make it difficult to fire a person because of their sexual preference does not mean the disease is going to spread.” Edge pointed out examples of the discrimination being faced by Alberta’s gays and lesbians, including a man being fired after an anonymous report he was gay and landlords not renting to two single men they assumed were a couple. What was the response of then Labour Minister Ian Reid? In March 1988, he said that the IRPA is “intended mainly to prevent discrimination against visible minorities and he knew of ‘no outward physical characteristics of homosexuals’.”

Slowly though, the tide was shifting. A 1985 Gallup poll showed 70% of Canadians agreeing that discrimination based on sexual orientation should be illegal. This growing support was gradually beginning to be reflected in the Alberta government. In 1989, Elaine McCoy “became the first minister responsible for the province’s Human Rights Act ever to support laws protecting sexual orientation.” She promised to take the question of inclusion to the Conservative caucus despite objections from colleagues like then Agriculture Minister Ernie Isley, who couldn’t “think of any reason why we’d want to develop special legislation to cover what is a behavioural activity.” The ensuing debate in the Alberta Legislature showed how far there still was to go. New Democrat MLA William Roberts, who’d courted the LGBTQ2 vote of Edmonton Centre to get elected, was kicked out of the Assembly— the first time in thirty-eight years the power was used—when he saw the government stifling debate on the proposed amendment to include sexual orientation as a protected ground against discrimination.

Just a year after vowing her support, McCoy faced such virulent resistance that she opined it might be another eight to ten years before gays and lesbians could see themselves protected under the IRPA. Her timeline, as it turned out, was dead-on.

In 1991, lab instructor Delwin Vriend was fired from his position at King’s College in Edmonton after the College discovered he was gay. Vriend attempted to file a complaint with the Alberta Human Rights Commission but was denied because sexual orientation was not protected under human rights legislation at the time. With the support of a legal team, which included Douglas Stollery, Julie Lloyd, and Sheila Grekol, Vriend took the Commission to court. In a 1994 Provincial Court ruling, Justice Anne Russell determined that Vriend’s termination “violated anti-discrimination protections of the Individual Rights Protection Act [‘IRPA’], which she interpreted to include protection from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.” The “IRPA did not specifically prohibit such discrimination, however, Russell read it in in order to enable the legislation to comply with section 15 of the Charter.” Provincial Justice Minister Ken Rostad ordered his department to challenge the decision, essentially continuing a legal battle to win the right to openly discriminate against gay, lesbian, and bisexual Albertans. Then Labor Minister Stockwell Day flat out said that “no one is fired because they’re a homosexual,” arguing that religious institutions “should be able to ban gays.” Shockingly, the majority of the Alberta Court of Appeal overturned Russell’s decision in 1996. Alberta’s LGBTQ2 population mobilized, led by GALA, with support from the Delwin Vriend Defense Fund, to challenge this ruling and to fight the growing number of groups springing up to defend the right to openly discriminate against LGBTQ2 people. In anticipation of a loss at the Supreme Court of Canada, these groups began to petition Alberta’s government to invoke the notwithstanding clause, an overriding power written into the Charter by a group that included former Alberta Premier Lougheed.

In the 1998 Vriend v. Alberta decision, however, the Supreme Court ruled that Alberta’s failure to provide anti-discrimination protections for gays and lesbians was unconstitutional. Sexual orientation, they said, must be read into Alberta’s human rights legislation. After seven years, Vriend had achieved victory, but the question remained: would the Klein government invoke the notwithstanding clause, circumventing Canada’s highest court ruling? The answer was, simply, no. This decision was not only a symbolic victory for the LGBTQ2 community, but it also had real-world implications, which meant that it was now possible for gay, lesbian, and bisexual Albertans to start filing discrimination complaints at the province’s human rights commission. The Vriend decision has been ranked as one of the most important decisions in the history of the Supreme Court of Canada for its impact on equality rights. It would set a precedent that would later impact same-sex pension, adoption, and inheritance rights, and ultimately pave the way for the legalization of same-sex marriage. To say the Vriend decision was monumental to the LGBTQ2 community across Canada would be an understatement.

Only a few years later, still under the Klein government, the spectre of the notwithstanding clause returned. In 2002, the Ontario Superior Court ruled that barring gays and lesbians from marrying was a violation of constitutional rights. While Klein had conceded defeat in Vriend v. Alberta, he insisted his government would use the notwithstanding clause should any court try to legalize same-sex marriage in Alberta. Indeed, two years earlier, Science Minister Victor Doerksen had “put forth a private members bill that led to an amendment to the Marriage Act to entrench the definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman.” By 2005, when same-sex marriage was finally legalized, Klein called for a national referendum on the issue, which was looked on with extreme favour by the Member of Parliament for Calgary Southeast—Jason Kenney. In the end, though, marriage equality became law, with Edmonton’s Keenan Carley and Robert Bradford becoming the first same-sex couple to receive a marriage license in Alberta.

In July 1997, then Alberta Family and Social Services Minister Stockwell Day instituted a policy banning gays and lesbians from becoming foster parents. A legal challenge was launched by a woman known as “Ms. T”, who had been considered an exemplary foster parent for 17 years and had fostered more than 70 children. When the government learned she had ended her heterosexual marriage and entered into a lesbian relationship, they refused to place any more children with her, citing her “non-traditional” family structure. In justifying the government’s decision, Minister Day stated the government would only place foster and adoptive children with “natural” families, saying they needed the “most normative societal situation possible.” A provincial election and cabinet shuffle replaced Day with Lyle Oberg as Social Services Minister, who continued to defend the policy and insisted all placements were made in the “best interests of the child.” In April 1999, the Alberta government surprisingly reversed its decision and announced it would now allow private adoptions and foster care placements for same-sex couples. However, Oberg was quick to declare this wasn’t an about-face or a softening of the government’s position on LGBTQ2 rights. It was more of a “defensive ploy” to prevent the court from changing the legal definition of spouse and being forced to grant even more rights to homosexuals. Despite these policy changes, there were still many obstacles to overcome. In 2007, after years of facing both subtle and overt forms of discrimination, Blair Croft and Lance Anderson, from Edmonton, became one of the first same-sex couples to legally adopt a child through the provincial government. Their perseverance and success not only challenged and changed attitudes; it also paved the way for many other LGBTQ2 families to adopt publicly.

Schisms in Alberta politics almost always seemed to return to LGBTQ2 issues. While Premier Alison Redford was affirming queer and trans Albertans by participating in Edmonton’s 2012 Pride festivities—the first sitting Premier to do so—those further on the right of the political spectrum, like members of the Wildrose Party, were drawing connections between Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way,” an LGBTQ2 pride anthem released in 2011, and homosexuals being damned to an eternity in a “Lake of Fire.” Previously, the Wildrose Party had run on a campaign platform that promised to abolish the Alberta Human Rights Commission.

Alison Redford’s surprising election marked a significant change in the way the provincial government treated the LGBTQ2 community. For the first time, the community was invited into the Alberta Legislature for a proactive dialogue about LGBTQ2 rights. This set the stage for several changes under the Redford government, which included new government resources on homophobic bullying, recognition of gay-straight alliances, and updates to Alberta’s Vital Statistics Act to allow changes to the sex listed on birth certificates. Redford also became the first Premier in Alberta’s history to raise the pride flag over the Alberta Legislature, and she also hosted the Premier’s Pride Brunch in Support of Camp fYrefly. After Redford’s short term in office, LGBTQ2 progress continued to march forward. Under Premier Dave Hancock, the homophobic preamble in the Marriage Act was repealed. Thanks to concerted pressure from allies like Liberal MLAs Kent Hehr and Laurie Blakeman, Conservative Minister Sandra Jansen, and Deputy Premier Thomas Lukaszuk, Bill 10 was introduced, under the Prentice Government, which legislated enhanced supports and protections for gay-straight alliances and queer-straight alliances. For the very first time, there were strong and visible LGBTQ2 allies in all political parties.

The 2015 election of the New Democrats under Rachel Notley was a watershed moment and brought sweeping changes in LGBTQ2 representation and visibility. For the first time, several out and proud LGBTQ2 members were elected, including Michael Connelly, Estefan Cortes-Vargas, and Ricardo Miranda, who would become the first LGBTQ2 person to hold ministerial office when he was appointed as the Minister of Culture and Tourism. Cortes-Vargas would later come out as the first nonbinary member to hold political office in Alberta.

The NDP government continued to propel LGBTQ2 equality forward by introducing a number of important changes, which included amendments to Alberta’s human rights act to add gender identity and gender expression as protected grounds against discrimination. The NDP government also sought to strengthen protections for gay-straight alliances, improve school policy requirements, and enhance protections for LGBTQ2 school staff by introducing Bill 24, An Act to Protect Gay-Straight Alliances. This bill brought immediate opposition from Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party, the new hydra head that had grown out of the unholy merger of the PCs and the Wildrose. The crux of Bill 24 centred around the parental notification requirements of school-based clubs such as GSAs. So opposed was the UCP to Bill 24 that it was one of the first items on the chopping block after their ascension to a majority government in 2019. The Kenney government’s Bill 8 undid much of the Notley government’s work on GSAs, including removing the time limit for school principals to grant a student’s request to start one, and even removing the guarantee that words like ‘gay’ or ‘queer’ could be used in the club’s name. Policies such as this, proving a historical lack of allyship and affirmation, led to the UCP being refused official participation in Pride festivities across the province. The UCP also quickly put an end to a provincial working group established to provide recommendations to the Alberta Government to prohibit the so-called practice of “conversion therapy.”

In the 1970s and 1980s, when members of GATE and GALA appealed to Alberta’s Human Rights Commission, they did so very much on their own. They found few allies on the Legislative floor and had equally few in the press or general public. The hard work and determination of those early advocates created a legal shift, one that was concurrent with a changing social mindset that can be attributed perhaps to each and every LGBTQ2 Albertan who came out to anyone in their lives. Longtime GALA and Equal Alberta member Murray Billett often states, “discrimination hinders coming out; coming out hinders discrimination.” This is as true on the streets of daily lives as it is on the Legislative floor. There is still much work to do to protect LGBTQ2 Albertans, especially racialized queer, trans, and Two Spirit youth. Still, with growing numbers of loud and proud voices inside our community and increasing numbers of outraged voices from allies outside our community, we can continue to hold current and future governments accountable until we become, truly, equal in dignity and rights.