OTTAWA — Federal Labour Minister Seamus O'Regan spoke strongly in favour of keeping LGBTQ rights enshrined in labour standards this week while a United Nations agency faced a push to remove them.
Some countries in Africa and the Middle East had called on the International Labour Organization to cut phrasing from its budget about protecting workers on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
O'Regan,who is gay, urged the meeting in Geneva to avoid a backslide on hard-won rights for vulnerable workers.
"My love for my husband will never again be negotiated by a government. And I can tell you that I will never let it be negotiated away or demeaned by anyone in this place, or anywhere," he told the meeting.
"I am a vulnerable worker. I am Canada's labour minister, but I am gay and I am married. I would not be able to work, or I would be jailed, or I would be condemned to death, if I happened to have been born in some of the member states before me."
The ILO is a United Nations agency that sets international standards on issues such as child labour, the right to unionize and anti-discrimination law.
The agency passed its budget after days ofdebate during which countries such as Oman argued, according to official meeting minutes, that the organization was using "divisive language" that "went against the universality of human values."
Pakistan deemed the existing phrasing "contentious," while Libya said it was "silencing points of view" and risked "interfering with the sovereignty of states and their rights to uphold their religious and cultural beliefs."
Canada's delegation spoke on behalf of a bloc of mostly European countries, saying the ILO has a duty to protect groups that are most at risk of exploitation in the workplace.
"Once rights are achieved … we will not stand by and have them brushed over, put back in the closet, or taken away," O'Regan said on stage.
The ILO ultimately kept its phrasing, but added a note that the agency recognized that some countries expressed different positions on the issue.
O'Regan told delegates it took Canada decades to recognize LGBTQ rights, and that conservative groups who warned about dire consequences from same-sex marriage were in the wrong.
"No one married a horse. No one exchanged vows with a sheep. People just became free. Free to be who they already were," he said.
"I was born this way. It was not taught. I wasn't groomed. This is as natural to me now as the colour of my eyes. It is who I am."
This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 14, 2023.
Dylan Robertson, The Canadian Press
