Nurse suspended, fined for saying men are men, giving Canada's Conservatives new path to victory

Pierre Poilievre's political comeback started with his by-election victory Monday to a new seat in Canada's House of Commons after his Conservative Party's stunning reversal of fortune in April elections, prompted by "wacko" Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's resignation.

The Alberta-based party leader's second attempted path to dethrone the Liberals under Mark Carney may now run through gender-ideology disputes in the adjoining province, where expressing the wrong views can imperil a medical license.

Vancouver nurse Amy Hamm's month-long license suspension and $93,639.80 fine, for expressing gender-critical views online and through her billboard praising Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, didn't get even a vague allusion in Poilievre's victory speech days later. Neither did threats to gender-critical views or speech policing in general.

In a speech focused on crime, gun rights and the economy, the closest Poilievre got was sharing an anecdote from a female prison guard "who was tied up and viciously assaulted by a violent criminal" at the penitentiary where she worked.

But since Wednesday afternoon, the politico known as "Skippy" has shared his own and others' outrage at least three times about the March 13 professional misconduct finding and Aug. 14 penalties against Hamm and what they say about freedom in Canada.

"This is authoritarian censorship," Poilievre wrote on X, sharing a National Post column Monday criticizing the "grotesque attack on free speech" by the British Columbia College of Nurses and Midwives, whose investigation of Hamm dates back four years. "We must restore free speech and free thinking in a free country," Poilievre said.

A U.K. Telegraph columnist portrayed Hamm's punishment as a turning point for its Commonwealth of Nations sibling, "a case study in Canada’s descent into tyranny."

Poilievre reposted fellow Conservative lawmakers Leslyn Lewis, who questioned whether BC medical professionals can "safely do their job if they are punished for acknowledging biological realities" crucial in medicine, and his predecessor, Andrew Scheer, who quoted English author G.K. Chesterton's 1926 prediction that "secular society" would soon punish objective truth.

Hamm said she spoke to Poilievre on the phone Wednesday. "He is a man who understands the issues regarding protection of our sex-based rights," and "I’m feeling positive about Canada in a way that I haven’t in a long time," she said. (Rowling, who has previously praised Hamm, hasn't spoken about her on X since the penalty was handed down.)

Hamm appealed the finding to the BC Supreme Court in April and is considering appealing the penalty, according to her lawyer Lisa Bildy. The panel agreed with her request to stay the suspension and costs award to BCCNM pending Hamm's decision.

She shared her donation page in light of reader interest, as well as that of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, which is sponsoring her case and says Hamm was punished for speaking while identifying as a nurse in "three articles and one podcast episode."

Last month, Hamm also filed complaints against BCCNM and Vancouver Coast Health, which fired her shortly after the finding, with the BC Human Rights Tribunal. Bildy shared redacted complaints with Just the News after JCCF said it wasn't sure it could legally share them.

The tribunal spurned a former registered nurse and JCCF client in another investigation over pure speech, however, fining Kirsten Olsen $10,000 for privately warning her transgender friend and tenant about a planned mastectomy. She appealed to the Supreme Court.

'Single mother who receives no child support'

BCCNM uses the increasingly contested U.S. administrative law model in which purported judges work for federal agencies and rarely rule against them, having a three-member panel of its Discipline Committee evaluate Hamm. 

It portrayed its monthlong suspension as shaped by previous discipline for similar behavior and mitigating factors such as cooperation in the probe, and the cost award as a steal for Hamm, though most of it will pay BCCNM's expert witnesses.

BCCNM wanted a three-month suspension and $163,053, while Hamm suggested a "reprimand," 10-14 days and $40,115 in light of her past three months of unemployment and status as a "single mother who receives no child support." 

The fact that there was no "direct victim" from her comments, least of all a patient, does not change that her "discriminatory and derogatory" comments about "transgender people" – saying that sex is real and females deserve their own private spaces – "were disseminated on forums that would have been available to a large audience," the panel said.

"This was not a lapse in professional judgment" but "a pattern of online behaviour" that shows Hamm did not understand "her ethical obligations as a nursing professional," the panel said. 

Because "the expert evidence established the risk of harm which statements of this nature engender," it doesn't matter that "no transgender people came forward.

It denied Hamm's claim that the "emotional toll she has suffered" from four years of investigation and the "discipline process amounts to a form of punishment, citing the absence of "medical evidence" while acknowledging it was "stressful" for her. The fact that Hamm is an "experienced nurse" of 13 years with a clean record actually makes her behavior worse, it said.

She could have "express[ed] gender critical views without making statements which denigrate and discriminate against transgender persons," so her seniority and experience justify "a more significant penalty," according to the panel. It's "speculative" that the process could have been avoided if BCCNM just told her to remove references to being a nurse, as Hamm said.

Told Trudeau to 'butt out' but now wants to butt in?

Poilievre's foil Fae Johnstone, executive director of Queer Momentum and a male who identifies as a woman, has denounced and mocked the potential PM several times since the Hamm penalty, then sneered at the "far right" as "sad unhappy people with nothing better to do" than flood Johnstone's feed with negative mentions in response.

"I think it's a dangerous precedent for a federal party leader to politicize the workings of a regulated profession," whose responsibilities Hamm "was unable to uphold," Johnstone wrote in an X thread. Poilievre is hypocritical for telling "Trudeau to butt out of provincial jurisdiction vis-a-vis trans youth" while intruding on provincial regulators, a second thread said.

"Poilievre wants you worried about free speech and censorship so you're focused on that while he and his provincial counterparts strip transgender people of their fundamental rights and freedoms," which will make it "easier to strip rights and freedoms from the next group," Johnstone said in a third thread.

"Pierre Poilievre is back to remind the alt-right that he is their man in Parliament," Liberal Hedy Fry, the longest-serving MP, wrote on X. "He is fanning the flames of hatred against trans and nonbinary people under the guise of freedom of speech and medical integrity." 

Mia Hughes, who exposed candid conversations within the World Professional Association for Transgender Health about serious side effects from medicalized gender transitions, pushed Poilievre and other leaders in the opposite direction. She's also a senior fellow at the MacDonald-Laurier Institute, "the most cited think-tank in Canada’s parliament."

Posting Canadian teacher training materials that tell young boys and girls they don't necessarily have penises and vaginas, respectively, Hughes said "every country that allowed this deranged, flat-earth level insanity to be taught to children" as science "must launch national inquiries."