Compiled by Dylan C. Robertson & Victoria Salvas

This election means death. Not only have Ottawa scrums, filibusters, and drawn-out committees been killed, pieces of legislation making their way through parliament have all met a harsh end as politicians take to the campaign trail.

Before a bill becomes law, it is introduced in either the House of Commons or the Senate. Subsequently the bill goes through readings where it is introduced, given a number code and debated. It can be read again, amended then passed, from the House to the Senate but only becomes law if it is given Royal Assent by the Governor General.

But bills are stopped in their tracks when an election is called. We tracked down the people who pioneered five of the most important bills that died on the order paper when the writ dropped. We asked what they thought of the abrupt death of their projects and if they’ll attempt rebooting them.

While government bills (titled C- with a number under 201) can be reintroduced at an advanced phase with the consent of the House, private members’s bills and motions are entered in a lottery to determine their Order of Precedence, meaning the order in which they can be re-introduced. Only 30 members per session have their motions considered, although the list is replenished if all motions are dealt with.

Here’s a look at the five bills that may or may not rise again:

1. Cheaper HIV Drugs:

Bill C-393, An Act to amend the Patent Act (drugs for international humanitarian purposes), was introduced by then NDP MP Judy Wasylycia-Leis in May 2009. After she left to run for mayor of Winnipeg, the bill was adopted by another NDP MP, Paul Dewar.

The bill, which came to be known as “the AIDS drug bill” would’ve allowed generic drug makers to supply their products to developing countries, so they could fight diseases like tuberculosis and malaria, and help the world’s 15 million AIDS victims. Apotex Inc. had promised to make much-needed antiretrovirals for children, should the legislaiton pass. The bill, which was passed earlier this month by the House of Commons, was sabotaged by its review committee and then by the Conservatives’s attempt to effectively whip the senate, feeling it would hinder Big Pharma.

“It’s pretty outrageous,” said Richard Elliott, executive director of the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network. “This bill had a lot of potential, and we pushed really hard to get it to pass. We had a lot of support from MPs in all parties.”

Dewar said he plans to reintroduce the bill. “We have to abolish the senate though, first,” he laughed. “That’s my plan. Well I’m just joking… but not really.” Dewar noted the bill was lucky to be successfully transferred after Wasylycia-Leis’s leave, as it is not an automatic process. “It was revived when actual co-operation broke out in the House of Commons,” he said. “Through unanimous consent, I was able to pick the bill up. “I’m ready, able, and willing to carry it forward after the election,” said Dewar, who hopes it ranks high in the order or precedence. “There’s so much public support for it. I don’t think they could get away with this again.”

2. Civilizing parliament:

Private Member’s Motion M-517 proposed a reform of Question Period. Conservative MP Michael Chong’s pet project aimed to civilize parliament’s most savage — and ironically unproductive — 45 minutes each sitting day.

The motion sought to strengthen how much discipline a speaker can give, lengthen the alloted time for each question and answer, and aimed at “examining the convention that the minister questioned need not respond.”

“Parliament needs to be reformed and I think the reform of parliament should begin with the reform of Question Period,” said Chong. If passed, the motion would have also stipulated who should be asked questions, most notably dedicating Wednesday exclusively for questions to the Prime Minister, and requiring ministers be present for two of the other four days. Chong noted that he was listed in the Order of Precedence for the first time in six years, and said he would re-table his motion in the rare chance he was listed for the next session. “I’m disappointed that the committee didn’t have a chance to deal with it before the election.”

Chong explained that while many members add motions and bills to the order paper solely to generate publicity for an issue, he fully intends to enact this reform. “I’ll continue to work on this issue through whatever mechanisms are available to me after the election,” said Chong. “Because this problem isn’t going away and I think Canadians want it to be addressed.”

3. Protecting trans rights:

Bill C-389, An Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code (gender identity and gender expression), was a private member’s bill sponsored by NDP MP Bill Siksay. Introduced in early 2009, the legislation would have make it illegal to discriminate based on gender identity, and aimed to protect transgender individuals by amending the Human Rights Act.

These amendments would have also been made to the Criminal Code, rendering these acts of discrimination hate crimes. The House passed the bill in February, against Stephen Harper’s wishes. However, the fact that it received “unanimous support from the Bloc, several Conservatives, and the Liberals bodes well for the next parliament” says Siksay. The MP is confident in the future of the bill; passing it again will demonstrate the governments’ “commitment to human rights.”

4. Improving First Nations’ water:

Bill S-11 Safe Drinking Water for First Nations Act, was introduced in May 2010 and would have developed federal regulations for governing water provision, disposal and quality standards in First Nations communities.

An issue that has received much attention recently is the issue of providing First Nations reserves with safe drinking water. An assessment from 2001-2001 found that three quarters of the drinking water systems in First Nations communities were at risk.

Despite the dire situation on many reserves, many First Nations leaders criticized the bill, feeling they were left out of the creating of the legislation and not offered funding to get it off the ground. The Assembly of First Nations felt that the bill presented lofty goals but sparse plans for financial investment and support, which in the long run, could leave reserves in worse condition.

5. Copyright reform:

Bill C-32, An Act to amend the Copyright Act, was the third attempt at copyright reform killed by an election call, dragging on a 14-year effort.

The bill sparked controversy for attempting to criminalize the use and promotion of software that circumvents digital locks, generating high-profile criticism, a minister’s comment that critics were “radical extremists,” and an indutry-led astroturfing campaign. But the bill also aimed at tackling online piracy, and making it legal to transfer music from CDs to iPods.

MP Tony Clement, who introduced the bill as Minister of Industry, told us he plans to reintroduce the bill if re-elected. “It’s just another example of important legislation that has now been discontinued because of the opposition parties passing a motion of non-confidence,” said Clement. “This is a very necessary piece of legislation to help regularize certain habits of consumers and also protect artists from wealth-destroying pirates. “I’m hoping that if we get a majority government, we can actually concentrate on the issues like C-32 and privacy protection and other aspects of the digital economy.”

Best Canadian Essays 2010

Katherine Ashenburg on cosmetic surgery, Ira Basen on citizen journalism, Will Braun on the tendency to customize Christ, Tyee Bridge on the power of fiction, Abou Farman on the Iranian Revolution, Paul Gallant on future of gay activism,Lisa Gregoire on life in Nunavut, Danielle Groen explores the brain when in love, Elizabeth Hay on the summer of her last poems, Jason McBride prepares for the end of the world, Carolyn Morris on people forced to live underground in Canada, Katharine Sandiford on the longest dogsled race in North America, Andrew Steinmetz on his family history and the Second World War, Timothy Taylor on a Spanish pilgrimage route, Chris Turner on the prodigal Alberta band, Nora Underwood on the future of farming and food.

Carolyn Morris’s excellent essay is reprinted from Toronto Life, but she also wrote about undocumented migrants needing health care in Canada in our March-April 2009 issue, if you’re looking for a bit of further reading. You also might be interested in reading Alison Lee’s “The New Face of Porn,” about feminism and pornography, from our November-December 2008 issue, which appeared in the 2009 Best Canadian Essays collection.

Scottish Flag and Rainbow Flag, together at last

I’m back in Scotland this month, for my first trip home since Christmas. Coming home is always incredible — a constant onslaught of the long-lost familiar — but being back also reminds me of some of the reasons I left in the first place.

I could give you a few of those, but lurking behind them all was a general sense of being at odds with my own country. Britain is not a place I’ve ever felt particularly safe as a queer, non gender-conforming person.

I don’t know how valid this discomfort is, or how much of it now is down to reverse culture shock, but it’s certainly true that I stick out here. People do a double-take when I walk into public washrooms. All of my gay friends have experienced street harassment of some kind, some of it vicious: an acquaintance was attacked last year by a man who followed her into a gay bar. Some of it merely irritating: for years I cut my own hair at home because I despaired of finding a hairdresser who would cut it short enough without hesitation and hand-wringing. In Toronto nobody looks twice at me, nobody yells at me in the street, and my hairdresser is queer.

Two years ago when I was a reviewer at the Edinburgh Fringe, I saw a stage adaptation of Stonewall, in which almost every straight person in the audience walked out, one by one. They’d obviously come looking for a bit of camp humour, but when it became obvious the transsexual character had lines and wasn’t just there to don fabulous outfits and sing, the uncomfortable fidgeting began. The same summer, I gave three stars to a Glaswegian comedian who afterwards accused me of being a lesbian with no sense of humour because I mentioned on my blog that his act was homophobic.

There is some less anecdotal evidence to support my sense that queers in Britain are worse off than those in Canada. In the news last weekend — buried behind five pages of Swine Flu — was a lesbian couple who have had to fight in the courts for access to National Health Service funding for in-vitro fertilization. Their fight has not been with the health service itself, but with their “regional primary care trust,” the body given the final say on matters of access to funding. Which GP you visit in Britain is determined by postal code, so simply switching doctors isn’t an option.

This story is interesting, because a few weeks ago while researching a story on transphobia in Britain I discovered that this same postcode lottery also means that transgendered people in some areas were being refused NHS funding for hormones and gender reassignment surgery.

This system is not all that different from the variation in treatments between Canadian provinces — gender reassignment is covered, for instance, in Ontario but not in Alberta — but I suspect the difference between ten provinces in Canada and 152 primary care trusts in Britain makes Britain’s a less visible problem. It’s entirely possible that you wouldn’t discover, say, that the Oxfordshire primary care trust routinely refuses to fund gender reassignment until you actually tried to access it.

Meanwhile, the Isle of Lewis just held its first civil partnership ceremony, six years after civil partnerships were introduced for same-sex couples in Britain. Reports in the press of a reluctant local registrar and the council’s tight-lipped promise to fulfill its “legal obligation” to carry out the service sounds like something from another era.

So as fantastic as it is to be home, I’m always a bit relieved to head back to Canada. Because increasingly I feel integrated there in a way that I never did in Scotland. And Toronto — for all that I am still bewildered by the traffic and I can only remember the names of five provinces at a time — feels safer and friendlier.

Cate Simpson is a freelance journalist and reviews and web editor for Shameless magazine. She lives in Toronto.

Only her plastic surgeon knows for sure. Image courtesy: ABC/Bob D'Amico

Has a transsexual ruined your life lately? Because if you believe what you see on TV, trans people are lurking everywhere, just waiting to pounce on unassuming heterosexuals.

Trans characters on TV are like those early depictions of gay men, before they started cropping up as every woman’s best-friend-slash-fashion-adviser. It’s depressing to argue that the amount of fleshing-out required to outfit such characters from a pool of stereotypes actually represents progress, but even by this measure trans characters have a long way to go.

The majority of trans people on television are male-to-female (meaning they were born as male but identify as female), and the dramatic crux is nearly always The Big Reveal: the moment when we realize that a beautiful woman was — gasp — formerly a dude. Inherent in this storyline is always the implication of deception, the idea that a trans woman is just a very well disguised lie that is bound to be found out eventually.

Take for example Alex Meade in Ugly Betty, whom everyone presumes dead until he shows up during Fashion Week transformed into the blonde and beautiful Alexis Meade. She then allows her own brother to hit on her before dramatically revealing her true identity in front of a room full of people. Myth #1: trans people don’t want to quietly get on with their lives; they want the entire world to pay rapt attention to their exciting new gender.

My favourite over-the-top trans character though is Ava Moore from the second season of Nip/Tuck. The disappointing thing about this storyline is that a trans character on a show about plastic surgery could have been truly groundbreaking. We could have been allowed to witness her entire transition, made to understand what she was feeling and why sexual reassignment surgery was necessary to her own personal happiness. Instead, we get the same tired old stuff.

Ava, who works as a life coach, is retained by plastic surgeon Sean to help his 17 year-old son Matt. But Matt and Ava spend a little too much time one-on-one and start sleeping together. The age difference has everyone on edge, and when Matt and Ava decide to run away together, Sean’s partner Christian threatens to kill Ava if she doesn’t break it off with Matt. Then, just to make his point, he rapes her — discovering in so doing that her vaginal canal is suspiciously shallow. Christian flees the scene, telling Sean and his wife that “Ava’s a man.” Myth #2: even when nothing male remains of her, a transsexual woman is still, somehow, a man.

For reasons that are never explained, Christian and Sean set to work trying to track down the plastic surgeon who performed Ava’s sex reassignment. Maybe that’s just what you do when you discover a transsexual in your midst: you try to find out where s/he came from.

Ava’s plastic surgeon reveals that Ava had first met him as Avery, a gay man who had fallen in love with him. But, being straight, the doctor could not return Avery’s love. So he agreed to transform him into a woman. Myth #3: being gay and being transgender are basically the same thing. Also, gay guys will do anything to make straight guys love them.

I swear, up until this point Nip/Tuck is not as hokey as the above episode implies. But introduce a trans character into a TV show and suddenly the whole thing becomes a Shakespearian farce.

Throughout the episode where all of this drama unfolds, Ava is repeatedly referred to as a medical marvel — as the “hope diamond” of transsexuals — because (Myth #3) trans women don’t usually pass so flawlessly. At the end of the episode, Matt is accepted back into the loving arms of his family—- who choose not to tell him about Ava’s past for fear of his being “sexually ruined for the rest of his life.” Ava skips town. Her secret is out, so obviously she can never work in Miami again.

Even The L Word is pretty uncomfortable with its trans characters. The first was Ivan, a drag king who seems to primarily identify as male. Ivan starts spending time with Kit — a straight woman — which makes Kit’s sister Bette immediately uncomfortable. “She is in love with you and she wants to be your husband,” Bette tells her, correcting Kit’s use of male pronouns while simultaneously stressing her distaste for all this reckless gender-bending. Myth #4: a trans person who appears attracted to you always has sinister intentions.

Then there’s Max, a female-to-male transsexual who, once he starts taking male hormones, begins behaving like masculinity run amok: acting jealous when his girlfriend talks to other guys, becoming physically aggressive with her and throwing temper tantrums right, left and centre. In the final season, Max gets pregnant and is abandoned by his partner. Which brings us neatly to Myth #5: trans people don’t get happy endings.

Television, we can do better.

Cate Simpson is a freelance journalist and the web editor for Shameless magazine. She lives in Toronto.