Chapter Two — Who Wants a Notwithstanding Clause? If Bill 2 was the opening punch, Bill 9 was the moment the government stopped pretending the notwithstanding clause was some rare constitutional emergency tool and started treating it like a house brand. Not a last resort. Not a grim necessity. More like something they were perfectly happy to pull off the shelf, slap on the counter, and ring through like it was part of the weekly special. That is what makes Bill 9 different. Bill 2 showed this government was willing to use section 33 against workers when bargaining got inconvenient. Bill 9 showed something deeper and uglier: they were now willing to build an entire ideological project around constitutional override and call it protection. Bill 9, the “Protecting Alberta’s Children Statutes Amendment Act, 2025,” was introduced on November 18, 2025, moved through debate over several sitting days, and received Royal Assent on December 11, 2025. The government’s own public-facing materials are unusually blunt about what the bill does. They do not bury the override. They advertise it. Alberta’s official Bill 9 page says the Act invokes the notwithstanding clauses in the “Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” the “Alberta Bill of Rights,” and the “Alberta Human Rights Act” to shield three separate clusters of law from being struck down by the courts. That is the first thing to understand about Bill 9: this was not one override attached to one narrow dispute. It was a multi-front package. The first cluster dealt with medical care for trans youth. The government said Bill 9 would protect children by prohibiting gender reassignment surgery for minors under 18 and prohibiting puberty blockers and hormone treatments for the purpose of gender reassignment for children under 16. The government’s language was all about preserving future choices and protecting kids from irreversible decisions. The second cluster dealt with schools. Bill 9 amended the “Education Act” so that if a student under 16 wanted to use a different name or pronoun at school, parental notification and consent would be required. It also moved instruction on gender identity, sexual orientation, and human sexuality into an opt-in framework rather than an opt-out one. The third cluster dealt with sport. Bill 9 worked alongside the “Fairness and Safety in Sport Act” and related regulations to restrict participation in women’s and girls’ amateur sport to those born female, again under the government’s banner of fairness and safety. Taken separately, each of those fronts was already politically explosive. Taken together, they form the actual meaning of Bill 9: a bundled culture-war package, wrapped in parental-rights language, armed with pre-emptive override protection, and pushed through as though Alberta was facing some urgent emergency rather than a deliberate ideological choice. That bundling matters. A lot. One of the recurring habits of this government is to hide structural aggression inside rhetorical packaging that sounds calm, wholesome, and protective. CHOICE. FAIRNESS. PARENTS. SAFETY. FREEDOM. It is a familiar script by now. Bill 9 was sold as a defence of children and families. But if you have to use the notwithstanding clause in three directions at once to make your policy survive scrutiny, you are not merely clarifying the law. You are telling the public, in advance, that rights protections are obstacles you have chosen to drive around. And that is the real point of this chapter. Bill 9 was not just another controversial bill in a controversial government’s pile. It was the normalization chapter. The government was no longer acting as though override use required embarrassment, hesitation, or some grave constitutional justification. Quite the opposite. The official Alberta page for the bill framed invocation of the notwithstanding clause as a necessary and principled move. In other words, they were not apologizing for using extraordinary power. They were campaigning on it. That shift is not cosmetic. It is political conditioning. When governments use section 33 once, they usually at least understand they are stepping onto dangerous constitutional ground. When they start using it repeatedly and publicly branding it as common-sense governance, they are trying to retrain the public to stop flinching. That is exactly why critics reacted so sharply. The Alberta Teachers’ Association saw exactly that pattern. On the day Bill 9 was introduced, ATA president Jason Schilling called it the government’s fourth use of the notwithstanding clause in less than a month and warned that normalizing the clause was dangerous. By the time Bill 9 passed, the ATA was even blunter: the government was stripping vulnerable Albertans of Charter protections and attempting to erase identities, not protect them. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association was no less direct. When the bill was introduced, the CCLA called it a deeply troubling escalation and said the government was using the notwithstanding clause to shield laws that threatened the rights of trans and gender-diverse people. You do not need to agree with every sentence of every advocacy group to see the pattern here. The criticism was not random outrage. It was a response to something very specific: a government using override powers BEFORE courts could even weigh in, and doing so across multiple areas of life at once. That is what makes Bill 9 bigger than the policy details inside it. This chapter is not about relitigating every medical, educational, and athletic claim the government made. Those claims matter, and the real-world harms matter, but the deeper significance is constitutional and democratic. Bill 9 was an attempt to build legal Kevlar around a political agenda. It told Albertans that if ordinary rights scrutiny might get in the way, the government would simply try to pre-empt the scrutiny. That is not confidence in the strength of your law. That is confidence in your willingness to bulldoze guardrails. And there is another reason Bill 9 belongs at the centre of this mega-thread. Because it makes the through-line impossible to ignore. In Chapter One, the government used override logic to crush a teachers’ strike and impose a labour settlement. Here, in Chapter Two, the same government used override logic to shield a broad ideological package touching health care, schools, and sport. Different targets. Same governing instinct. Rights are fine until they get expensive. Process is fine until it slows the agenda down. Institutions are fine until they refuse to be obedient. That is not a series of isolated decisions. That is a model. The names and slogans change, but the pattern does not. Manufacture urgency. Wrap coercion in reassurance. Present control as protection. Then dare the courts, the critics, and the public to keep up. Why it matters: Bill 9 was the point where the notwithstanding clause stopped looking like a constitutional emergency brake and started looking like a routine instrument of government. It bundled multiple rights-affecting measures into one protected package and signalled that, for this government, constitutional safeguards were not boundaries to respect but hurdles to clear. Final Thought The title of this thread is not rhetorical decoration. WHO WANTS A NOTWITHSTANDING CLAUSE? By Fall 2025, Alberta had an answer. This government did. Not reluctantly. Not sparingly. Not with visible shame. It wanted the clause because the clause let it move faster than scrutiny, louder than dissent, and farther than rights protections were supposed to let it go. Bill 9 did not just use the override. It normalized wanting it. bsky.app
Chapter Three — The Looting Continues Not every chapter in this mega-thread needs a notwithstanding clause taped to its forehead.
@unroll.skywriter.blue Thread unroll, please.