Is Doug Ford’s PC Government Finally Standing Up to Woke Lies?

A recent Toronto Star opinion piece offers glimmer of hope

Image from the Taylor Institute

By Igor Stravinsky (Teacher, commentator)

The opinion piece below was written by Toronto Area Teacher D. Tyler Robinson and published by the Toronto Star on February 25th 2024. Robinson is a Business Studies Teacher, according to the Ontario College of Teachers, which also reports that he has not yet completed the mandatory sexual abuse training. Better get on that Tyler! I know, it’s tough to find time when you’re so busy telling Canadians what a racist shithole we live in.

The opinion piece is the typical kind of woke nonsense we teachers are subjected to on a regular basis at our “professional learning” (PL) sessions. In it we “learn” that

• Blacks suffered in slavery in Canada for 260 years

• Blacks living in Canada today are descended from “stolen people” who were forcibly brought to a “stolen land” (pre-confederation colonies in what is now Canada)

• Kids become racist in early childhood and we need “antiracist” curriculum to counter this “fact”

• Racialized kids need to have their racial identities affirmed so they can stand up to all the discrimination they will inevitably face in racist Canada later in life

• Anything “Eurocentric” is bad, and all kids need their (non-European) identities “explored, appreciated, and celebrated” regularly at school 

School Boards have jumped on board with all of the above, and much, much more like it. At our PL sessions, we have learned to keep quiet. Suggesting that the above statements are inaccurate, exaggerations, misleading, or of questionable merit will land you in a world of trouble. Just look at what happened to former TDSB principal Richard Bilkszto when he dared to question the claim from “anti-racist” consultant Kike Ojo-Thompson (a former PDSB teacher) that Canada is more racist than the United States. The total shunning he experienced from the TDSB, his Principals’ Association, and his fellow educators led to a mental health spiral so devastating that he took his own life.

Robinson’s opinion piece is certainly a frustrating and depressing read for most of us teachers. Every school has a handful of teachers like Robinson, and we learn to keep a healthy distance from them. Anything you say around them can be construed as a “microaggression”, earning you a disciplinary letter, an Ontario College of Teachers investigation, or worse. Whether what you said is factual or not is irrelevant in the disciplinary process. It is sufficient that you “caused harm” by what you said. These days, feelings are more important than facts. Saying for example, “few black people lived in Canada prior to the 1970s” or “not everything that happened in the Indian Residential Schools was bad” can land you in hot water.

But there is one faint glimmer of hope in this otherwise depressing opinion piece if you are able to keep reading. It seems Robinson and a bunch of his postmodernist, critical theory-embracing buddies wrote a course and, so far, the Ministry of Education has not accredited it. That is really good news! After all, people can't just write courses and expect them to be approved. It doesn’t work like that. You have to approach the Ministry with the idea for a course and get it approved in principle, then you start writing and there are multiple opportunities for the Ministry to seek input from multiple education stakeholders along the way and make adjustments. 

But lately, that whole system has been bypassed in so many of our institutions so often.  As soon as a handful of “anti-racist” activists start making a fuss everyone bows down and all the normal protocols are disregarded and the activists get what they want, which is always counter to what the majority of members of the organization would support. The majority still embrace the traditional liberal principles of equality, fairness, individual rights and freedoms, and most importantly, the pursuit of the truth in all matters, no matter where that may lead.  

After giving the anti-racists a free hand for several years, and allowing the education system to descend into academic mediocrity and general disorder and violence, is Doug Ford starting to wake up (no pun intended) to the reality that the “anti-racists” will never be satisfied? Even if the curriculum were 100% activities based on “anti-racism” they would still complain more was needed. And these activists will never admit for one second that any of their ill-conceived reforms are not working. Asking for evidence is “colonial” and “oppressive”. 

My guess is that Ford thought appeasement was the easiest, lowest cost (politically) option to deal with this surge in postmodern ideology. He hoped it would be a flash-in-the-pan fad, so he held his nose and went along with it. But is he now starting to see that wokeism has a pretty long shelf life and in fact, in the longer term, these misguided policies will start to cost him politically? 

I’m not holding my breath, but we better all hope so, because if the Liberals or the NDP win the next election they will double down on “anti-racism” in the schools and elsewhere. That will make what we have seen so far look like a picnic.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read There’s a Teacher Shortage in Ontario

BREAKING NEWS: James Pew has contributed a chapter to the new book Grave Error: How The Media Misled us (And the Truth about Residential Schools). You can read about it here - The Rise of Independent Canadian Researchers

Also, for more evidence of the ideological indoctrination in Canadian education, read Yes, schools are indoctrinating kids! And also, Yes, The University is an Indoctrination Camp!

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