Outlier Among Outliers - The Most Hated Candidate in Last Year's Ontario Elections

A Weekly Report on the Canadian Gender Wars - June 24, 2023 Vol 21

Rainbow

By

Shannon B Douglas

As many readers will know, I was one of a very few school trustee candidates in Canada last fall who ran on a so-called Bigoted, Anti-Trans platform. At least that’s the way I was characterized in the media.  To be fair and frank, I chose to run a gender critical campaign against Lyra Evans, the only trans-identified incumbent school trustee in Canada (now chair of the Ottawa School Board).

This is my Oscar-The-Grouch Face

As far as I could tell, I was the most explicit candidate in the country about the dangers and issues with queer theory in schools.  I ran against Lyra Evans because he is a self-described “unapologetic progressive,” and has a small mind with a track record of endorsing terrible policies. Among those terrible policies are those that he pushes gender indoctrination of young children; and he has demonstrated he will use state power to bully, to defame and to encourage violent mobs to intimidate people he doesn’t agree with.

I began my campaign a year ago this week.

At the time, Peter Wallace, who I met during the campaign, was doing incredible work with his Blueprint for Canada.  He began building his broad and comprehensive online resource for parents across Ontario during that campaign, running against Critical Theory and social justice indoctrination in Kawartha Lakes schools.

Collectively, though loosely affiliated, along with people like Catherine Kronas (Hamilton), Cristina Bairos-Fernandez (Waterloo), Chanel Pfahl (Ottawa), we became known as the far right anti-woke slate and we were identified and reported as such in the MSM.  We were the first dissidents standing up and running. We knew it would be difficult and that the media, through one-sided reporting and inflammatory language, would legitimize the kind of abuse we all took.   

News this week, from the Samara Center for Democracy, which uses an A.I. to analyze online abuse of election candidates confirmed what we all experienced.  They reported that school trustee elections were the most controversial of all levels of the fall election; that Ottawa was the worst of all regions for vitriol, and they also found that proportionally, I was the most abused election Candidate in Ottawa followed closely by my friend and friend of Woke Watch Canada, Chanel Pfahl.

We knew that the woke progressives were organized, that we would be mobbed and attacked and that we would hear every insult and accusation imaginable. And then some. We had all debated for months, jostling with each other like penguins at the edge of an ice cliff,

“Should we go for it?”

“Who’s going to go first?”

We were leaning forward, looking to see just how dangerous the waters would be if we dove in, and I am very proud to have stood with such amazing people of integrity in the face of such vile attacks.

I’m taking stock this week, as I’ve been watching the many reports of parent protests across the country.  Those parents are all expressing the same things I built my campaign around and more and more of them are rising all across the country. Thousands and thousands of them awakened to woke, keeping kids home from Pride Events, in part tipped into action by the brave work that so many did to get this into the public debate last year.

Anthony Furey, now candidate for Mayor of Toronto, did a follow-up piece after the October 24th election about the school board races and summed up the issue extremely well. An excellent short video of his take is available if you check out the link to the TNC article by clicking on the image.

None of our slate were elected though Catherine Kronas and Cristina Bairos-Fernandez put in strong showings. The fact we didn’t win was inconsequential. What was consequential was that we stood up to show people that they weren’t alone in their common concerns and that it was possible to stand up against the woke monopoly of school boards in Ontario and Canada.

So much has changed in the last twelve months. In August, while public coverage of the gender scandal was still just a trickle, the editorial board of the National Post took an official position critical of gender ideology, pointing to the lack of science supporting it, and warning of the damages it inflicts upon children.  Through the fall campaign more and more parents began speaking out and the school boards themselves, caricatures of functioning bodies, demonstrated their lack of integrity and their dysfunctions so widely and so consistently that it became easier and easier to confront them. 

Parents organizing in Halton against a teacher and board that made themselves international laughing stocks moved the needle in exposing the absurdities the status quo is capable of engaging in. 

By January it was clear that the toxicities of Queer Theory were becoming more widely apparent, and coverage was expanding to greater and greater degrees, enough for me to write a weekly summary about.   

It’s unavoidable now and the public conversation and push back has grown bigger than a weekly report can summarize. It has permeated every facet of our lives, and now institutions and corporations are stepping up to setting boundaries with the rainbow movement.  Some of them quietly and voluntarily, and some of them paying prices in the double-digit billions for pushing the rainbow.  Even with continuing positive narrative support of outlets like CBC, CTV, Global and G&M, and the millions of dollars in government grants to promote LGBTQIA+, the rainbow mafia are losing their script, and Pride as an institution is being justifiably confronted for its excesses. 

The histrionic rhetoric is being understood for what it is, as an emotional perversion of language used to silence and intimidate people who would question even the most basic assertions of the radical trans activists by stating the obvious fact that a woman is an adult human female.

Mass absences and large protests will only grow in numbers and frequency on this issue now. The movement has a life of its own and it has become impossible to write a meaningful weekly summary of the significant and now daily developments across the country. 

There have been at least two more protests announced in Ottawa this week. One on Monday, and another planned for Saturday to say nothing of the protests in Niagara, Hamilton, Calgary, Vancouver, & PEI.  

Christians and Muslims and Sikhs and other groups of sane normal conscientious parents are all standing up together.  There should be nothing surprising about this because normal parents don’t want kids in grade nine being exposed to materials teaching about autofelation and felching by external “Planned Parenthood” consultants as happened in a Saskatchewan school this week, in a type of incident that’s coming to light more and more frequently and involving kids of younger and younger ages.   

In telling signs of guilt, where boards know they have no leg to stand on, these defenders of what we can rightly call child abuse and grooming, have gone from name-calling, to cutting off mics, to calling police on concerned parents, to now shutting the public out of meetings completely.

They are perpetuating toxicities like abusive family systems do, where the authoritarian exerts extraordinary pressures on the system to maintain a public appearance of virtue, and a happy healthy family, while trying to keep control of anyone in the system that might point out the abuses, the addictions, and the rampant toxic outcomes. 

At a certain point, the game is up, and the dysfunctions of the abusive systems are always exposed.  It’s going to be especially dreadful as we tear down the lies of the gender inclusion cult and the public discovers what these queer activists have been hiding by bullying all criticism into silence.

The Toronto Star(!!!) this week ran an opinion piece about the disaster that is showing itself at a new elementary school where woke policies led to construction of entirely gender-neutral washrooms for kids.   Children are now traumatized going pee because of all the “unintended consequences” that result from ivory-tower utopianism being imposed upon the real world.  These policies and practices are objectively bad.  People can see it.  It can’t be censored out of existence, nor will it stop with the boards slamming doors in people’s faces. 

Windsor-Essex board this week saw an estimated 400 - 500 parents, 90% of whom were critical of gender-ideology and sexualization of kids in classrooms and hallways protesting at the school board offices. Led by Elton Robinson the parents outlasted and vastly outnumbered the counterdemonstration while the school board could not deign to listen, so smug in their ideological beliefs, and confident in their dysfunctional and atrocious human rights policies.

Some of those policies coming to public attention are disturbing.  In New Brunswick, the one of two LGBTQ activist organizations who proposed policy 713 and whose recommendations were implemented without any scrutiny, not only positioned queer activist teachers in schools as superior to parents and set up teachers to hide social transition from parents, they also have an explicit agenda to fight “heterosexism” in schools. This was also reflected in leaked policy documents in Hamiltion where the new gender inclusion framework was set out for the coming year.

Heterosexism is supposedly an oppressive bias that harms children and it’s being treated by queer activists as a sin like racism and transphobia. It is the belief that the normal state of human affairs is that men and women mate with each other and have babies.  They believe heterosexism needs to be confronted and dismantled because the idea that it’s normal to be heterosexual could make so-called “queer kids” feel bad.

These are astounding claims that have made their ways into professional development for teachers and into the classrooms of elementary schools defended by so-called human rights doctrines. Normal sexual orientation is being referred to as oppressive now, like whiteness is by the race theorists. Below is more pushed by PIE (Pride in Education) “Queering Sex Ed”

The good news is that people are waking up to it in large numbers. People are going to be talking about it all summer. Politicians are going to be getting loud ears full on the subject from parents all through June, July and August at barbecues and weddings and everywhere they go. We are all going to be talking about it with our friends, family and our colleagues.

The concerns of sane, rational, loving parents are not going to go away now. People have found the courage needed to stand up and reject the tactics of the woke mob.   

Given that I can see this unfolding now, and that all this has a life of its own, for a little while I’m going to go back to my own life.  As we get into back-to-school mode in August I might return with some regular commentary, but for the next two months I’d really like to allow others to carry the signs and the message that say “Education, Not Indoctrination.” 

Just for a little while. 

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Thanks for reading. Here is last issue in case you missed it - Moving the Needle in the Gender Wars

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