There’s an old war tactic that while you fortify against attack on your front door, you need to remember to protect the back door. And that happens when the opposition makes – to use a football metaphor – an end run.
Yes, yes, I know I said the third bit of copy about Bill 67 in Ontario would be the last, but I did use the weasel word, “hopefully,” so technically, I’m not breaking a promise.
The end run around Bill 67 so skillfully engineered by the Waterloo Board of Education, to all intent and purpose, adopts critical race theory as Board practice. The Board just completed a workshop for its teachers called Roots and Wings. It uses all of the relevant wokespeak language taking over English. And so, according to the reporting of Sue Ann Levy, sessions included training on intersectionality (which essentially attempts to intersect or unite all minorities that suffer at the hands of the power structures), white supremacy (another key word, as in “how white supremacy is “embedded in social-emotional learning (SEL) ideologies,” whatever they are), and “decolonize,” as in the session on how to decolonize when you talk or meet with newcomers in your classroom. Presumably, these are people with “racialized experiences in schools” and the teacher is, well, likely to be white.
Creating “’meaningful and reflective’ territorial acknowledgements…” is another session. Presumably these are the ceremonial acknowledgements that the land where the institution stands was (or perhaps still is) that of a First Nations tribe. Everyone is happy to virtue signal by giving this tribute, but what might happened if any of the First Nations actually took it seriously and said:
Okay, great, thanks for that. We’ll be taking this land back, say about a week next Tuesday? That should give you enough time to clear out whatever you want to keep. Just leave the keys on the table on the way out. Best of luck.
(I wrote a short story a while ago in which that is exactly what happens.)
So would Trudeau recall the Emergency Act that he used on the truckers, or just fork over the land, or maybe buy it like McGuinty did a while back?
And less the LGBQT community feels left out of the Board’s sessions, there is a workshop on dress code, as Levy explains, which is about changing “the student dress policy using an ‘equity literacy case analysis framework.’” If it means, as Levy writes, “allowing transgender or gender non-conforming students to wear the dress of their choosing,” then for heaven’s sake, say so and let parents in on what they are doing. But like all such woke politicians, the public is kept dumb.
In a previous article I mentioned the way that woke board politics in some U.S. School Boards has resulted in communities being torn apart, particularly in Virginia, when parents finally became aware of what was happening. The Boards, forgetting that they are elected officials and not the Communist Secretariat, refused to let upset parents speak at meetings and threw them out, not to mention the Department of Justice trying to label parents who wanted a say in their children’s education – one that they used to have – as domestic terrorists liable to be arrested. Couldn’t happen here, eh? Well, the Waterloo sessions were closed to the public and reporters from the wrong side of the tracks were not given access.
The editor of The J.ca wondered why no reporters discussed Bill 67 with the party leaders during the Ontario election debates as we are soon heading to the polls. It was a perceptive question. Maybe because the Bill died when the writ was dropped so it’s old news? Until it won’t be old news?
And now that’s pretty much what is happening. There seems to be an interesting connection between Bill 67 and the Roots and Wings workshop: Bill 67 was introduced by MPP Laura Mae Linda, NDP representative from Kitchener Centre. Kitchener is the regional seat and heart of the Regional Municipality of Waterloo, and of course, the home of the Waterloo Board of Education which just sponsored this new woke training session for teachers.
It would appear that Waterloo is the epicenter of Ontario Wokism.
To those of you who take the time to read these observations, thank you. And if you feel that they are worth passing along to someone who might be interested, I’d appreciate your taking a minute to do so.