Education for Acquiescence… Meanwhile, Back in Canada

Public Goods  •  January 28, 2025  •  William Paul

Donald Trump looms over current events like a volatile bag of gas: Make Canada America’s 51st state. Take Greenland and Panama by force. Round up and deport millions of illegal immigrants. Stop teachers from pushing “woke ideology” down the throats of children. Rename Mars, Trumplandia – whatever. Anything vaguely similar to information that escapes from Trump’s head only underscores the necessity of a robust education system to fight it off like a bad – and spreading – infection.

The madness blowing around the US may not yet be as broadly accepted, well-funded, and organized in Canada. But, as we grapple with long-standing and new problems in education, there are things we need to watch.

Starting from the top – who knows? Justin Trudeau, caught up in political follies and force-walked through the snow by his caucus, is finished. But he still heads a Liberal party in search of a leader who might avert a total catastrophe in a spring election. The NDP isn’t in contention, running neck and neck with their former supply and confidence partners at about 20 per cent. Meanwhile, the federal Tories under Pierre Poilievre are riding a populist wave crashing toward a majority government.

Poilievre and His Populism

Poilievre rides that wave with his disdain for elites – with whom he is firmly ensconced – along with people’s fear over jobs, prices, housing, taxes, and quality of life. As he told right-wing cheerleader Jordan Peterson in December, Canada is run by radical socialist authoritarians. But he stands for average people whom he claims are poorer than their American counterparts, whose chances of making enough to put even a down payment on a home are illusory. Poilievre will fix that problem by getting government out of the way of enterprise and cutting its bureaucracy. He’ll cut taxes and “socialist” policies of printing and borrowing money, while setting off a resource boom. Sounds familiar, something frustrated voters might go for as they survey the tired menu offered by middle-of-the-road parties that are by no means socialist.

Bear in mind that when he sat in the Harper government this friend of workers couldn’t find it in himself to support anti-scab legislation for federally regulated industries, fought for right-to-work legislation, and complained about “foreign” migrant workers taking Canadian jobs.

What does it mean to get government out of the way? What does it mean for the Pharmacare Act, a small first step towards universal drug coverage that Poilievre says will take away worker’s existing health plans? It doesn’t. What will happen to the basic dental care program introduced for children and seniors in 2023? And for someone looking to cut taxes during a time of the huge deficits he derides, what will become of $10 per day daycare or indeed, the Canada Child Benefit that decreased child poverty? He doesn’t answer questions like these, but they are crucial to the families whose kids go to the schools that support their communities.

What will he offer to avert even the worst effects of climate change that will certainly determine the future of the children we send to school today? Axe the carbon tax, and along with it, the rebates it provides Canadians; ignore “these environmental loons that hate our energy sector,”¹ pump more oil, and refine more liquid natural gas.

To counter Poilievre and others like him, educators need to push critical pedagogy so their students can develop good bullshit detectors.

Money Problems

As in America, finding money for schools is a problem in most parts of the country. In British Columbia, student enrolment is at its highest since 2007-08, but school boards are still struggling to meet province-mandated balanced budgets. The North Vancouver School District dipped into its savings for $2-million to balance its budget. Other school districts followed suit, raiding their cupboards, skimping on classroom supplies, freezing hiring, and cutting into programmes. B.C. NDP education minister Rachna Singh blamed shortfalls on the previous Liberal government (2001-17) that accumulated an ongoing funding deficit. The province is also facing $9-billion in deferred maintenance projects.

In Alberta, a funding model based on average rather than actual enrolments leaves school boards holding the bag for unfunded students. Even Premier Danielle Smith, whose United Conservative Party introduced the plan, is considering changing it. The Alberta Teachers Association estimates that 250 teaching jobs will be cut for 2024-25 despite higher enrolment across the province. Premier Scott Moe’s Saskatchewan Party increased the schools’ operating funding by $180-million for 2024-25. But the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation argues the province’s schools have seen a decline in in per-pupil funding by 20.7 percent between 2015 and 2022.

Ontario has endured years of massive education cuts since 2018 when the Progressive Conservative government of Doug Ford arrived on the scene. According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives economist Ricardo Tranjan, spending per student, adjusted for inflation, has dropped by $1500 since 2018 when the PCs promised to fix the devastation they said was wrought by the Liberals before them. Boards across the province are routinely short millions of dollars to balance their budgets as they cut programmes, teachers, and maintenance to do so. Ontario’s Financial Accountability Office recently estimated that it will cost $31.4-billion to clear the maintenance and construction backlog.

It’s also not good in Quebec. Francois Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government is carrying a budget deficit of $11-billion and making huge cuts across government services. School boards have been told to cut at least $123-million from their budgets. It seems to be the norm that this money will come from school board coffers, like those of the English Montreal School Board, deferring capital projects like building new schools.

Newfoundland and Labrador under Liberal Premier Andrew Furey has, among other issues, a school repair problem which it set out to fix this past year with $50-million towards school construction and upgrading. It also devoted $3-million for classroom assistants in classrooms plagued by complex student needs and increasing violence. Still, due to declining enrolment over the past years, the government cut 225 teachers from schools. The Newfoundland Teachers’ Association says this will negatively affect the safety of students, teachers, and staff.

Last year, the Northwest Territories’ government of R.J Simpson cut $9.9-million from its small education budget. For a breakdown of school underfunding across the country, check out the Little Education Report. Schools have never been swimming in money, but many are barely hanging on to the side of the pool.

Funding for Private and Charter Schools

Despite all of this, there’s an American taste for diverting funds from public to independent private and charter schools here in Canada. British Columbia funds non-profit independent schools to between 35 and 50 percent of the public school rate of provincial funding. Premier Danielle Smith’s $8.6-billion school building plan includes a pilot programme to push private-school construction. This move, welcomed enthusiastically by the Alberta Association of Charter Schools, would add 12,500 new charter school spaces in the province. Independent schools like these in Alberta are currently subsidized up to 70 percent of public-school operating funds. The group Support Our Students Alberta is definitely not enthusiastic, arguing that charter schools can hand-pick students and are a form of publicly subsidized private education that stratifies children by socio-economic status, background, and personal circumstances.

Saskatchewan gives 50 percent of the provincial per-student grant to independent schools in the province. After allegations of abuse made by students at one of them, the Saskatchewan Advocate for Children and Youth made 36 recommendations to improve oversight but still supported choice between public and independent schools.² Manitoba covers the same rate for children in its independent schools, having increased overall funding to $94-million in 2023. Nova Scotia pays for up to 90 percent of special education private-school tuition for kids with special needs like learning disabilities. The conservative think-tank Fraser Institute says Nova Scotia needs to up its game and offer more choice to families so schools have to compete with each other. Choice and competition are an end in themselves in the discussion around independent schools.

Quebec is a little different. The province, identified with the Bill 21 law on secularism that bans teachers and others in positions of authority from wearing religious symbols, supports 50 private religious schools throughout Quebec to the tune of $160-million. There’s more. In a 2022 article published with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, researcher Anne Plourde describes a three-tier education system within the province. Fifty-six percent of students attend regular classes; the rest, just under half, are enrolled in private schools and special programmes within the public system related to areas like sports, arts, and special education. Most of these latter programmes require parents to pay annual fees, on average, of around $1,200. She described layers of segregation:

“one between public and private, and one within the public school system itself – has a ‘cream-skimming’ effect, in which students with lower academic performance and socioeconomic status are concentrated in regular public-school programs while the most advantaged students are clustered into private schools and special public-school programs.”³

Much to the chagrin of the Fraser Institute, Ontario is an outlier in this discussion. Ontario does not fund independent or private schools.

Vouchers and the Fantasy of Choice

It looks bad for politicians who purport to be interested in educational democracy to give money to private or other independent schools. One way around that it is to give parents a voucher to go and buy the schooling of their choice – whether at a private or public school, a charter, or something else. Superficially, it’s all about variety of educational options, customer satisfaction, and innovation. Vouchers, big in the US are very popular in Alberta, where the United Conservative Party discussed the possibility of introducing them back in 2019. The Alberta Parents Union is a major proponent, pushing the government to expand privatization and introduce vouchers.

The Ford government dipped a toe into this pond during the pandemic in 2021-22 when the Ministry of Education provided money for families to purchase computers and $175-million in 2022 for private tutoring. The money didn’t go to schools – in dire straits, coping with the pandemic at the time. Computer purchases alone diverted $1.8-billion from school funding.⁴

How do you make sure you preserve the public good by ensuring that there is a public system available for which parents don’t have to pay extra and to which all kids have equitable access? As writer Paul Bocking, “In the long term, these payments may serve to prepare for public consent for a future, more direct form of school vouchers.” Vouchers may work very well for people who have money to top them up to help send their children to an expensive private school. But such a system could encourage more people to take their kids out of local public schools as they deteriorate in the vicious cycle of insufficient funding and consequent under-enrolment.

Privatization, whether through vouchers or independent schools, helps with union busting too. Education workers could end up bargaining with multitudes of private employers who exist to make a profit – or eventually with a few large corporations in control of the market. It’s a great way to extend the grasp of neoliberalism but an awful way to provide education for young people.

Gender Identity

Fortunately, Canada does not have an influential group as viciously retrograde as Project 2025 in the US (see part 1). But we do have the Fraser Institute that supports privatization, vouchers, skimpy funding rates – and not surprisingly, a discouraging approach to 2SLGBTQ+ and transgender rights It doesn’t overtly call for a ban on accommodating transgender and non-binary kids or for letting them play the sport of their gender choice. Instead, it plays the parental rights card. It condemned teachers for denouncing as “bigoted homophobes” the protesters attending the 1 Million March 4 Children in September 2023 who accused schools of exposing their children to what they called “gender ideology.” Teachers didn’t do that. For example, Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario (ETFO) called for “Canadians to engage in constructive conversations, to listen to differing perspectives, to reject bigotry.”

This march had traction across the country – though it faced strong counter protests. One of the organizers, “Hands Off Our Kids,” sees as its mission to ensure that young people have access only to washrooms, change rooms, and sports for the sex they were assigned at birth. Parents must be told if their child asks for a change of name or pronoun. The only flag flying on the pole out in front of the school should be the Canadian one, not the Progress Flag.

Saskatchewan, Alberta, and New Brunswick are the provinces most closely connected to gender politics. Premier Scott Moe of Saskatchewan set out last fall to launch a policy restricting transgender students to change rooms according to their assigned sex at birth. His government already passed Bill 137, the Parents’ Bill of Rights, which stipulates that a student under age 16 must have parents’ consent to change pronouns. This bill of rights avoided possible challenge under Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms by invoking Section 33 (1) – “notwithstanding clause.”

Moving further, Alberta’s United Conservative Party (UCP) recently passed legislation under health and education that requires schools to seek parental permission for kids to learn anything about sexuality, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Like those in Saskatchewan, schools would have to receive permission from parents for students under age 15 to change pronouns; notification alone would be enough for those over 15. Young people under age 15 are restricted access to gender-affirming care like hormone therapy and puberty blockers. Ketty Nivyabandi, of Amnesty International Canada, called the move appalling: “These egregious new rules will have a chilling effect on the protection of gender rights and sexual diversity in Alberta.”

Up until recently, New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs had been the standard bearer against rights of transgender and non-binary students. He introduced Policy 713 requiring parental consent for students under 16 to be addressed by a different first name or pronoun. In the ensuing uproar, two of his cabinet ministers resigned in protest, and six of his fellow Tories voted with the opposition calling for an external review of the policy. There is good news to report here with the defeat of his government in November. Incoming Premier Susan Holt reversed the policy eliminating a requirement that puts educators in the unethical position of outing their students and placing them in potential danger in order to comply with a policy that could violate Charter rights.

Working the “Woke”

“Woke” is a gift to people who scorn ideas of diversity, equity, and inclusion and would rather not explain why groups seeking a way to participate fairly in society are some kind of threat. It’s meat for Pierre Poilievre, who greeted the Freedom Convoyers and supported their refusal to be vaccinated against COVID-19 as they occupied downtown Ottawa for weeks in February 2022. Maybe he was thinking of this rebel period when he explained the term “woke” during a Commons debate a couple of years ago:

“As for the definition of ‘woke’, woke has one purpose and only one purpose. It has plenty of pretexts but only one purpose: control. It is designed to divide people by race, gender, ethnicity, religion, vaccine status and any other way one can divide people into groups. Why? It is because then one can justify having a government to control all those groups. No more woke; we need freedom.”⁵

It’s politically useful to conflate even moderate ideas of fairness with something sinister like division and control. Poilievre follows that track in his chat with Jordan Peterson as he dismisses concerns about race: “put aside race- this obsession with race that wokeism has reinserted.”⁶ He belittles generations of struggle, loss, and death that children and families faced over that very issue – all to avoid being divided into groups, denied rights, and segregated in residential schools and the like. He’s talking about expunging inconvenient history.

He goes further in the interview claiming that a result of “wokeism” is an increase in hate crimes. This absurd suggestion flies in the face of a 2024 RCMP report linking hate crimes to “rise of populist politics and inflammatory rhetoric directed toward immigrant, racialized, and religious minority groups.”

Teresa Zackodnik, English Professor at University of Alberta, regards the term woke as shorthand for even moderate liberal ideas, attacked over the claim that they infringe on rights and freedoms. It “has become mainstreamed into political discourse and is very, very worrisome.”⁷ Wokeness is blamed for poisoning the minds of young people in school with ideas like Canada being a settler colonial nation. For some non-Indigenous – particularly white – settlers, the counteraction comes from the assumption that woke educators force white students to think and speak in the language of anti-colonialism. It’s come to the point that “mentioning race at all is somehow a racist act.”⁸

The backlash is serious, she believes. UCP members from Red Deer recently proposed that prospective teachers take one university three-credit course on the problems of Marxism and Communism. With its Provincial Priorities Act, the UCP is also taking a strong step to control what kind of research happens in Alberta, inserting the provincial government between funding agencies and universities to approve new applications.

Professor Zackodnik describes a movement to turn away from unpleasant history, to say we aren’t racist, to invoke stories like those of Black Loyalists to reassure ourselves that nothing bad is happening here: “a tendency of imaginary and national memory to turn away from the (Freedom) Convoy and what was revealed within it,”⁹ like its racist, xenophobic organizers described by journalist Justin Ling.

All of this is to say that there is no cause for complacency in Canada despite what we might think about the random madness surrounding civic life in America. Doug Ford brought that front and centre when he flipped the protest over the tragedy of Indigenous people of Grassy Narrows to focus on what he calculated to be a pro-Palestinian field trip:

“It’s disgraceful. You’re trying to indoctrinate our kids. They should be in the classroom learning about reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, the whole shebang, but instead, the TDSB and these teachers want to bring them down to a rally, a Palestinian rally, and it’s ridiculous.”¹⁰

Education for acquiescence is happening here. Ford’s rant describes perfectly what education looks like without critical thinking and teaching. •

This article first published on the School Magazine website.

1. Jordan Peterson, “Canada’s next prime minister: Pierre Poilievre” Ep 11, YouTube, December 21, 2024.
2. Saskatchewan Advocate for Children and Youth, “Making the Grade – Moving Forwards in Independent Education”, December 2023 p.5.
3. Anne Plourde, “Three-tier education system in Quebec: The state of the situation,” October 19, 2022 Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
4. Paul Bocking, “Schools, austerity and privatization in the pandemic era,” School Magazine.
5. Debates of March 13, 2023, Open Parliament, p.16.
6. Jordan Peterson, “Canada’s Next Prime Minister: Pierre Poilievre,” Ep 11, YouTube, December 21, 2024
7. Interview with Teresa Zackodnik, December 12, 2024.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Sabrina Nanji, “The politics of bike lanes,” Queen’s Park Observer, September 26, 2024.