Teachers’ keynote choice irks pipeline supporters
A pro-pipeline advocacy group has taken issue with an upcoming Alberta Teachers’ Association conference that is touting controversial environmental activist Tzeporah Berman as keynote speaker.
Three of the association’s councils are holding a conference from Oct. 11-13 in Enoch dubbed “grounded in truth, soaring with knowledge.”
“(Berman) does have a legitimate perspective that is shared by people both in Alberta and more broadly,” said ATA spokesman Jonathan Teghtmeyer in an interview Saturday.
“We recognize that the speaker is controversial and even more so now, since the developments of this recent summer. But climate change and Indigenous reconciliation are current issues in society and teachers ... need to be aware of multiple perspectives.”
Berman is an environmental studies adjunct professor at York University and a former Greenpeace director. In 2017, she was let go from Alberta’s oilsands advisory committee.
She is also known for once comparing the oilsands to the fictional wasteland of Mordor, a location in author J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional world.
The oilsands advocacy group Canada Action has started an online petition to get Berman removed as a keynote speaker.
“It sends a hostile message to the majority of the province’s parents who support the sector,” the organization wrote on its website.
A link to the petition was circulating on Twitter Saturday.
The conference is being held by subgroups of the ATA, including the social studies council, First Nations, Metis and Inuit education council, and the global, environmental and outdoor education council.
Teghtmeyer said the ATA is in discussions with another speaker who will offer an alternative perspective to Berman’s at the conference.
“The conference has been in planning for about a year now, and she was approached pretty early on,” he said. “The decision to bring her in was made under a little bit of a different context.”
The conference is organized and funded by teachers, he said.
“At the end of the day, teachers are obligated to teach the program of studies and they approach that work with the utmost professionalism, and they do so without imposing their own opinions in the classroom.”