Ontario Tories still incoherent on sex-ed
File not as tricky as government making it look
NDP leader Andrea Horwath spoke to a mostly rapturous crowd of roughly 1,000 educators at the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario annual meeting in Toronto on Tuesday. The latest election the NDP didn’t win was more than two months ago, but the self-congratulation came thick and fast — for its many female and ethnically diverse MPPs, for having “the largest official opposition in nearly two decades,” and for how much help ETFO members were in making it all happen.
Finally, though, Horwath acknowledged reality: right now, all that is useless. “In four years’ time we can elect a government that Ontarians want — the one that people voted for,” she said. (She thinks that because the majority of voters didn’t vote PC, they kinda sorta voted NDP.)
For now, however, she conceded it’s the pits.
“Doug Ford wants to drag our schools backwards,” Horwath intoned. “He started with sex-ed: he’s taking our curriculum back to the last century, and he’s hurting the most vulnerable youth in the process.”
“Doug Ford isn’t going to stop there,” she warned. “He’s doubling down on cuts. Already we’ve lost $100 million in urgently needed school repair funds. And you and I know he’s only going to cut more.”
Ontario teachers might not be able to pay for school repairs. But on sex-ed, they’re not necessarily waiting for a new government. At lunchtime the ETFO crowd marched up University Avenue to Queen’s Park and more or less declared the province can stuff its 1998 curriculum where the sun don’t shine.
Teachers should and will teach whatever they feel is necessary to keep their students safe and properly informed in 2018, speakers at the rally (at the very least) implied: about same-sex relationships, about gender fluidity and about consent, none of which are mentioned explicitly in the now20-year-old document.
“The safety and human rights of our children trumps anybody’s religious beliefs,” said Horwath, attributing opposition to curriculum to Ford’s “radical extremist social conservative friends.”
“We are going to be on the right side of history. We are going to do the right thing,” vowed ETFO president Sam Hammond. “When our members exercise their professional judgment this year and teach the 2018 curriculum, we’ ll be there for them.”
This is a perilous situation. The NDP and ETFO are free to portray the sex-ed curriculum’s opponents as three-horned white evangelicals in thrall to Charles McVety. They are free to imply that their voices and votes don’t count, or that their opposition is driven purely by homophobia.
But those people do have a voice, and a vote. It’s a small part of why the NDP didn’t win. And they are not a convenient, Caucasian McVetian monolith. In Toronto’s Thorncliffe Park neighbourhood in particular, school officials had to carefully talk a remarkable percentage of elementary school students’ parents out pulling their kids out for good. Compromises included a class that referred to “private parts” instead of naming genitalia — an arguably ridiculous concession, if sex-ed means anything, but one that nevertheless helped keep kids in public schools.
That’s where sticky curriculum issues are best addressed and hammered out: at individual schools. The last thing we need thrown into the volatile mix is the prospect of teachers going rogue on their own in the name of Andrea Horwath’s idea of social justice.
When reporters put this open revolt to Education Minister Lisa Thompson after Question Period on Tuesday, over and over again, she would only smile gormlessly and insist she was confident Ontario’s teachers would feel very comfortable teaching sex-ed under the 1998 curriculum and forthcoming ministerial guidance. It was utterly ridiculous. She might as well have said they would be happy with a seven per cent pay cut. Teachers were literally outside the building, as she spoke, refusing to teach the curriculum.
This is a tricky file, but not as tricky as the Tories are making it look. As I’ve argued before, there is no reason the modern topics addressed in the 2014 curriculum can’t be taught under the 1998 curriculum: it is far less out of date than it is vague. That was the foundation on which the government should have carefully built its plan to repeal, consult and rewrite — an unnecessary venture, in my view, but one they promised voters nevertheless.
Instead we’ve had everything from Thompson arguing nothing much would change, only to walk it back; to Ford deflecting every question on the sex-ed curriculum to the math curriculum, as he did in the legislature on Tuesday; to deputy premier Christine Elliott suggesting teachers might broach 2018 curriculum topics one-on-one with students, but not during class.
“Hey Mr. Richards, can I ask you a question about sex? Alone?”
“Sure, let me just write a quick suicide note first, OK?”
Teachers and Tory governments are always at war. It’s a rule. If Ford’s government somehow didn’t see all this coming, they’ve had more than enough time to get a handle on the file since it blew up. Now they only have three weeks until school starts. Must do better.