PCs once rejected college. Why won’t Ford?
Here’s a question Premier Doug Ford might ask himself the next time a preacher of ill repute comes calling: What would Bill Davis do? The history of Canada Christian College makes for a tawdry tale, dating from father to son, but never giving up the ghost. Today, this fledgling Bible college aims to be born again as a full-fledged university, thanks to Ford’s Tories helping it leapfrog legal hurdles ahead of the required independent assessment.
A generation ago, another Progressive Conservative government headed by Davis took a different tack. Instead of acting as an enabler for what critics describe as a degree mill, the government passed a law in the 1980s that curbed its degree-granting powers.
As premier, Davis chose to protect the people of this province from a preacher of questionable provenance. The documented deception of “Dr.” Elmer McVety caught up to him, and the Canada Christian College he founded, after a series of Toronto Star stories detailed fundraising improprieties over the years.
Back then, a government background paper accused Canada Christian College of “misleading” practices, and the resulting legislation clipped the elder McVety’s wings before he could soar to greater heights. Fast forward to 2020, when the Ford government recently slipped in legislation expanding the degree granting powers of the same college, now resurrected under the son, “Dr.” Charles McVety — despite public doubts about the education graduates get on campus.
Like the father, the son has been nothing if not controversial on matters pecuniary, pedagogical and moral — assailed in the legislature as a gay-baiting, Islam-hating bigot with a Bible and a dubious doctorate. Like the father, who lost his evangelical television show amid controversy, the son also lost his TV program when the Christian broadcaster CTS dropped his show after the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council condemned his “malevolent, insidious and conspiratorial” remarks about LGBTQ targets.
Today, the lessons of history go unlearned in the realm of higher education. Which is why officials from the Davis era who know the old story are saddened by the latest stories detailing the miraculous revival of the McVety brand under Ford’s patronage, detailed in a recent investigative piece.
“I was the Deputy Minister of Education and Colleges and Universities during the last few years when Bill Davis was premier,” Harry Fisher wrote me. “The political top-down initiative you so clearly describe made me think that the McVety example might be getting us closer to the Trump theatre of political posturing next door.”
Fisher is feeling “angst” because politicians shouldn’t meddle in matters of accreditation: “The channel for considering the Canada Christian College as a university in Ontario should have risen as a request by the university-college community in Ontario to our (present) government, and not from a top-down, political direction.”
As a non-partisan public servant, Fisher served the minister of colleges and universities, the late Dr. Bette Stephenson (who had a real MD, not a made-up doctorate from a degree mill). But Stephenson also turned for political advice to her veteran chief of staff, Rick Donaldson, who is today equally dismayed by the affair.
Donaldson recently wrote to his local Progressive Conservative MPP to complain about Ford’s subterfuge in trying to slip in the university upgrade for Canada Christian College under cover of COVID-19:
“It is totally inappropriate for your Government to bury critical legislative changes into an omnibus bill on the COVID-19 virus,” he wrote his local MPP, Rudy Cuzzetto. “I used to deal with Charles McVety and his father, Elmer, during my days in the minister’s office in the early 1980s. Their college does not merit nor deserve university status for their inappropriate and out of sync position with today’s Ontario … I trust you will stand up to this kind of political opportunism.”
Donaldson, who describes himself as “still a Bill Davis Tory,” shared the correspondence because he wants his fellow Tories, and his fellow Ontarians, to know the background: “Degree granting status was revoked then over misleading information.”
What would Stephenson say today about the sudden rehabilitation of Canada Christian College?
“Bette would not be impressed. I can hear her now,” said Donaldson, who worked with her for a decade. “I think the first thing she would say is, ‘Oh, my goodness. Really? Not again!’ ”
Despite his political background, or perhaps because of it, he argues against the politicization of pedagogy: “It is absolutely critical to protect the integrity of the application process. Let the certifying authority do their examination independently. Their (McVety’s Canada Christian College) message of division (and) homophobia is no more acceptable today than in 1981 … Don’t let politics interfere in this decision.”
Back then, Stephenson fought to protect the reputation of post-secondary education at the cabinet table. And Davis used his political pulpit to preach tolerance, safeguard pluralism and advance diversity.
But that was then. This is now.
Why is Ford’s government doing the opposite all these years later?