MINISTRY OF INDOCTRINATION
Ontario taxpayers must demand an end to left wing "dismantling" of public education, because insiders who speak out are silenced or fired
Ontario taxpayers now spend millions of dollars annually indoctrinating citizens to believe that Canada’s dominant culture and socio-political systems are all irredeemably racist, bigoted, and unjust, and must be “dismantled” and rebuilt. Public education is now controlled by critical social justice ideologues who wage war against many of the values formerly central to western pedagogy, including individualism, meritocracy, reason and objectivity, freedom of conscience and speech, the primacy of the written word, and conventional academic standards. Their clearly stated goal is to destroy and replace the western classical education tradition, which we are told is racist, and discriminatory in a myriad of other ways. They call this process “decolonizing”.
It makes no difference to these unelected ideologues that Ontario citizens elected a majority Conservative government in the 2018 elections — all provincial education bodies now advertise full-fledged commitment to critical social justice pedagogy, which demands the implementation of far left revolutionary programs of social engineering. The unfortunate conservatives, libertarians, and classical liberals working in public education today are powerless against the “social justice” behemoth — openly resisting or critiquing this cultural revolution is grounds for punishment, even dismissal.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion mandates are now elevated above all other concerns. Administrators justify the massive quantities of money and time now spent teaching staff and students to follow critical social justice orthodoxy by alluding to the need for systemic compliance with Ontario’s Human Rights Code. But anyone who has studied critical social justice theory can attest to the fact that these are academic disciplines that require the adoption of explicitly neoMarxist frameworks. Citizens are implicitly being asked to accept that only the collective embrace of radical leftist ideology will produce systems in compliance with the Ontario Human Rights Code.
Citizens are also being asked to accept the expenditure of many hundreds of millions of tax dollars on programs designed to benefit a very small fraction of the population. In addition to the multiple millions now allocated by the Ministry of Education to DEI programming and policies, many with a specific mandate to fight “anti-black racism” (in the 2011 census, 4.3% of Ontario citizens identified as Black), the province has begun throwing additional millions at this issue from every other possible department within our bloated bureaucracy:
But it isn’t clear how “diversity”, “inclusion”, “equity”, and human rights code compliance is being achieved with all this spending. Can these goals be achieved by actively excluding and ejecting people from public sector employment because they hold political or religious beliefs that do not align with critical social justice ideology, or they have a skin colour and/or other immutable characteristics associated with the province’s “dominant” identity group? The most oft-cited “not thriving” or “suffering from systemic inequities” identity groups in Ontario that DEI programs and policies specifically target are Black people (4.3%), indigenous people (2.4%), Muslims (4.6%) and LGBTQ+ (3-5%). If Ontario bureaucrats insist on special treatment of particular citizens based on their immutable characteristics or religion, perhaps the taxpayers should get more say in how these people are to be aided by tax dollars: maybe it would be better to just hand each such citizen a nice fat cheque, rather than spend hundreds of millions annually, in perpetuity, to employ an army of DEI managers and consultants to bully and indoctrinate the populace into compliance with a neoMarxist idealogical agenda.
It also isn’t clear how DEI administrators — who are implementing increasingly authoritarian/totalitarian policies to control narratives, redraw the boundaries of socially acceptable speech, and constrain the free flow of information (all being undertaken to supposedly protect minority identity group members from “harm”) — will ever manage to fairly balance the competing concerns of various identity groups. An excellent illustration of the “idpol” morass we are now in, a case that exemplifies the fact that fresh hells are being created by assigning special protections to specific identities, is the recent decision by TDSB leadership to disallow a book club selection and author visit by a Yazidi woman named Nadia Murad. Murad is a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, a highly respected human rights activist, and a survivor of sex slavery at the hands of ISIS. Yet TDSB deemed her an unacceptable choice for a girls’ book club, on the grounds that her story and presence might increase Islamophobia.
Such ill-conceived decisions, and the offence and social conflict that such decisions and censorship cause, are happening because authorities are privileging identity groups perceived to be stigmatized/victimized minorities in Canada. Absurd and infuriating idpol travesties like this are becoming disturbingly common.
The radical leftism of today’s social justice movements like BLM and gender activism — movements created and fueled by the rise of critical social justice theory in our higher learning academies — has become the dominant culture in Ontario’s public education system. BLM’s founders and most ardent activists are predominantly self-declared Marxists, revolutionaries in the tradition of the Black Panthers. Gender activists display symbols expressing their allegiance to communism almost as often as they display their movement’s various rainbow flags.
Critical race theory, gender theory, intersectional theory, feminist theory… all these theories have been developed over time by Marxist academics into forms of indoctrination that command left wing political activism; they are primarily concerned with changing society’s power dynamics, and using race, gender, sexuality, and other identity categories as proxies for the traditional Marxist concept of “class”. Most, perhaps all, critical social justice scholars self-identity as Marxists and/or anti-capitalists, and preach the desirability/inevitability of far-left revolution as a corrective to historical injustices.
Most DEI administrators working for western governments and institutions do not explicitly call for revolutionary action against the state (although we do hear quite a bit of that rhetoric when riotous BLM uprisings occur in response to perceived racial injustices). Militant forms of political revolution are a hard sell in a prosperous democratic society with a large and comfortable middle class. Instead, DEI proponents use a classic Marxist strategy of subverting the populace's attachment to traditional and conventional social orders by exploiting people’s desire to be good, to be compassionate and fair-minded, and to contribute to building a better world. Today's revolutionaries couch their revolutionary intentions in terms and phrases such as “we will dismantle and replace systems of oppression”.
With so many spectacularly failed socialist revolutions on the historical record, Marxist intellectuals and their elite collaborators have turned to advancing communism in western contexts through mundane but effective methods such as bureaucratic manipulation — taking over education systems, starting with the universities, has proven to be a hugely successful long game strategy for the revolutionary left.
It has become virtually impossible to have a successful career in education without demonstrating allegiance to the dogma of critical race theory and critical social justice ideology. Educators at all levels must now exhibit a dedication to the goal of purging society of traditional western beliefs and values. Everyone surviving the education system now must agree to “do the work” required for the creation of a brand new, “morally superior” collective consciousness that will result in a structurally equitable social order. This requires every educator to symbolically take a knee for BLM, commit to intensive and ongoing engagement with “anti-racism” and “social justice” praxis, and to support DEI legislation designed to significantly redistribute wealth and power.
It is perfectly acceptable now for teachers and administrators to advertise their allegiance to the Black Lives Matter movement by including the BLM organization’s logo in their email signature. Whether unwittingly or intended, every recipient of these emails is being subjected to the not-so-subtle messaging that our education system fully embraces a far left revolutionary political organization — an organization whose leadership ranks are full of racist Black supremacist Marxists who condone destruction and looting as an acceptable form of political protest, and advocate to defund the police and destroy the belief that strong nuclear families are the primary building block of a healthy and stable society. According to our civic leaders in education and beyond, individuals such as Yusra Koghali (pictured below with some of the vile messages she saw fit to post online) are the worthiest of role models for Ontario youth. Toronto City Council even presented this radical Nation of Islam acolyte with a civic leadership award and congratulated her for “making people uncomfortable”! This is a woman who once tweeted a prayer to Allah to help stop her from killing white people at a rally she was about to attend.
In education, the words “diversity” and “inclusion” have been used for decades now in the context of developing curricular materials and institutional cultures that reflect and respect the various cultural identities of students and their families. But the real force for dramatic systemic/strucutural change brought by this new cultural revolution lies in that third word, equity. Equity is the holy grail of critical social justice activism — the primary goal of DEI administrators is to install an ideological/political monoculture that supports structural change to achieve equity quotas. Equity mandates permit the development of strong new mechanisms and legislation to accomplish large-scale redistribution of power and wealth. Equity mandates use identity politics to significantly increase socialism in a society without actually calling the changes “increased socialism”. The racial justice movement is arguably the most wildly successful Trojan horse constructed by Marxist strategists in the entire history of western communism.
The DEI craze is essentially a hugely successful socialist movement — the primary purpose of all the new DEI policies and programs is to implement equity policies that will aid members of less successful identity groups, by using state-imposed regulations that simultaneously limit access to power and wealth for individuals identified as members of the traditionally dominant identity group (whites, men, Christians, heterosexuals, etc). DEI administrators don’t actually plan to end discrimination and racism, just inequitable outcomes between identity groups. New forms of discrimination are being legislated in order to rectify historical discrimination. This helps to explain the ease with which organizations are now ejecting ideological dissenters; the people losing their jobs in this brave new equitable society are typically vocal dissenters against critical social justice orthodoxy who are pegged as upholders of white supremacy culture (AKA the liberal democratic order that has come to characterize western civilization, that presents ideals such as equality under the law, meritocracy, the primacy of reason, individual property rights, freedom of conscience and speech, etc). In short, DEI leaders promise to make the world a better place by destroying western civilization.
DEI administrative positions, and now most teaching positions, can only be obtained by people who can demonstrate bone fides in “anti-racist” praxis, meaning leftist political activism, meaning demonstrated ongoing commitment to explicitly socialist/communist ideals… thus, the spread of socialism/communism is literally being commanded and legislated everywhere in Ontario’s education system. DEI programs and policies now dominate at the Ministry of Education, at all publicly-funded affiliate organizations connected to education (such as SMHO), at all public school boards, at every school, and every public sector union and chapter. Taxpayers now support a small and growing army of DEI administrators expressly (albeit surreptitiously) tasked with increasing socialism in Ontario, a province that currently has a nominally Conservative government.
DEI proponents are heavily invested in the false premise that every identity group disparity that can be captured by data is evidence of systemic discrimination. Ontario’s Education Equity Action Plan, for example, emphasizes throughout the document that a major focus of the ministry’s work is now the collection of “identity data” to locate group disparities in order to then remove the corresponding “systemic barriers” that are resulting in poorer outcomes for those identity groups:
…comparing identity- based student data with data on program enrolment, suspensions and expulsions, and graduation rates may reveal more precisely how certain groups are being disadvantaged.
Education leadership now universally professes to believe that the current education system is discriminatory and oppressive because certain identity groups fail to succeed at the same rates as other groups. Educational policy documents name Black, indigenous, and LGBTQ+ people as the most systemically victimized, stigmatized, and oppressed, based on data such as collective rates of graduation, recorded behavioural interventions (suspensions and expulsions), and advancement to post-secondary education, but also on personal anecdotes of individuals perceiving themselves to be victims of discrimination. The universal messaging is that until we see data showing equal outcomes for all identity groups, the education system will remain discriminatory, and pursuit of reforms and restructuring administered by left wing ideologues will remain necessary. It is not permissible to hold the position that disparities in collective outcomes might be caused by factors other than systemic racism and bigotry.
In addition to intensively analyzing student identity data and consequently restructuring the system to achieve equity quotas, the ministry likewise commits to analyzing staff identity data and implementing heavy-handed affirmative action and re-education programs to rectify identity-group disparities in staffing. Needless to say, this allows them to actively silence and purge from the ranks anyone who dares openly criticize the new leftist agenda and/or critical social justice pedagogy. Intimidated and fired staff members are being accused of “hate speech” and “violations of the Ontario Human Rights Code”.
In one case, an Ontario teacher in a Toronto board was suspended (and later fired) when colleagues reported her to the administration for speaking out — during a confidential union meeting, in the part of the meeting where members are invited to share concerns, no less — against CRT/BLM and far left indoctrination and politicization of the education environment. She used the opportunity to object to tax dollars being spent to purchase teachers copies of a book called So You Want to Talk About Race. This is a text now widely used and promoted in Ontario schools that promotes tenets of critical race theory, and the teacher expressed her opinion that it is not suitable for use in Ontario schools. The book includes the recommendation that discussion leaders exclude white group members who dare to argue against the prevailing dogma about racial issues, to ensure that conversations about race are always managed in a way that offers therapeutic benefit to non-white group members (who are assumed to have been traumatized by the experience of living in a white supremacist society). When the school board fired this teacher after months of “investigation”, they didn’t cite the opinions she expressed in the meeting, but her politically charged social media activity as the reason for dismissal. The board investigator accused her of racism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, etc and cited as hate speech a selection of posts expressing: opposition to BLM; opposition to the persecution/punishment/murder of teachers who showed cartoons of Muhammed to students during lessons; and opposition to new affirmation-only treatment protocols for gender dysphoric youth that are leading to many unnecessary, permanent, and severely damaging medical interventions. Before colleagues from the union meeting informed on her, this teacher had no official complaints on her record. School administrators now consider it reasonable to terminate staff for merely expressing, even outside of work, ideas and opinions that counter social justice ideology or that might offend some members of specific protected minority groups.
In another case, a school district superintendent silenced a teacher for possible Human Rights Code violations while she was engaged in giving a presentation during a school board meeting. The teacher was presenting objections to controversial messaging about sexuality and gender found in books now used in Ontario elementary schools. After the incident, other school board members commented that the Human Rights Code had never been invoked during a meeting for this purpose before. The board additionally took the unusual step of refusing to make the recorded meeting available to the public, as per normal policy. We have seen over and over again that DEI certainly does not result in increased respect for/inclusion of a diverse range of opinions, beliefs, and ideas — in fact, with the advent of DEI, we have seen has quite the opposite result.
Anyone working in education today can attest that at all levels, the system culture now encourages an obsessive focus on identity politics and division of people into identity group categories. Universalism is now frowned upon as oppressive. Each identity group is assigned to a particular rung of the intersectional victimhoood hierarchy, and the least oppressed/most privileged group is understood to be primarily responsible for all the suffering of the groups lower down in the hierarchy. It is now verboten to suggest we should be considering a wide range of factors that contribute to lack of success in school.
The only framework now acceptable when discussing student achievement gaps is the critical social justice framework that locates all inequality as originating from systemic power imbalances. And staff are constantly bombarded with messaging (via PD workshops, in-service meetings, distraction of documents, new events, clubs, community partnerships and initiatives, etc) that the system’s primary, most critical objective is not the delivery of high quality academic and co-curricular educational opportunities to all students, but to operate in a manner that will lead to the achievement of equal outcomes as measured in identity-based data.
Canadians are literally spending billions of dollars across the nation now to pursue this supposedly all-important systemic goal of equal outcomes for all identity groups. And yet, despite all this purported concern for helping groups of Canadians who are collectively failing to thrive, no one is actually permitted to comprehensively interrogate the complex web of reasons for group outcome differences. To venture beyond blaming systemic discrimination and oppression is verboten. It is considered a form of racism to point to cultural and family values that contribute to lack of student achievement. It is considered anti-black racism, for example, to point out that other historically oppressed minority groups in Canada, like Chinese people, are not failing to thrive, in some cases minority demographics are even outperforming the “white” demographic group. It is somehow considered racist and supportive of white supremacy to note that minority groups are not monolithic, and wide variation exists within single identity groups — for example, to point out that Nigerian Black people have far higher success rates than Jamaican Black people in Canada, so perhaps anti-black racism isn’t the entire story behind racial group disparities. One risks being called homophobic and transphobic to note the prevalence of serious mental health disorders in members of LGBTQ+ identity groups (disorders mostly not caused by discrimination, although they’d have you believe that…) and suggest that this might go a long way to explaining their higher rates of disengagement and lack of achievement in school.
Education system staffers who advocate for a more nuanced and comprehensive approach to identifying problems and solutions are now commonly being fired or otherwise intimidated into silence and compliance. Critical social justice ideology is dangerously simplistic and formulaic, and although the purpose of DEI is, at least superficially, to liberate and empower marginalized people, the primary results so far seems to be increased division and tribalism, lowering of academic and behaviour expectations, and massive increases in resentment against white people and the “oppressive systems” they supposedly designed with the express purpose of keeping non-whites down. One could be forgiven for thinking that DEI’s actual purpose is not actually to help minorities, but to foment revolution, and damage social cohesion and peaceful co-existence.
To further their cultural revolution, the ideologues leading this movement are not above lying to activate the populace’s compassion, empathy, and sense of outrage about injustice. Their revolutionary aims depend on generating mass resentment against “the system”, which they tell us is structurally and inherently oppressive and discriminatory due to its foundational “whiteness”, “heteronormativity”, and “patriarchy”.
Consider the excerpts below, which are from a document that was distributed in September 2020 to all Ontario teachers by the provincial organization called School Mental Health Ontario:
In recent years, and increasingly in recent months, we’ve seen deaths and injuries to many Black women and men at the hands of violent police officers and White people. Seen across media channels, this has ignited important protests around the world.
We have BLM to thank for popularizing the patently false narrative that there is currently an epidemic in western societies of white people and police officers hunting Black people down in the streets. (Statistics actually show that Black people are much more likely to be assaulted and murdered by another Black person than by a white person or a police officer.) The same document then explains how this apparent plague of “violent police officers and White people” murdering and injuring Black people is the justification for massive new spending and obsessive focus on “anti-racist” initiatives:
This has reaffirmed the need to acknowledge and take action to end anti-Black racism. Racism is a lived reality for Black Canadians, with devastating consequences for individuals, families, and communities. It is systemic in nature, as certain systems are put in place to create and perpetuate racial injustice and inequality in the lives of Black people."
With a heavy dose of unintended irony, the same document urges the following of teachers:
Share factual information and reduce the spread of rumours. Using accurate information about people, events, reactions and feelings is empowering. Use language that is developmentally-appropriate for children, and ensure the information is based on facts. It is especially important to correct negative statements made or heard in the media about any specific group. Invite students to correct you too.
It is relatively easy for those with authority positions in education, government, and media to manipulate people by citing statistics and making declarations, whether true of not. “Anti-racists” showcase stats that attest to unequal outcomes between different identity groups, like relatively low graduation rates amoung Black and indigenous Canadians, and then blame all such disparities on systemic discrimination that results from the bigotry, selfishness, and greed of the members of the dominant identity group. In this way, social justice ideologues grossly oversimplify and often blatantly misrepresent the origins of disparities between groups.
“Anti-racists” understand that their key to power has been in taking control of education and “re-educating” (i.e indoctrinating) the populace — controlling education is key to taking and maintaining power. The domination of public education and government bureaucracy by the current social justice movement has resulted from the success leftist academics have had in taking over university departments and excluding their ideological opposition.
With increased public awareness, we will certainly see substantial pushback against CRT/BLM/DEI in schools, as we are now seeing in the USA. Ontario, being a province that elected a Conservative government in the last election, undoubtedly has a large percentage of taxpayers who do not wish to continue funding programs of mass indoctrination into divisive far-left ideological frameworks designed to foment revolutionary activism. Canadian media so far hasn’t shown much interest in the topic, but that will change as the DEI bulldozer piles up a massive heap of legal and social conflicts and conundrums.
This is an excellent read, CC. Thank you.