New Brunswick premier Blaine Higgs has done a sensible thing regarding parental involvement in schools’ He has, however, endured tremendous backlash for it. One can only hope that voices of support drown out his detractors.
Until recently, provincial Policy 713 mandated teachers to refer to students by their preferred pronouns without parents being told–unless that was okay with the student. This Cultural Marxist approach made dissenting teachers into heretics. Teachers who believed that gender and biological sex matched, had already confessed to something different by their action towards students and they would, of course, pay the price.
Like any indoctrination school, students could adopt an entire belief system without encountering anything to persuade them otherwise. Until recently at least, explicitly religious schools did the same with less subterfuge.
They were open and explicit about their value system and didn’t try to divide parents from their children. Facilitating and keeping pronoun secrets creates just such a divide when teachers and fellow students call the student what they want to be called. All of this happens every single school day, possibly without the parents finding out–like the terrible betrayal it is. The state rules children with ideology and parents are marginalized.
The project reinforces Cultural Marxist idea that western society must be overthrown and provides the way to make that happen. Here, teachers become the intentional instruments of the subversion of traditional values instead of partnering with parents in their children’s education.
Prime Minister Trudeau, by contrast, characterized Higgs as an evil exremist. “Far-right political actors are trying to outdo themselves with the types of cruelty and isolation they can inflict on these already vulnerable people,” Trudeau said. “Right now, trans kids in New Brunswick are being told they don’t have the right to be their true selves, that they need to ask permission.”
The chromosomes in every cell tell us who we are, but Trudeau doesn’t want parents to do so. He characterizes 57% of Canadians as “far-right political actors” of “cruelty and isolation…on these already vulnerable people.” Hello? These children have ate at their parents’ supper table all their lives, while it was politicians themselves who told people to isolate at home in 2020 and 2021.
Trudeau made his comments at an event for the non-profit Rainbow Railroad Freedom Party, a Toronto non- profit, where people whose homosexual sex produces no children want to undermine parental jurisdiction over babies they created.
Higgs said Trudeau was “playing to the audience that he was with,” and he was right.
“I find it really quite surprising in some ways that questioning the role of a parent in a child’s upbringing is really a debate,” Higgs told Lilley, but that is undeniably true.
Two of Higgs’ Progressive Conservative cabinet ministers resigned over the policy change. Higgs is better off without them because any cabinet ministers that call themselves conservative and can’t defend parents are in the wrong party. Now that Higgs has shown the courage of his convictions, will he find trustees and teachers to do the same?
Lee Harding is a Research Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
