Busy, minding other people’s business

Opinion

Here we go again.

The parents of children in a Winnipeg school division, atop all the other responsibilities and stresses of raising children, are having to contend with interlopers looking to cause trouble as part of a tireless reactionary battle about problems that don’t exist.

This time around, members of Action4Canada — a radical conservative group which promotes Christian homeschooling, are once again making a nuisance of themselves by turning up sans invite to Pembina Trails School Division campuses to foist brochures and other materials on parents. This time around, their problem appears to be the alleged presence of pornographic materials at school libraries.

This isn’t the first time this has happened — similar agitators made their presence known at city school divisions last year as part of the “parental rights” push which sought to forbid schools from concealing a child’s self-determined gender identity if that child wanted confidentiality on the subject. They were taking issue with school library books then, as well.

“A4C pamphlets likening storybooks about puberty to pornography and promoting homeschooling continued showing up on windshields in the (Pembina Trails) division’s parking lots throughout February,” this paper reported in a March 15, 2024 article.

“Likening storybooks about puberty to pornography” is key here. Sexual education is important for young people to have. They must know how bodies work and what theirs are doing as they grow, not only as part of a simple health education but also so they may protect themselves from would-be predators out to take advantage of a young person’s naïveté. To say that a book merely acknowledging the fact of puberty and describing it is tantamount to pornography is not a serious complaint about illicit material, but a complaint that the public school system is not willing to be as repressive as the complainant.

And while the debate seemed to largely die down — at least in Manitoba — after a contentious provincial election in which parental rights was a major plank in the failed Progressive Conservative campaign, it has risen anew, and the cause seems pretty clear.

Wally Daudrich, leadership candidate for the PCs, claimed during a February leadership debate that there was pornography in schools. He could not provide evidence of this claim, but that didn’t matter. Daudrich’s accusation was simply a bauble, a shiny item to jangle in front of fringe right-wing activists so that they may get back to the hard work of sticking their noses where they don’t belong and annoying people they have nothing to do with.

So, here we go again.

The world is full of ways to spend one’s time: there are countless books to read; films to enjoy; model ships to carefully erect in little glass bottles. One could collect stamps, archaic though that may be. Instead, some dedicate themselves to aggravating schools to which they do not send their children, in neighbourhoods in which they do not live, about fabricated debaucheries.

Why? We cannot say. But it’s certainly not something hard-working parents and educators should have to put up with, and so, within reasonable grounds, one might suggest it’s time to forcefully tell these people it is time to clear out. However emboldened they may be by the rise of regressive policies in our neighbours to the south, this is still Canada and we still respect a pluralistic society here.

So if Action4Canada’s members insists of making their presence known, it is fair enough if the people they meet channel their inner Bob and Doug McKenzie and tell them, without reservation, to “take off, eh!”