As much as teachers’ unions like to claim their members are essential to society, the Alberta teachers strike that cancelled classes for 740,000 students on Monday shows that the exercise of raw political power matters more to them than educating students. How else do you explain their rejection of a deal that included a 12 per cent raise and the hiring of 3,000 more teachers?
Alberta recently became the latest province to be subjected to legal action by activist groups on parental rights and school legislation. But there have been many other examples, including in the case of Saskatchewan’s pronoun law, and Ontario’s sex-education revamp that Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives had campaigned on before winning the election in 2018.
Nadine Ness, director of Saskatchewan-based grassroots group Unified Grassroots, says it’s not right that unelected school administrators and activists get to overrule elected governments—who reflect the will of the public who voted for them—on parental rights.
“The only people it serves are certain teachers and the government, and that is more harmful to students than we can ever imagine,” Ness, who is a mother of four, told The Epoch Times.
Earlier this month, a 50-year-old mother in Yolo County, California, decided to make a statement at a local school board meeting about the school system’s policy that allows junior high children to choose which locker room they use based on their gender identity. She wanted to show the board just how uncomfortable those little girls feel when a biological male steps into their most sacred space and strips down.
#California. A 50-year-old mother was protesting the district's policy allowing students to use locker rooms based on gender identity.
Stripped down to a bathing suit at a California School Board meeting, asking officials: "If you are disrupted by a 50-year-old woman in a… pic.twitter.com/QEHKyUlzJP
— Pisklauren (@pisklauren) September 28, 2025
The overall objective of the Million People March 4 Children on Saturday is to “protect parents’ rights” and “our children from indoctrination.”
But while the expected massive march is designed to fight governments from teaching children in schools an alternative sex curriculum, participants also plan to call out Toronto’s decision to pay for municipal staff gender operations – the subject of my Friday column.
Not seeing anything on Twitter that is current, lots from years past.
Ontario’s minister of education is taking the Toronto Catholic District School Board chair to school Monday by asking him to return dozens of items that he has expensed to the taxpayer.
In fact, in a letter to Markus de Domenico, Ward 2 trustee, who is the TCDSB chair, Minister Paul Calandra detailed 61 items that his staff found in submitted expense forms that he would like to be turned back over to the school board, which at this time is under suspension while the Ford government reviews the system as it has been.
The Catholic school boards and the Catholic teacher’s unions are often as twisted as their “secular” counterparts.
It’s no wonder a sense of entitlement takes root in an environment of zero accountability.
Abraham Lincoln famously said, “The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.” Truer words were never spoken.
The Ontario education system is in free fall. For the past 20 years, education policies infused by Marxist theories that had been incubating for decades in the universities, then floridly realized in practice, have resulted in tripartite failure: failure to provide effective pedagogy; failure to provide a psychologically safe environment for politically incorrect identity groups; and failure to protect both children and teachers from physical abuse. The situation is dire.
Nobody panic – but men are less likely to attend university than their female counterparts. This is borne out by the data, as The Globe and Mail’s Joe Friesen reports – a growing trend that has taken root over generations.
Why? One factor may be a public school system that may be better suited to female students, something referred to by some as the “girlification” of education, a term I came across in my colleague Rachel Giese’s 2018 book Boys: What it Means to Become a Man. Are males as alienated – in the education system, but also in society at large – as the manosphere would have us believe? And is this contributing to the growing number of men skipping university?
Trump is bad, men should be emasculated, traditional male roles are evil, university is wonderful, Trump voters are awful and Trump is bad.
The gender gap in higher education has been widening for decades. Do universities need to do more to entice men back?
As classes begin for students at Canadian universities this month, one group will stand out for its relative underrepresentation: young men.
Even before enrolment data is available, it’s safe to predict that for every 100 Canadian students on campus this fall, nearly 60 will be women and only about 40 will be men.
This gender gap has existed for more than two decades, and universities are well aware of it – but they haven’t done much to address it. Discussion of the subject is not quite taboo, but it’s uncomfortable.
That’s likely because out in the working world, men are doing just fine. The data show that men still earn more than women. They also tend to hold more positions of power, including at universities.
Everything is great according to the Globe but stupid boys get paid more and still dominate STEM education and until STEM equals WOKE mean stupid boys must die or something.
The Globe may or may not have interviewed a white guy as a subject for this study which says more than they know.
Jean M. Auel’s Neolithic-age novel Clan of the Cave Bear has a brutal scene in which the protagonist, at age 10, is brutally beaten and raped by a Neanderthal (later, she gives birth to their child). This, I’m sure, is why it’s likely to be pulled from Edmonton Public School libraries in the fall.
It’s one of 200 titles that made the school board’s draft list of books slated for removal, which was recently leaked to CBC, due to the province’s sexual content guideline. That guideline states that no works containing graphic, explicit sex should be on school library shelves — and that access to works containing non-graphic depictions of sex should be limited to Grade 10 and up.
The classics were very violent.
Walk into almost any school today, and you’ll see it: boys being told, in a hundred subtle ways, that their very nature is a problem. They’re too loud. Too restless. Too competitive. Too aggressive. If they’re not sitting still and coloring quietly, something must be wrong with them.
The phrases we use are damning — toxic masculinity, patriarchy, problematic behavior. And the message comes through loud and clear: There is something inherently bad about being a boy.
The kids will soon be back in school. And according to new data from school boards across Ontario, the number of violent incidents in schools has increased by 77% since 2018.
In fact, in 2023-24, the latest year of available data, school boards reported 4,424 violent incidents. Four of the five school boards with the highest number of violent incidents are in the Toronto area. The fifth is in Ottawa.
My friend Tom Mautner is the chair of the board of governors at a school in North London. This week, with students out for the summer, he took me for a tour. For a visitor from Toronto, where schools are run from the top down by a vast bureaucracy – a.k.a. the Toronto District School Board – it was an eye-opener.
Laurel Park is a public secondary school with around 600 students. It was built in the 1960s in what is now an area of mixed incomes and backgrounds. Until just a couple of years ago, it was faring poorly. School inspectors gave it low ratings. Ambitious families shunned it. Disciplinary problems were rife.
Given the state of Canadian education we could learn from anybody including chimps.
Back in June, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) announced it planned to transfer beloved principal Barry Sketchley out of Rosedale Heights School of the Arts, which he founded 33 years ago.
This was unusual because Sketchley had already announced he would retire next year. All the TDSB had to do was to let Sketchley serve his final year at Rosedale Heights, but instead, it decided to forcibly transfer him. Not surprisingly, parents and students mobilized against this transfer. Students walked out of classes in protest while parents lobbied TDSB trustees in an attempt to persuade them to reverse the transfer. Unfortunately, all this fell on deaf ears.
Kids These Days Dep’t: You may have seen a study making the rounds in recent days decrying the corrupting grasp of Andrew Tate on today’s male youth, titled “‘Trying to talk white male teenagers off the alt-right ledge’ and other impacts of masculinist influencers on teachers.” It gives the impression that roving junior Vikings have taken over classrooms, backing their female counterparts into a corner as they try to learn. It’s a distinctly racial problem and a distinctly male problem, one that teachers are fighting to no avail.
America’s largest teaching union is a case study in the capture of education by extreme progressive activists
The breakdown in relations between the US’s top teacher’s union, the National Education Association (NEA), and the Anti-Defamation League, a civil rights group focused on tackling anti-Semitism, reflects a deeper and dangerous takeover of education by determined activists. Besides the usual financial demands, education is increasingly seen as a means to achieve progressive, even radical “social justice”, which of course means boycotting anything connected to Israel.
The NEA is clearly taking political sides, claiming that it is pledging “to defend democracy against Trump’s embrace of fascism”. The union is also adamant in defending undocumented immigrants, opposing parental rights, and pledging to back mass demonstrations against the administration. This approach is seen by boosters as “social justice unionism”, adding political stances to the usual economic ones.
I have little regard for the ADL or the teachers and their unions. Both are extremist left wing entities that embrace DEI/CRT.
