In The Free Press, Rupa Subramanya reports on a Canadian school board’s attempt to paint a parent’s (valid) objection to the forced speech of modern-day “land acknowledgements” as causing “harm” and not acceptable:
Late last month, a Canadian school board informed Catherine Kronas, a parent serving on her child’s local school council in Ontario, that her role was being “paused” for allegedly causing “harm” and violating board policy.
Her offense? “Respectfully” requesting during an April 9 council meeting that her objection to the land acknowledgment be recorded in the meeting minutes. Kronas argued that the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board lacks an official mandate to require land acknowledgments at school council meetings and that such statements “undermine the democratic process”, amount to “compelled speech”, and are “divisive” and “inappropriate”.
Kronas, who has served on the board for the past year and like all board members is a volunteer, has since been barred from attending upcoming meetings, including virtual ones, while the board reviews the allegations.
“They’ve ostracized me and painted me as someone who harms others,” Kronos told me, pointing to the letter she received in May.
Parents who once expressed similar concerns about land acknowledgments privately have all “slunk away” and “gone silent”, she said. She is convinced that if even one other parent had publicly backed her objection, she wouldn’t have been suspended.
“I have no support,” Kronas says.
But Kronas is far from alone in her views. A new poll shows that a majority of Canadians — 52 percent — reject the idea that they live on “stolen” indigenous land. In Kronas’s own region, Hamilton-Niagara, a suburb just outside Toronto, 50 percent said “no” to the concept.
There’s also a political shift underway that reflects this: New legislation from Ontario premier Doug Ford that is widely viewed as effectively anti–diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) aims to roll back some of the ideological activism that has spread through school boards. The bill will, among other things, ban the renaming of schools based on the belief that historical figures are linked to “systems of oppression” and mandate the return of school resource officers, a form of law enforcement, in jurisdictions where police services provide them. In recent years, many Ontario school boards have removed police from schools on the grounds that their presence causes harm to “racialized” groups — a peculiarly Canadian euphemism for non-white people that casts them as perpetual victims in need of saving — and makes at least this brown Canadian feel like something is inherently wrong with us.
