My family arrived in Canada in October 1967, just as the last of the Centennial events were shutting down. Pierre Trudeau became Liberal leader and Prime Minister not long afterwards. I think the “Trudeaumania” of 1968 was nearly 100% media generated, but it was new to Canadian voters who liked the idea of Canada being led by a sophisticated international playboy rather than the stolid, rather unfashionable men who preceded Trudeau. The media continued to “love him long time”, which definitely helped keep him in power and then back into power after the brief Joe Clark experiment. Since he left office, his reputation has been cherished and burnished by progressives in the educational system, as Harrison Lowman relates:
A Toronto Sun editorial cartoon by Andy Donato during Pierre Trudeau’s efforts to pass the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. You can certainly see where Justin Trudeau learned his approach to human rights.
“When I was in high school, I was taught that every single Canadian adored Pierre Elliott Trudeau. I learned that when the rose-pinned prime minister winked and pirouetted, the whole nation swooned.
It wasn’t until first-year university that I was first exposed to the fierce Western backlash to his National Energy Program.
It wasn’t until I graduated that I learned about any opposition to his Charter of Rights and Freedoms, his policy of national bilingualism, and official multiculturalism.
It was my Ontario high school civics teacher’s fault. While she was a great educator in other ways, the politics lessons she taught us were clearly slanted in the Liberal direction; a direction she supported.
My experience as a young person 20 years ago demonstrates the immense power teachers hold in moulding young minds. It’s a power that concerns me when I imagine dropping off my eight-month-old son at school in three years. Today, that teaching slant has become even steeper, with too many educators unwilling or unable to provide political or ideological balance in their classes.
This week, I interviewed Stephen Reich, a PhD student at The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) who researches the proliferation of critical theory in kindergarten to Grade 12 policymaking.
Reich told me I should be concerned—that the educational leaders in this country have all but abandoned what should be the true purpose of education: imparting civilizational knowledge to the next generation. Instead, they’ve replaced it with seeking multiple “truths” and a narcissistic obsession with oppression narratives. Never mind that 92 percent of Canadians polled say they don’t want their children separated by race: taught to see themselves as “privileged” vs. “oppressed”. Reich says certain teachers are far less interested in producing independent thinkers and far more interested in producing activists.
“I have a feeling that success [for them] is ideological conformity,” he explained. That they aim to help foment some sort of “liberation.”
