The Right-Wing Plan to Take Over Alberta Education

A new report details how right-wing forces are weaponizing the concept of “parental rights” to push culture-war narratives aimed at undermining public education in Alberta.

The Parkland Institute study, entitled “Challenging ‘Parental Rights’: A Primer for Parents, Students, Educators, and Advocates,” was written by Heather Ganshorn, research director for the public education advocacy group Support Our Students Alberta.

In an interview, Ganshorn explained that while parental rights have “historically been used by language and cultural minority groups to argue for their children's rights to be educated in their own language,” the modern connotation is closely associated with U.S.-based traditionalist conservative groups and their Canadian fellow travellers who “want to assert a lot of control over what everybody's children have access to.”

The United Conservative Party government’s now-paused effort to dictate which books can and cannot be read by schoolchildren in Alberta is one manifestation of how this movement transcends national borders.

According to reporting from Brett McKay for the Investigative Journalism Foundation, Alberta’s Ministry of Education used a content-rating resource developed by a former member of the U.S.-based parental rights organization Moms for Liberty to determine which books in Edmonton and Calgary public schools should be targeted for removal.

Restrictions on sex education, which went into effect last week in Alberta schools, are another policy goal of the modern parental rights movement, as is requiring schools to notify parents if their children decide to change their names or pronouns for the purposes of gender affirmation, which is on the books in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

“These measures are framed as protecting parental authority but often override children’s rights and ignore the perspectives of supportive parents, particularly those in LGBTQ+ families,” Ganshorn writes in the report.

While the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms doesn’t explicitly reference any inherent rights of parents, Ganshorn said there’s a consensus among legal scholars that these rights are “implicit” but that they must be balanced against the “uniquely vulnerable” position of children themselves.

“Often, when this conflict comes to the surface, it's really these right-wing parent groups who reject the whole concept of children's rights,” she added. “The religious right has this view that children are their chattel.”

The connection between this conservative traditionalism and education privatization is manifested in Alberta’s system of “school choice,” which is uniquely robust in the Canadian context.

In Alberta, the provincial government provides equal operational funding to privately operated charter schools as it does to public, separate and francophone schools, subsidizes upwards of 70 per cent of tuition for private schools, and provides stipends for home-schooling.

In her report, Ganshorn details how this system came about as a result of agitation from conservative parental rights groups in the 1960s, mainly Dutch immigrants who didn’t want to send their children to the public or separate school systems, so they established their own private religious schools that adhered to the Dutch Reformed branch of Protestantism.

This led to the establishment of lobbying groups, such as the Christian Action Foundation, which pushed the government to fund private schools in the name of “parental rights in education.”

In 1967, under the Social Credit premiership of Ernest Manning, a devout Christian, Alberta’s government began subsidizing private education.

But it wasn’t until the heyday of neoliberalism in the 1990s that education came to be viewed as a commodity, with public funding of private education regarded as a way of introducing consumer choice to education, leading to the establishment of Alberta’s first charter schools under Progressive Conservative Premier Ralph Klein.

Implementing the logic of market competition to education through charter schools eventually created an environment in which it wasn’t enough for private education boosters to coexist with the public system; the public system had to be delegitimized.

Cultural conservatives gradually crafted a narrative of fear that the public education system is undermining traditional values by exposing the children of God-fearing parents to pornography and grooming them to become gay or transgender.

Among those caught up in the culture war are undoubtedly “a lot of true believers who just feel their way of life is under attack,” Ganshorn emphasized.

“It must be very disturbing to feel like the public education system is filling your child's head with ideas that you profoundly disagree with, but there are some really cynical people using this to push privatization,” she explained.

In the report, Ganshorn identifies three influential parental rights groups in Alberta: Parents for Choice in Education, or PCE; the Alberta Parents’ Union; and Take Back Alberta.

The oldest of these groups, PCE, has been around since 2012. Its executive director, John Hilton-O’Brien, is a past president of the Wildrose Party.

While Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides claimed that a group of concerned parents approached him with concerns that their children were being exposed to books with “sexually explicit material” in public school libraries, PCE and explicitly anti-LGBTQ2S+ outfit Action4Canada took credit for Nicolaides’s effort to ban or restrict access to certain books.

The government requiring parents to explicitly opt in to their children receiving sex education at school was another policy win for Parents for Choice in Education, which launched a petition advocating for this policy in 2022, the same year that the Alberta Parents’ Union was launched.

The Alberta Parents’ Union’s website says the group advocates “for the best possible education for all Alberta students — whether that be public, separate, francophone, alternative, charter, independent, or home education.”

But many of the petitions listed on its website are aimed squarely at the Alberta Teachers’ Association, which represents teachers in the public, separate and francophone systems but not charter or private schools.

According to the parents’ union, the teachers’ union is indoctrinating students to believe in critical race theory, LGBTQ2S+ rights, the existence of climate change and “an ideological spin on the events at the United States Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021.”

Take Back Alberta, whose founder David Parker takes credit for catapulting Danielle Smith to the premiership on pandemic-era grievances, is now focused squarely on getting right-wing parental rights advocates elected to school boards to combat “the tyranny of the rainbow guard and the green guard.”

Because of historically low participation in school board elections, report author Ganshorn warns that it’s possible some of Take Back Alberta’s candidates will win, enabling them to undermine the inclusivity of public education from within.

She concludes the report with a call for supporters of public education to engage with the upcoming trustee elections by critically examining candidates’ affiliations and endorsements, looking out for privatization dog whistles, such as “fund students not systems,” asking candidates to clarify their positions on funding non-public education, and asking those who invoke parental rights to explain themselves.

School board trustee elections occur on Oct. 20, the same day as municipal elections.