In spite of the role trustees play in communities across the country, school board elections in Canada have historically been rather perfunctory affairs, often beset by poor voter turn-out and little to non-existent media coverage. Yet, that has changed dramatically in the past few years, as what were once considered low-stakes contests have transformed into increasingly polarized and intense flashpoints of public debate.
Catalyzing this transformation has been the aggressive entry of the conservative “parental rights” movement into debates over public education in Canada. Indeed, across the country, parental rights groups have sought to challenge and contest local school board elections often in a bid to reverse anti-discriminatory policies and programs aimed at 2SLGBTQIA+ students.
Here in Saskatchewan, Regina’s public school board elections last year witnessed a slate of candidates supported and endorsed by the Regina Civic Awareness and Action Network (RCANN), a conservative advocacy group opposed to diversity, equity and inclusion policies and pro-2SLGBTQIA+ initiatives in schools. Similar conservative slates of school board candidates appeared in local elections across the country last year.
The discriminatory roots of the movement
While this sudden transformation of usually uneventful local elections into intense expressions of the culture wars might strike many people as novel, the targeting of school boards by conservative activists has a long and sordid history. This history has been most manifest in the United States, where school boards have been the battleground over larger social questions such as de-segregation, abortion and 2SLGBTQIA+ rights. Like its current manifestation, many of these past battles were also couched in the rhetoric of “parental rights.” American conservatives opposed to racially integrating public schools spoke of their inherent rights as parents to choose their children’s schools in defiance of integrationist bussing efforts in the 1960s. Similarly, parental rights were invoked to justify employment discrimination against gay and lesbian teachers in the 1970s, based on the right of parents to “determine who is going to teach our children.”
Canada has certainly not been immune to this tendency. As Hazel Woodrow writes, “parental rights” have been invoked in this country to push back against students’ confidential participation in school-based GSAs (Gay-Straight Alliances/Gender-Sexuality Alliances), against comprehensive sex education, racial equity, and most recently, against transgender students’ self-identification in schools.
A twin strategy
So while not a new phenomenon, there is no doubt that the current level of organization and effort by conservative activists to roll back anti-discriminatory policies and initiatives within the classroom definitely feels more acute. Many commentators point to the experience of school COVID shutdowns as a key event emboldening conservative education activists.
“The COVID-19 pandemic opened the digital doors to classrooms,” Libby Watson writes in Education Week. “For many parents, it was their first time seeing daily lessons. Some were appalled by content about race, gender identity, and sexuality, igniting a fervor that led to the conservative parents’ rights movement and its calls for giving parents more control over curriculum and books, and organized political efforts from groups such as Moms for Liberty to win school board majorities.” While initially an American phenomenon, we have seen the same conservative organizing efforts cross the border into Canada.
Both the use of parental rights rhetoric as well as the targeting of local school boards need to be seen as twin parts of a strategy to obscure the real intent of conservative education activism. As American legal scholars Mary Ziegler, Maxine Eichner and Naomi Cahn argue, the use of parental rights rhetoric helps obscure the real goal of conservative education activism, which is the rolling back of anti-discrimination policies and initiatives designed to protect vulnerable minority groups. They call this strategy, “retrenchment by diversion.” Recognizing that openly stating their goals to stymie and roll-back rights and protections for minority groups would be largely unpalatable to significant numbers of the electorate, conservative education activists “sidestep controversy” by diverting attention from its “rights-reversing motivations by supplying a more politically palatable rationale for its actions”—the long and valued tradition for parental rights.
And while these rights-reversals are initially targeted at students, the ultimate goal is the roll-back of equality-focused rights for adults as well, as we have seen in the United States in regards to restrictions on access to abortion that were initially directed at minors but have now come to apply to adults as well. This diversion also allows conservative activists to appeal to more moderate sections of the electorate, parents who might recoil at the idea of denying protections for 2SLGBTQIA+ youth, but may believe they are instead advocating for greater control over their children’ s school lives.
Moreover, given what little attention and turn-out school board elections usually exhibit, they are eminently winnable—even by a relatively small minority. By using parental rights rhetoric to skirt controversy and peel off more moderate voters, the belief is that conservative advocacy groups can covertly place their preferred candidates into positions of influence on local school boards to advance their wider agenda.
School boards in the crosshairs
Fortunately, so far the ability of these groups to practice this kind of message discipline has been found wanting, often alerting more progressive voters and the media to their wider designs. Certainly this appears to be what occurred in Regina, as a published list of RCANN endorsed candidates was quickly retracted once the public got wind of their actual policy positions.
This appears to have been the experience in other jurisdictions as well, as many of these endorsed candidates would ultimately face electoral defeat once their actual agendas became public. Despite these defeats, the strategies employed by conservative education activists may still prove successful in the future. In Regina, certain RCANN endorsed candidates were still able to pull close to 40 percent of the vote. While in mostly two-way races this level of support was insufficient, we only need to imagine a more crowded field where this could deliver victory.
Moreover, these efforts to take over control of our school boards are not going away. The conservative advocacy group Take Back Alberta is already training a slew of candidates to run for school board elections in October of this year, in “response to widely felt concerns that our school boards have been overtaken by radical activists.”
We have been fortunate so far that many voters have been able to see through the deceptions of these groups, but as the above makes clear, deception in service of discrimination is the goal.
