Juno News - October 25, 2022


A growing anti-woke movement in Canada’s schools

Topics
school trustee races
Mentioned
Nillie Kaplan-Mirth
Why is Doug Ford so afraid of testifying before Emergencies Act commission？ The sad reality of what’s taking place on Toronto’s streets

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

188.83

Word count

656

Sentence count

43

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The latest Ontario municipal elections were a pretty sleepy affair, in terms of big-ticket questions about who's going to be the next mayor of Toronto, things like that, but one of the angles that many people picked up as being noticeable was school trustee races, where there was a whole slate of candidates in different cities and parts of Ontario who were running as anti-woke candidates.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The latest Ontario municipal elections were a pretty sleepy affair in terms of
00:00:04.320 big-ticket questions about who's going to be the next mayor of Toronto, things like that.
00:00:08.520 But one of the angles that a lot of people picked up as being noticeable
00:00:12.040 was school trustee races. And there's a lot of contentious stuff, a lot of conversation,
00:00:17.280 excitement perhaps about those races, because there was a whole slate of candidates in different
00:00:22.740 cities and different parts of Ontario who were running as anti-woke candidates, candidates who
00:00:27.880 were frustrated with a progressive ideology being forced on children through curriculum or through
00:00:33.620 things that individual schools or school boards are doing. Some of them were particularly upset with
00:00:38.220 a transgender ideology being pushed on kids excessively. And they were talking about that 0.76
00:00:43.360 during their campaign. This got a lot of people talking. There were news articles out there that
00:00:47.660 quite frankly were almost semi-libelous about some of these candidates, one particular CBC feature.
00:00:52.780 Regardless, the conversation began. And what was the result of it at Monday night's elections?
00:00:58.140 Well, they didn't fare too well. I would say by and large, most of those candidates
00:01:01.760 did not succeed, did not go on to be trustees. If anything, something of a step backwards.
00:01:07.260 We saw a prominent Twitter doctor, Dr. Nillie Kaplan-Mirth. She won her seat to be 0.65
00:01:11.540 an Ottawa area school trustee. She has said that children need to keep wearing masks at all times.
00:01:16.960 She said just actually a few days ago, she posted she plans to keep masking forever. Forever? That was
00:01:22.300 her phrase. So you can say, okay, well, that wasn't really a step forward for people who want
00:01:27.140 to sort of liberate kids from these sort of issues being pushed upon them. But what I think is the
00:01:32.440 most interesting takeaway is that the conversation happened. That people step forward to run as
00:01:39.160 trustees under a sort of anti-woke platform. And that there was a lot of interest out there, even if
00:01:44.420 some of the interest was for people to mischaracterize them. Because in the United States,
00:01:48.340 wow, they've really got something going on in that direction. And they are, they are overturning
00:01:52.980 a lot of incumbents, and they are really getting a parents rights movement happening in the United
00:01:57.580 States in terms of people upset with the fact that they've realized, hey, we've been busy talking
00:02:02.040 about who's going to be president, who's going to be governor. Meanwhile, there have been people
00:02:05.300 getting into these positions at the school boards, and they've been doing radical things that we're
00:02:08.940 unhappy about. So now we're in a position in Ontario where I think people are at least aware of that
00:02:14.360 angle. They're aware of that fact, and they know trusty races do matter. And these are,
00:02:19.740 for better or worse, now battlegrounds for so many broader issues, things that are discussed
00:02:25.360 in broader society, and the ways that some people want to really force those issues upon children.
00:02:31.560 And that really, a lot of people just want to get the politicization, the race-based ideologies,
00:02:38.160 the divisive stuff, the cultural stuff, they want to get that out of the school system. And
00:02:42.440 they're seeing that there's too much of it going on right now. And I think that's resonating
00:02:45.880 with a lot of parents, even nonpartisan parents who just say, well, hold on a second. I just want
00:02:50.200 the kids to get a just the facts education to prepare them for adult life. So my guess is while
00:02:55.680 these candidates weren't victorious, this time around, we're going to see more and more interest
00:03:00.320 in this, more and more people get in the game, more and more people watching the school board meetings
00:03:04.520 because they've concluded this is a level of government, a level of elections that matters.
00:03:12.440 Thank you.
00:03:13.440 Thank you.
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00:03:18.480 Thank you.
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00:03:27.440 Thank you.