Juno News - May 16, 2023


Parents concerned about trans ideology in Canadian classrooms

Topics
should parents be notified gender-related curricula and parental access
Mentioned
Andrew Lawton Show Colin Craig Zoom
Justin Trudeau is LOSING in Toronto! Maxime Bernier wants to ＂reopen the abortion debate＂

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

194.32

Word count

2,241

Sentence count

146

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode of The Andrew Lawton Show, host Andrew takes a look at a recent poll that suggests a growing number of parents want to know what their children should be told about their child's gender identity in public school when they present themselves as "I'm a woman, I'm a non-binary, or I'm pan-gender." Should they be notified?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
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 You're tuned in to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:00:08.380 I want to shift gears here yet again.
00:00:10.500 The problem with Friday is that like all the stuff we don't get to earlier in the week,
00:00:13.460 we all have to like put into one seamless narrative.
00:00:15.980 So we're abandoning the narrative and abandoning the seamlessness.
00:00:18.900 And hopefully it's just interesting enough to keep your attention.
00:00:23.300 But last but certainly not least, Colin Craig is with secondstreet.org,
00:00:27.220 which has commissioned a rather interesting study, a poll through Leger,
00:00:33.580 that looks at, I think, something that if we go back to the earlier discussion we had about abortion in Canada,
00:00:40.600 there's a gap between what ordinary people think and what the media would tell them to think,
00:00:47.120 what the media would sort of claim is the consensus on a particular issue.
00:00:53.060 And one in particular jumps out, and that is about if schools should inform parents when a child shows up and says,
00:01:00.920 you know, I'm actually a woman or I'm non-binary or I'm pan-gender or the one that I learned many years ago,
00:01:07.100 masculine of center, gender, queer.
00:01:09.120 So a student goes to a teacher and says, I'm this and this and these are my pronouns.
00:01:12.840 Should parents be notified?
00:01:14.520 57% in this poll said yes.
00:01:17.440 But that would be a position that, you know, when it's been mentioned by politicians in other jurisdictions,
00:01:22.380 is like this hateful, bigoted, transphobic position where it's no.
00:01:25.820 I think parents in general should know what's happening between their child and their child's educators.
00:01:31.840 Colin Craig is with me now after that lengthy wind up there.
00:01:34.920 Colin, good to talk to you.
00:01:35.880 Thanks for coming on today.
00:01:38.500 I'm me, Andrew.
00:01:39.620 So let's start with the why you've done this question.
00:01:42.000 I mean, Second Street, I know we've had you on, has done a lot on energy policy, on health care.
00:01:46.020 This was when I saw this, I'm like, oh, really?
00:01:48.200 They went there.
00:01:49.920 Yeah, well, we put our fingers in all the pies. 0.93
00:01:52.700 You know, we spend, you're right, we spend a lot of time on health care and natural resource issues.
00:01:57.360 But we do some work on education, taxation, lots of different other policies.
00:02:04.940 And we actually did a poll about two and a half years ago.
00:02:08.680 And one of the questions we asked was, do Canadians think that the public school system has gone in the right direction or wrong direction over the last 20 years?
00:02:18.920 And at the time, about 32% said wrong direction.
00:02:23.620 And we thought, well, that's actually pretty high.
00:02:25.140 That's a pretty significant number of Canadians who don't think the system is going in the right direction.
00:02:29.040 But this time it was 51%.
00:02:31.540 So it's a very, very big jump.
00:02:34.240 And the reason what got us going with this poll is we thought, well, let's ask that question again.
00:02:38.640 And then we sort of were looking at some of the other issues in education.
00:02:42.480 And this was one where, you know, like yourself and I'm sure lots of your viewers, I had seen these different stories coming up about parents being kept in the dark, about, you know, what their children are talking with their teachers about when it comes to pronouns and transitioning, having very serious discussions.
00:02:59.460 And I thought, you know, I wonder if there's any public opinion research on this for Canada.
00:03:03.360 And I hadn't seen any.
00:03:04.400 There were some numbers from the States.
00:03:05.500 We thought, well, let's ask the question and see what Canadians think.
00:03:09.120 Well, and the other one that was interesting, not as decisive as reporting back on, you know, gender identification is this one of 45, 47% of parents agree or of respondents agree that schools should have to make materials for topics on gender and race related topics ahead, available ahead of time for parents to view.
00:03:28.560 Now, that one I find interesting because I think largely a lot of curricular materials are available ahead of time.
00:03:35.280 But I don't think most parents have the initiative to to go in and seek those out.
00:03:39.660 Some do.
00:03:40.500 But I was curious kind of what your insights were on that.
00:03:42.780 I mean, is there this realm of materials that parents cannot access and do not know are being taught unless their child tells them?
00:03:52.080 Short answers, I'm not sure exactly.
00:03:53.940 I know in the U.S. there have been some challenges where parents have tried to get access to materials that are being taught in schools and they've had trouble.
00:04:00.660 I'm not sure exactly where that's at with where that's at in Canada, but I think it's an easy solution that can sometimes help in cases where parents are concerned about what's being taught for very sensitive topics.
00:04:13.440 We have technologies makes all this stuff so easy now that schools could put this information out ahead of time.
00:04:20.620 So a parent could go in and see, OK, what's my child going to learn about, say, gender related issues or race related topics and just kind of understand, well, do I want my child learning that?
00:04:30.420 Yes or no.
00:04:31.080 And if they're if they have a deep concern, they can say, well, you know, I'd like my child to sit in the library during that lesson or whatever.
00:04:36.560 The other option, of course, and this was, you know, someone else raised this with me and I think it's a good idea.
00:04:41.540 It also allows parents to know, OK, my child's going to learn this in school today.
00:04:45.280 I want to present a different perspective to them when they get home so that they can learn a little bit more and, you know, see different viewpoints, have maybe a bit more of a balanced learning exercise when it comes to this topic.
00:04:56.800 So we thought, you know, this would be interesting just to see what Canadians think.
00:04:59.960 And like you say, certainly more Canadians think that's a good idea than people that say not to.
00:05:04.880 I want to drill down to that one question I led in with about the 57 percent say, yes, the public, the teacher should have to tell or the school should have to tell parents if a child wants to change their gender, use different pronouns.
00:05:17.640 The regional breakdown I found quite surprising here, because I think if you were to say this, everyone would be like, oh, yeah.
00:05:23.880 If I were to ask which province said this yes the most, people would say like, oh, yeah, you know, clearly Alberta.
00:05:29.060 And Alberta was actually kind of it was below the below the mean there.
00:05:34.160 You know, BC, unsurprisingly, was the lowest, even then at 49 percent.
00:05:38.580 Alberta, 54 percent said yes.
00:05:40.660 The real outliers here on the high end were Atlantic Canada and Quebec.
00:05:45.840 Now, Atlantic Canada is a smaller sample, 100 people.
00:05:49.360 So there could be in that a bit of a, you know, perhaps a sampling issue.
00:05:54.220 But but Quebec, 61 percent.
00:05:56.060 So regionally, I found that just quite interesting.
00:05:58.940 Yeah, those numbers certainly are interesting that, you know, it is higher in those provinces.
00:06:04.800 It's like you say that samples are smaller, so it could be just, you know, partially due to having a smaller sample size.
00:06:11.100 But it's not just the more conservative the province, the larger the number.
00:06:14.740 Ontario was higher than Saskatchewan and Alberta.
00:06:16.980 Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, we're not we're not an advocacy organization.
00:06:19.980 We're not taking a position in terms of what governments should and shouldn't do on this.
00:06:23.320 I mean, my own personal opinion is that, yeah, I think parents should have the right to know.
00:06:27.560 I mean, this is a pretty serious thing for a child to be assuming basically a different identity at school if they're changing their pronouns.
00:06:35.420 But also even chatting with the school system about, you know, how do I go about changing my my gender and trying to have surgery and all this stuff?
00:06:44.300 You know, my colleague makes a good point.
00:06:46.260 He says schools can't give students a Tylenol without checking with parents first.
00:06:52.200 We're going to let them engage in this pretty serious psychological intervention.
00:06:58.180 You know, I totally understand why parents would want to know.
00:07:01.340 And what I think is interesting is the breakdown between parents that say yes and parents that say no, or rather Canadians that say yes versus no is 57 to 18.
00:07:11.380 And then there's a large number of Canadians who are undecided, I think, maybe because they haven't been confronted with this issue.
00:07:17.260 Maybe want to know a little bit more, whatever the case is.
00:07:20.580 But it's also interesting, too, that when you shift this discussion from Canadians at large to Canadians with kids, the number increases goes up to a well over 60 percent.
00:07:33.360 I think 60 and not just kids, but kids in the household.
00:07:35.820 So not just like, you know, boomers with adult kids, but yeah, parents with kids at home.
00:07:39.820 Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for clarifying that.
00:07:42.180 Yeah. It's it's people with young kids.
00:07:44.440 They want to know. And like I said, I can't blame them.
00:07:47.460 And I think it makes sense because this would be a very difficult thing for a child to be going through if they're suddenly confused about who they are.
00:07:56.060 And and that you'd want to as a parent, you'd want to be helping them.
00:08:00.700 Right. You'd want to be there to guide them.
00:08:02.600 And maybe regardless of what side of the debate you're on with this, I think any parent would want to be there to to support their child if they're going through something that's very difficult.
00:08:11.880 Yeah. I mean, look, I'm in my my 30s.
00:08:14.680 I'm one of the dirty millennials that I complain so often about.
00:08:18.400 And one of the challenges I find is that I think that I was kind of part of this transitional period where parents were engaged in the education system and, you know, wanted to do the parent teacher checkups and read the report cards and learn.
00:08:31.800 But but for the most part, sort of just trusted that the system was working, just sort of dropped you off at school in the morning.
00:08:36.940 And and that's that. And I think that parents would be doing a tremendous disservice of themselves and their kids to do that.
00:08:43.860 And all the parents I know and granted, I mean, there's a bit of a selection bias in terms of who I talk to more often, but but they just don't trust it.
00:08:51.920 And the number of people I've heard from that have just self-selected out of the public system who are not the traditional private school or homeschool demographic.
00:09:00.360 But it's largely because of stuff like this.
00:09:03.640 Yeah, there's it feels like there's been a lot of controversial news stories in the past while involving public schools.
00:09:11.480 I mean, you're based in Ontario, the Oakville teacher with the extremely large fake prosthetic breasts.
00:09:19.100 I'm sure most of your your viewers have seen them.
00:09:21.960 If not, if you Google it, you'll see that these these fake breasts were about the size of a Gatorade cooler that, you know, an NFL team might throw on its coach after winning the Super Bowl. 1.00
00:09:31.020 Like absurdly large.
00:09:32.940 What football games are you watching?
00:09:35.360 Well, you know, right.
00:09:37.920 Yeah.
00:09:38.120 All the champions, you see these these giant coolers being thrown. 0.98
00:09:41.620 That's how large these fake breasts are. 1.00
00:09:43.380 And many people found them demeaning to women. 0.96
00:09:45.520 So you see that kind of thing.
00:09:46.600 And then you see a school system that was just frozen, unable to deal with this, something that I think many people would consider to be extremely inappropriate on the other side of Canada, British Columbia, small town Castle Garby Sea, an elementary school teacher had a drag queen read to children in a classroom through Zoom.
00:10:06.540 And so many parents were outraged about this.
00:10:09.560 And so regardless of where you stand on these issues, I mean, these are pretty controversial things.
00:10:14.900 And I think more than anything, what we're seeing is a need for more choice.
00:10:20.840 And Alberta has a good solution with charter schools here.
00:10:24.000 For those who aren't familiar, they're basically schools run by nonprofits that are funded by the government.
00:10:31.600 And they tend to specialize in different things.
00:10:33.780 One might specialize in science and math.
00:10:36.080 Another one might specialize in a particular like cultural study or language, whatever.
00:10:41.120 Parents have more choice that they can choose schools outside of the public school system without facing a huge bill.
00:10:48.700 Because like I say, the government will fund these schools.
00:10:52.600 So it does give parents more choice.
00:10:54.180 And I think in the rest of the country, we would be wise to be looking at that.
00:10:58.180 Because clearly, there's a pretty high dissatisfaction rate with the direction the public school system is going in.
00:11:04.680 Yeah.
00:11:05.080 Very well said.
00:11:05.960 People can read the results for themselves over at secondstreet.org.
00:11:09.280 And if you are a parent, at the very least, pay attention to what's happening in your kid's school.
00:11:13.620 So you don't get blindsided whenever these stories come up or an Oakville teacher is waving the stories in your face, so to speak.
00:11:20.000 Colin Craig, always good to talk to you.
00:11:21.560 Thanks for coming on today.
00:11:22.900 Thanks a lot, Andrew.
00:11:23.760 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:11:26.560 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.