Juno News - March 26, 2026


Schools in Hamilton to apply “anti-colonial lens” to graduation ceremonies

Topics
graduation ceremonies
Mentioned
Paul Calandra Hamilton
CBC is Panicking University puts “IDENTITY POLITICS” over STUDENT SAFETY

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

165.01

Word count

387

Sentence count

17

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In a direct response to Juno News reporting, Minister Paul Calandra demands that graduation ceremonies this year stay apolitical or else. After an anti-colonial memo about graduation was leaked from the Hamilton-Wentward District School Board, the Ontario Minister of Education barged in with a fierce warning to the education system: back off or else!

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.640 The Ontario Minister of Education, Paul Calandra, just told school boards to knock off the divisive
00:00:07.200 politics. In a direct response to Juno News reporting, Minister Paul Calandra demands that
00:00:12.720 grad ceremonies this year stay apolitical or else after an anti-colonial memo about graduation was
00:00:20.960 leaked from the Hamilton-Wentward District School Board. Well, that was our leak. You can read it
00:00:25.520 right here. It was an internal memo sent to me by someone within the school out in Hamilton,
00:00:31.700 which told principals that they had to organize anti-oppressive, anti-racist, anti-colonial
00:00:37.880 graduation this year for all the students. Now, days after this reporting, Ontario Minister of
00:00:44.100 Education Paul Calandra stepped in. He barged straight in with a fierce warning to the education
00:00:49.840 system to back off or else. And in a letter to the school boards, Paul Calandra said that graduation
00:00:55.900 is not an appropriate forum for political views and must remain strictly student-centered,
00:01:02.340 apolitical, inclusive, and respectful. He even said he would use all the tools necessary
00:01:08.580 at his disposal within the Education Act if they fail to comply. And how do I know that he was
00:01:15.080 responding to Juno News' reporting? I made it very clear in that letter that I don't want
00:01:19.820 teachers put in the middle of disagreements between students and school boards. There was a
00:01:24.500 memo that went out from the Hamilton District School Board to teachers. So a faceless
00:01:29.540 superintendent in that board decided that graduation ceremonies shouldn't focus on
00:01:35.100 student achievement. Student achievement, by the way, which comes about because of the hard
00:01:39.100 work of teachers, right? So a graduation ceremony is about the student success, but it's also a way
00:01:46.360 for parents to recognize what teachers have done to build on that success. So this superintendent
00:01:52.240 in Hamilton decided, let's make it divisive. Let's turn it away from the success of students
00:01:56.800 and put that on the responsibility on the shoulder of the teachers organizing. Well,
00:02:02.780 that superintendent, you know what that superintendent should do? Go to every single 0.97
00:02:06.640 one of these graduation ceremonies so that when parents are upset by the divisive nature of it,
00:02:11.240 When parents are upset that the focus is not on students, let them take the heat from the students, not the teacher.
00:02:17.980 We should focus on success of students and what they've accomplished.