Juno News - Top 10 Woke Fails in Canadian Classrooms in 2025

00:00:00.000 When I tell strangers what I do for a living, I tell them I'm a journalist covering education,

00:00:17.260 but I doubt that they imagine the scandal and corruption and honestly downright ideological

00:00:23.180 indoctrination that I actually expose. But for those of you who do follow my work,

00:00:29.240 you'll already know that I don't write about things like test scores or teacher shortages or bake sales.

00:00:37.400 No, no, no, no, no, no. I write about the transformation,

00:00:42.540 infiltration of kindergarten to grade 12 education with what I believe to be highly politicized

00:00:51.240 ideologies that frankly have no basis in reality most of the time. Wacky activism has

00:00:58.940 nothing to do with teaching English or math or literacy or civics, but these teachers and

00:01:07.340 bureaucrats do try their very best to shoehorn these topics into the classroom in any way possible.

00:01:14.320 And it's my job to show you just how wacky it's become. But I digress. Less of me telling you

00:01:21.500 things are weird in education and more of me showing you my biggest education stories in 2025

00:01:27.520 as voted by your views. So let's start at number 10. At number 10, we start strong with a look at

00:01:35.860 diversity, equity and inclusion spending under Doug Ford. In my analysis of budget records from the

00:01:41.680 Ministry of Education, I uncovered that Ontario spent nearly half a billion dollars, not million,

00:01:46.980 billion dollars, reshaping public education around DEI and critical race theory-based ideologies,

00:01:54.440 largely outside of the public view. So this tracking started in 2017, so before the Ford government.

00:02:01.200 And that was because this is the year this thing called the Equity Action Plan was kicked off.

00:02:05.780 This is the very action plan that made official policy to deliver some of the crazy ideologies we're

00:02:11.440 seeing embedded in English and math class today. So the funding flowed through special programs like

00:02:17.460 anti-racism, this critical race theory, de-streaming, race-based graduation coaches, and even developed

00:02:25.000 an equity bureaucracy itself within the ministry. So my analysis was very narrow. I kept it narrow in the

00:02:33.900 things that were easily provable. So I think that the actual amount spent on this kind of ideology is

00:02:40.160 actually much bigger than I originally reported. We're just going to have to wait and see what the

00:02:46.360 final numbers will be going forward. I like that we started here because the rest of the episode will

00:02:51.820 be example after example of the results of this action plan from back in 2017. Just to finish off, in

00:03:00.320 2024, the province was spending about 30 million dollars a year on these initiatives, with no province-wide

00:03:07.580 evidence that they've improved outcomes. I don't even think they were tracking whether or not they were

00:03:14.240 achieving goals with things like KPIs or anything. They just kept spending more and more and more and

00:03:18.800 more on it without any kind of tracking. And as you may imagine, when asked to account for the spending,

00:03:25.400 the Ministry of Education did not respond.

00:03:29.360 I am really glad this one made it to the list. This is probably my favorite story of the year.

00:03:33.620 This is my feature investigation that revealed that Ontario's Ford government accredited the

00:03:39.300 Canadian Islamic College, which is a new private post-secondary institution backed by the Muslim

00:03:46.520 Association of Canada. And this is all despite a sealed Canada Revenue Agency audit that raised

00:03:52.840 serious concerns about MAC's past funding activities and alleged affiliations with a certain international

00:04:01.060 religious political movement that cannot be named. The CRA audit initially recommended to revoke MAC's

00:04:07.840 charitable status and imposed a compliance agreement instead, which included a penalty of 1.3 million

00:04:16.240 dollars, though parts of the record still remain under court seal. Now, despite this, the government or the

00:04:22.980 province rather moved ahead with the accreditation of the college and public records suggest the college would have

00:04:29.940 been accredited directly through ministerial approval. Students at the college are required to take

00:04:35.320 core courses promoting what the institution calls an Islamic worldview, including programs that approach

00:04:41.480 social justice, governance, economics, and even activism through an explicit religious lens. Now,

00:04:49.400 national security experts warned that certain international religious political movements that cannot be named

00:04:54.860 often advance its ideology through education and civic institutions while denying formal ties. Now,

00:05:03.500 MAC has denied the allegations, calling them politically motivated. But for me, the story does leave me with a few

00:05:11.400 unanswered questions. First of all, why would a college tied to an organization under CRA counterterrorism scrutiny

00:05:19.280 be accredited without public explanation? And why won't our elected officials answer the questions I have

00:05:26.820 about it? At number eight, the case of Catherine Cronos. Now, Catherine is an Ontario parent council member at her

00:05:35.920 board, the Hamilton Wentworth District School Board, and she was suspended by her board after urging that her

00:05:43.100 objection to mandatory land acknowledgements be recorded in the meeting minutes of parent council.

00:05:49.280 Not a huge ask. She argued that the wording of such land acknowledgements effectively amounted to

00:05:54.960 political speech, and that it didn't have any place in political institutions, or government bodies,

00:06:01.260 rather. So her objection did go viral last April on social media, and you might have seen it. Honestly,

00:06:07.680 it was a pretty brilliant objection. The board's action did draw legal scrutiny, and a charter-based

00:06:14.420 warning, a legal letter was sent by the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, and eventually

00:06:21.140 Catherine was reinstated to her parent council. Now, even after her return, she still faced repeated

00:06:26.680 efforts to silence her at meetings, prompting a broader debate about transparency, parental rights,

00:06:33.280 and even free expression within school governance. The interesting thing, though, about Catherine's

00:06:38.420 objection is that it's since encouraged other parents to do similar, and another parent at another

00:06:44.640 board, this time the Waterloo Region Board, Jeff Horstman, he launched a charter-based legal challenge,

00:06:50.380 again with JCCF, on his board's mandatory land acknowledgement policies for the Parent Involvement

00:06:56.320 Committee. And he did so on the grounds of freedom of conscience, no less. So I'll be following this very

00:07:03.240 closely in the new year. At number seven, members of team Nova Scotia's girls volleyball team were

00:07:10.960 threatened with sanctions after privately raising concerns about competing against and sharing

00:07:17.740 accommodations with a male teammate who identifies as female. Parents and players say that they were not

00:07:26.040 given any prior disclosure or consent, or asked for their consent, rather, before the athlete was placed

00:07:31.760 on the girls' team and spaces. When concerns were discussed privately, the coach repeatedly labeled

00:07:39.360 the concerned girls disgusting and warned them that they could be expelled from the team. Emails to

00:07:45.600 parents framed the issue as discrimination while omitting the athlete's male biology. Now, the result here is

00:07:52.960 a no-win situation where teenage girls are effectively told that speaking up about fairness and, well, fairness in

00:08:00.320 sports, but also privacy for young girls could cost them their membership and their participation within

00:08:05.920 that sport. The teen male athlete, so the mother of the male athlete, did respond to me, did respond to

00:08:13.440 my request for comment. But she said that, quote, the claims outlined in your message, my email, are false and

00:08:20.320 harmful. But she didn't really elaborate on which claims she was referring to. My email did contain all the details of the

00:08:27.440 allegations made to me. But at least she responded because the other officials in this story did not

00:08:35.280 respond. At number six, grade eight students in the Waterloo Region District School Board were taught to

00:08:44.480 unlearn lies about gender. And this includes the idea that parents have a right to know if their child is

00:08:51.760 socially transitioned in schools. So unlike a lot of the teacher training that I cover and I've shared,

00:08:57.920 this doesn't really look like teacher training. It really looked like the teacher just created these

00:09:01.440 slides to do the lessons herself. So she took it upon herself, basically. And the classroom materials

00:09:06.480 introduced concepts like assigned sex at birth, as we know. But it also includes teaching kids about

00:09:12.960 neo-pronouns, so zizim, right? And it told students that using them was about, quote,

00:09:18.320 validating that we all have the right to live our truth. I mean, it sounds nice, but we know where

00:09:24.320 this goes. They're going way beyond tolerance and enforcing the idea that if you don't ardently

00:09:30.720 defend the idea that humans can quite literally change sex, that you're a horrible human being,

00:09:36.720 right? And you don't want to be a horrible human being, so you need to be an ally. And you can't

00:09:40.000 question it because they're living their true selves. So there's some issues with teachers taking this

00:09:45.120 and going rogue. So the students were also instructed to reject myths. But one of those

00:09:50.240 myths, again, was that parents have a right to know if their kids are being socially transitioned

00:09:54.640 in schools. The teacher also promoted activist role models like Jazz Jennings, who transitioned at age

00:10:01.360 five and I believe underwent genital surgery at age 17. So that's not the best role model possibly

00:10:10.080 encouraging teens to go through surgery. And it's a whole rabbit hole on the actual surgeon

00:10:15.600 because the surgeon is part of WPATH and has been involved in all kinds of exposés. So that's a

00:10:22.080 whole rabbit hole that I don't have time to go into today, but I encourage you to go down yourself.

00:10:26.240 I tried to speak with the board, but they refused to explain why gender transitioning is being promoted

00:10:32.080 in English class. Oh, I forgot to mention. Yeah, this was done over several weeks period. There was all these

00:10:38.000 social justice slides and lessons, all in this English class. So the kids were too busy learning

00:10:44.880 to be activists to actually learn English. But as again, the board did not tell me why they thought

00:10:50.640 this was appropriate and why they would allow a teacher to teach children that parental concern is

00:10:56.800 hateful bigotry. At number five, a poster displayed in a grade nine English classroom in Brampton

00:11:04.800 declared that, quote, all of our bodies are infected with the virus of white body supremacy.

00:11:11.840 The poster claimed that this so-called virus was, quote, created in 1691 in the laboratory of the

00:11:18.320 Virginia assembly and now exists, quote, in the air we breathe, in the water we drink, in the food we eat

00:11:26.640 and the institutions that govern us. As you can imagine, parents were pretty alarmed that racist American

00:11:32.640 ideology, utterly disconnected from Canadian history was being presented to 14-year-olds so casually,

00:11:40.080 I mean, so proudly in a classroom. Now, one parent told me her heart sank seeing this display as some

00:11:46.320 kind of academically sound deep thought. As per, the school board hasn't explained whether this material

00:11:54.480 aligns with policy or why it displayed it at all. The Peel region board is definitely one to watch. I would

00:12:02.400 like to have, I'll just say this in this section, I would love to have more moles in the Peel board,

00:12:06.800 so if you're a parent and you're at that board, please do email me. My email is on my x account,

00:12:13.520 realfinkeldusty, at realfinkeldusty on x, or on my sub stack. At number four, a leaked recording

00:12:21.440 exposed a Hamilton high school teacher turning a grade 11 English class into a lesson on far left

00:12:28.320 activism. Now, this is also the Hamilton Wentworth district school board. And instead of teaching

00:12:34.400 literature or writing, or what you would expect people to be learning in an English class, the class

00:12:39.920 was devoted to Black Lives Matter, anti-oppression ideology, identity politics. And when students would

00:12:47.600 push back on these concepts, they were essentially framed as harmful or hateful, right? So the behavior,

00:12:52.720 you can't push back, you have to be an ally. And if you're not an ally, then maybe you might be a white

00:12:56.480 to purpose. So sort of that kind of attitude to stamp out any of the pushback. The teacher

00:13:02.480 justified teaching his students to adopt his personal politics, obviously, as survival for those

00:13:09.040 he imagines he's helping. Because let's be honest, I do think they imagine that they're helping. I did

00:13:15.120 try to speak to the school board again, they did not respond, they declined to explain whether parents

00:13:20.960 were informed of this, or whether they liked or approve of using class time for politics. For this

00:13:27.840 one, I really think I need to play a clip for you to fully appreciate this English class.

00:13:33.440 So for example, a school can punish a kid for using a racial slur. We could agree that that is a good

00:13:40.480 thing, right? When I say punish, I just mean a consequence, right? I don't mean straight to jail,

00:13:47.840 right? Like that's clearly not going to happen. Despite how tempting it is for some of you to think

00:13:54.320 that. And I'm not judging that at all. Because I get the frustration when somebody does something awful,

00:13:58.720 I get that. But it isn't straight to jail. But there's a consequence. But if the school operates,

00:14:05.840 as I just mentioned in a racist way, it is very challenging to generate a consequence.

00:14:11.920 Right? Systems move and change very, very, very slowly. Very, very slowly. When they do even move a

00:14:19.840 millimeter, you see people cheering and people are so excited. Right? I'll give you an example,

00:14:27.120 but again, you might be a little bit too young to remember. But I'll give you a for instance.

00:14:33.680 How often do you see police officers get in school?

00:14:39.200 Every day? No. Once a week? No. Once a month? Maybe. Once a semester? Maybe once a year?

00:14:47.120 That's a change. That's a change. The SRO program was this like police liaison program

00:14:56.000 that didn't exactly station a police officer at school.

00:15:00.640 We're getting close. We're getting close. We're at number three. We confirmed through internal

00:15:06.400 Nova Scotia health documents that the province funds and approves transgender medical intervention

00:15:12.560 for teens. And this does include genital surgeries listed for patients under the age of 19. This was

00:15:18.960 a pretty big story as far as I'm concerned. And I think it should have been a lot bigger than it was

00:15:22.640 at the time. So I'm glad it made the list. Now, officials refuse to clarify the ages of the under 19s.

00:15:29.040 But they did acknowledge that the procedures are funded by the province by policy. The findings

00:15:34.880 directly contradicts repeated public assurances that genital surgeries are not being performed

00:15:41.840 on minors in the country. And this places Nova Scotia far outside the direction of other Western

00:15:47.520 countries, far outside, sorry, the direction that other Western countries are now moving into.

00:15:52.400 So again, I always reach out to people when I'm writing about them, and very few do respond. But

00:15:57.600 Stacey Burgess, Executive Director of Clinical Care at Nova Scotia Health, she did respond.

00:16:04.000 I asked her if the data of underage genital surgery was real, all these under 19s getting

00:16:09.760 their bits cut off. And she actually confirmed it. She pointed to other policies showing that, quote,

00:16:16.880 minors over the age of 16 can request exemptions for such surgeries under certain conditions.

00:16:23.600 She didn't clarify further than that, though. Crazy.

00:16:27.440 Number two, this piece broke down a new nursing code of ethics requirement,

00:16:35.680 asking nurses to affirm contested social and political positions as part of their professional

00:16:41.600 duty. They're basically branding ideology as ethics here. And it's just as nutty as you would expect.

00:16:48.000 It denounces what it calls white European centric foundations of modern medicine,

00:16:54.000 compels nurses to adopt a broad set of, you know, your typical radical progressive political beliefs

00:16:59.760 as part of their professional duties. Now, at this point, we all expect social justice, a DEI,

00:17:06.160 in our workplaces. So we're not really shocked by that. But this code of ethics went way further

00:17:13.280 by requiring nurses to apply a planetary health lens to their care. Now, this instructs nurses to

00:17:20.640 understand the interconnectedness between nature in, as an example, human beings, plants, animal species,

00:17:28.480 and nonliving entities, and recognize the rights of nature and the planet. We're talking about nursing.

00:17:35.200 Our number one most viewed story of the year is, you may have guessed it, the family's racist.

00:17:45.840 This is one of my very first articles when I started working at True North. And it reveals that,

00:17:52.000 once again, the Waterloo Region District School Board approved and delivered training suggesting that

00:17:57.600 the word family could be harmful because of how some racialized students might interpret it. I guess,

00:18:04.560 not all families, not all people have families. Why this is racialized, though, is a whole question

00:18:10.720 to be answered. They also terms, sorry, they also labeled terms like objectivity, perfectionism,

00:18:19.600 as linked with white supremacy. So the article went everywhere. It was in America. It was in the UK.

00:18:28.320 I don't think it was in print media, but it was in digital news media. I mean, big media was in the

00:18:33.360 Daily Mail, and it was in Newsweek. And the CBC even wrote a hit piece on my article, which actually

00:18:39.200 focused on critical race theory's involvement with this particular training. Now, the crazy thing is,

00:18:47.040 is that this school board, the chair of the board and the director of the school board, they went on a

00:18:51.680 media offensive, and they did several radio interviews. But they also put out a number of

00:18:57.840 statements out to the public. So there's a huge pushback for this particular thing. And I was actually

00:19:02.560 banned off Twitter over it. So it was a pretty big deal back in June of this year.

00:19:08.800 We still don't have any answers for this. The training slides that I received were not the full

00:19:14.640 deck. I have asked for them through FOI. I've been denied through FOI. We have been promised them,

00:19:20.320 but we haven't seen them yet. So I will be keeping on this story because this board is very tenaciously

00:19:25.760 clinging to not sharing what has happened in this story. But you obviously care about it,

00:19:30.880 and I will be following up. Thank you so much for watching my top 10 this year.

00:19:35.600 And I wanted to add that so many of these stories, in fact, nearly all of them,

00:19:40.320 they wouldn't have been possible without people like you, the audience. If you want to get in touch

00:19:44.800 with something that's happening in your child's school, or maybe you're aware of crazy DEI policies

00:19:50.800 going on in other institutions, I do share my email in my bios, whether it's on X or Substack. Like I

00:19:56.000 said, X at Fingledusty, at Real Fingledusty and my Substack, which is just Melanie Bennett. So feel

00:20:03.200 free to reach out and or private message me on social media. I love hearing from you. And also,

00:20:08.880 reporting on this only really matters if you share it. So True North and June are among the only

00:20:15.680 outlets covering the ideological transformation in education. I certainly, I think I'm the only one

00:20:20.880 with that beat. So share, share, share, the more we share, the more we can inform the public. And

00:20:28.560 do not forget to have the happiest Christmas break. I will see you in the new year.

00:20:35.840 Wait, it's not over. I, I'm really sorry, I had to turn it up to 11. Because it's Christmas, no less.

00:20:44.160 So this one is fresh off the presses. This one is not voted by you. But this one is one that I

00:20:50.240 decided to add. I reported on a Christmas in Palestine hallway display at Peel District School

00:20:56.880 Board just this month in Brampton. Again, the display recast the birth of Jesus in a modern

00:21:02.720 geopolitical narrative about Palestine and the Israel Gaza conflict. The display created by a teacher and

00:21:09.920 department head Fadi Mahana described this nonsense geopolitical activism. So I'll give you an example.

00:21:16.880 There was a poster that said from the river to the sea and turned it into some kind of fishing culture

00:21:23.120 metaphor about fishermen and fishing in, in Gaza. What elevated the story for me was that Mahana was

00:21:31.440 appointed to the Ontario College of Teachers investigation committee. So this is really important

00:21:37.760 because this is the body responsible for screening complaints of teacher misconduct and deciding which

00:21:44.960 cases proceeds to disciplinary action. So that appointment raises some serious questions about

00:21:50.720 integrity and judgment here, particularly as Jewish groups and organizations have documented hundreds of

00:21:57.920 often unsanctioned anti-Semitic incidents in Ontario schools. And many of those incidents are tied to

00:22:04.480 teachers themselves or school approved activities. And in this case, Mahana, one thing, one thing I didn't say,

00:22:11.840 please go read the article, one thing I didn't say about it just now is that it just erased the existence

00:22:16.160 of Israel calling Israeli cities Palestine. You know, it would have on this Christmas display, the

00:22:25.120 temple mount and things like that. Like, it really did in, I guess, a slightly sophisticated manner,

00:22:30.880 paint the picture that Israel just doesn't exist. And this place was always called Palestine. And so if you

00:22:35.440 have someone on an investigation committee to investigate misconduct complaints, who they

00:22:40.960 themselves are misconducting themselves, and we have an enormous amount of complaints about anti-Semitism,

00:22:47.200 so much so that even the federal government became involved and wrote a report, a anti-Semitism in K-12

00:22:53.840 education in Ontario report from the feds. It had to be written by the feds. That's how bad it is. So this whole

00:23:00.080 story was just wrapped up in sort of the problem that we're seeing in education. So that was mine

00:23:05.600 from me to you. I will tell you this, the school eventually removed the display, so it is now gone.

00:23:12.960 They did say it was meant to foster cultural understanding. Okay, well, for real this time,

00:23:19.440 that is the end. Merry Christmas.

Juno News - December 25, 2025

Top 10 Woke Fails in Canadian Classrooms in 2025

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