Western Standard - August 09, 2024


Attempts to cancel Paul Coffey


Episode Stats

Length

2 minutes

Words per Minute

170.87543

Word Count

406

Sentence Count

1


Summary

In this episode, we speak with a former school trustee who served on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We talk about his time on the board, his controversial anti-racism views, and what it was like being on a non-voting board.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 uh where are things standing now though there's been some is there an inquiry coming or a hearing
00:00:04.560 or any of that or is it still just people shouting for your dismissal oh no they they wanted me to
00:00:09.440 resign uh publicly or whatever and then uh the minister of education did have a governance
00:00:16.160 review so we had a third party come out actually i'd like to announce i'm speaking for myself as
00:00:21.440 a trustee but not for our school board that's that's kind of important to to clarify so anyways
00:00:27.600 this governance uh review came out and did a review and and uh said that we should be dissolved
00:00:34.480 that's what the minister says and instead of dissolving our board which doesn't happen i think
00:00:40.080 very often across canada he wanted to uh he appointed four trustees to our board so they're
00:00:48.240 non-voting trustees and they're going to uh be involved in our meetings and see if see if they
00:00:55.280 can change our mind on how we behave or how we run the school division i i guess so they'll just kind
00:01:01.440 of appoint and stack your elected board with their own people and then basically they can kind of
00:01:05.600 override things kind of what happened was uh um one of our one of our trustees had resigned to go work for
00:01:12.960 our local mla mdp mla and so then we were down to eight trustees but then uh we ended up uh terminating
00:01:23.360 our ceo and so then three of the long-term trustees that were with the board uh resigned on the same
00:01:30.720 day and then uh so now we're down four so i think the minister decided to appoint his own four uh trustees
00:01:39.760 to be non-voted and non non-elected or whatever so so it's kind of interesting we're yeah and it's fair
00:01:49.040 enough that you point out you know you're just one of the bunch it doesn't mean you're setting policy or
00:01:52.960 you're speaking for them uh i mean that's the point of having multiple trustees you would hope
00:01:57.520 that you get some diversity of view what though compelled you then to delve into uh questioning
00:02:03.040 some of the findings or statements in the truth and reconciliation commission or uh uh some of the
00:02:08.240 residential school uh theories i guess you could say okay so uh with the anti-racism you know so
00:02:14.480 you know so who couldn't argue against that