Western Standard - Who has the power in Alberta's school board system？

00:00:00.480 Hi, my name is Leah Muschid. I'm a reporter here at the Western Standard and today we have with us

00:00:05.040 John Hilton O'Brien, Executive Director of Parents for Choice, an Alberta-based advocacy organization

00:00:11.360 dedicated to informing parents about Alberta's education system. Today, John is going to comment

00:00:17.760 on the recent report by the Parkland Institute, which is talking about challenging parental

00:00:23.920 rights, as well as the book ban that has been put in place in Alberta schools. So John, today why

00:00:32.000 don't we start out by discussing the book ban and you can tell us more about that. So let's start at

00:00:37.200 the beginning. A dozen years ago, parents came to us with concerns about books in their children's

00:00:43.280 schools. So we raised some alarms about it, we tried to talk to ministers and so forth, and

00:00:49.920 school officials told us they weren't there. Turns out this was false. Parents finally ran what we

00:00:57.440 kind of call an intelligence operation, and they got into school catalogs and pulled call numbers.

00:01:03.920 And that happening last year is what convinced the minister to investigate and then to act.

00:01:10.400 So right now what's happening is Edmonton Public Schools has been cosplaying as the rebel alliance

00:01:16.800 against the government's empire. But let's be clear, this is not a war on ideas. The government always said

00:01:25.920 that classic literature would stay. If you read the original order, it specifically exempted any

00:01:33.840 cases where sexual activity was implied but not clearly described. And so EPSB had no call than any of

00:01:42.800 the books they did. But today, with the government's announcement yesterday and the revised order,

00:01:49.520 what's being removed is specifically graphic sexual imagery. Child abuse, penetration, sex toys. 0.81

00:01:58.640 No reasonable person thinks kids need that in a school library. Just the same. I had an interview last 0.99

00:02:06.000 week where a librarian or someone from the library association was defending having these books in

00:02:12.160 schools. So that's been kind of entertaining. But this morning I had an interview on CHED where the

00:02:22.080 interviewer told me I was just an activist so I shouldn't have a say by implication. So what gives here?

00:02:30.240 Whether I'm an activist or a professor doesn't change the facts. Parents produced catalog call numbers

00:02:37.200 after 12 years of denial. That evidence is why the minister acted. Truth doesn't depend on job titles.

00:02:45.760 And professionals like librarians, real professionals know their limits. They inform and they advise parents.

00:02:54.000 They do not overrule them. So why exactly are left-wing media and activists starting to make this about me?

00:03:04.720 Who I am has no bearing on whether sexualized material exists in school libraries or whether

00:03:10.720 we should protect kids from it. The catalog numbers tell the story. The research studies that I've cited tell the story.

00:03:18.720 Facts don't change depending on who says them. So what is going on here? Well, last Wednesday, Parkland Institute

00:03:31.040 issued a report about who is really behind parental rights. And that's being used as a talking point on the left.

00:03:40.080 And they named me personally. They even got a key fact wrong to the point of honestly being pretty much slanderous.

00:03:49.760 They said that in an article I wrote for the Western Standard, I had said that teachers were allowed to make

00:03:57.600 referrals to the child gender identity clinic in Alberta without parental consent.

00:04:05.040 They claimed that I had produced no evidence for this.

00:04:08.320 But if you read the article, whether it's on our website or I think on the Western Standard,

00:04:13.920 in the sentence that talks about it, there's a link to documentary evidence.

00:04:19.280 I found a presentation being made internally at Alberta Health Services saying precisely this.

00:04:30.720 So, you know, there's a saying in politics that you shouldn't punch down. And for goodness sake,

00:04:37.680 if you do, don't miss. So why would Parkland Institute do this?

00:04:42.320 Yes. Well, what's happening here is the empire wants to claim equal moral ground with the rebel alliance.

00:04:50.240 And when you don't have the truth on your side, you resort to character assassination.

00:04:56.160 But look, Parkland is not a neutral think tank. It does not disclose who their donors are. They don't

00:05:06.240 disclose what their budget is. And the reason for this is that they operate as part of the University of Alberta's

00:05:15.040 574 million dollar research umbrella. At the same time, they hide their own budget.

00:05:24.480 Now, its board does include some professors, but it does something that no other think tank does,

00:05:31.920 or at least not attacks to a university. They have reserved seats for the major public sector unions.

00:05:39.680 AUPE, AFL, ATA, Health Sciences Union, United Nurses of Alberta. For decades, this has been known as

00:05:49.840 Alberta's unofficial opposition to conservative parties. Is that really scholarship or is that a

00:05:56.880 political machine and academic clothing? But look, it's a little bigger than Parkland, okay?

00:06:05.280 If you go to Public Interest Alberta, they shared the same unions on the board, plus the Canadian Union of

00:06:12.240 Public Employees. And these unions that are on the board of this organization spent a lot of money during

00:06:21.200 the last election as third party advertisers. Sorry, I mean during the last trustee election. The ATA alone,

00:06:29.840 the Alberta Teachers Association, spent $1.1 million as a political third party advertiser. When you add up

00:06:37.440 the spending from these unions, $2.7 million was done officially at the provincial level in 2021,

00:06:46.480 and $1.7 million was done specifically as a campaign advertiser during the municipal election. A PAC called

00:06:57.760 Calgary's Future was funded to the tune of almost $2 million by CUPE, and they endorsed spots on every

00:07:06.720 seat on Calgary City Council and every seat on the public school board. They're not alone in this. In

00:07:14.640 Edmonton, the Labour Council endorsed eight candidates who were, I think it was for trustee, and five of

00:07:22.480 those won. The net result is that both city boards are effectively captured by union-backed slates.

00:07:30.000 And we're talking $2.5 billion in education budgets. This is not the rebels versus the empire.

00:07:39.920 That's a machine running billion-dollar boards. So what I'm telling you is that the board of the

00:07:47.360 Parkland Institute is the empire. They are not the rebels. And EPSB is part of that discussion on their

00:07:57.520 side. So this election, the ATA announced that they're going even further. The government has tried to

00:08:06.480 attempt this down a little bit by announcing restrictions on third-party advertisers.

00:08:11.920 But the first job of any campaign manager is apparently to get around spending limits and so

00:08:18.080 forth. So last March, they declared war with their Stand for Education campaign.

00:08:25.680 I'm not sure if they're buying TV or radio ads, but we are starting to see lawn signs from the ATA,

00:08:32.880 at least in Calgary. And we expect to see the full blitz. They have their own candidate website that they

00:08:41.280 refer people to. They're putting up ATA broth lawn signs. They're also handing out an 88-page campaign

00:08:48.880 handbook, very professionally written, probably cost a substantial amount of money, and it would do credit to

00:08:57.840 either UCP or the NDP during a provincial campaign. And they're giving that out to their people for free.

00:09:06.400 It gives step-by-step instructions on messaging, canvassing, organizing, and tells ATA locals how to

00:09:13.200 get involved. It's not a union helping members. This is a parallel political party trying to capture

00:09:20.320 school boards or keep the control they already have. And when I say that during the last election,

00:09:28.000 unions spent $4.4 million at the trustee level, admittedly as political advertisers mostly rather

00:09:37.600 than direct election campaign advertisers, I'd like to remind you for scale that during the last

00:09:44.880 provincial election, UCP only spent $4.2 million. So the union spending during the course of the last

00:09:54.400 school board elections was bigger than a winning provincial election campaign. So the ATA's agenda

00:10:03.280 is not neutral. They open a campaign only for so-called public schools. They leave out Catholic boards.

00:10:10.960 They leave out independent schools and they leave out homeschoolers. Why? Because if they close down

00:10:17.520 the alternatives, they can force every teacher from the independent schools and homeschoolers to pay ATA

00:10:24.800 dues. And they have a political ally with the Public School Boards Association of Alberta. They're aligned on

00:10:33.840 that. They fold in SOGI-123 activism, promising to mobilize opposition to government policies.

00:10:40.960 And their tactic crossed the line, right? An ATA staffer personally phoned Canyon Meadows Cinema last

00:10:47.440 year to cancel a UCP event, or sorry, to cancel their ATA event because they said the cinema had dared to

00:10:59.440 host an event by a UCP constituency association. They went to the extent of calling the UCP a hate girl.

00:11:06.800 So this is not education advocacy. This is political warfare. Now compare that with transfer choice and

00:11:15.120 education. We really are grassroots. We've trained about 300 parents, community members and potential

00:11:21.520 trustees. We don't have a multimillion budget. We don't have a free campaign manual. We're not providing

00:11:31.280 lawn signs from HQ. When we provide a service, we charge for it so that there's no even appearance of

00:11:40.480 collusion. If we train people, they'll pay a fee to take our workshop. It's not done for free.

00:11:46.720 And what we see here is ordinary people stepping up. It's not driven by big money from somewhere.

00:11:57.200 We're run by tiny, tiny donations from ordinary people. It's like we're looking at David and Goliath here,

00:12:06.080 and Goliath is pointing at David before the battle and yelling, he's too tall. So what's the bottom line

00:12:13.680 here? When you draw a government paycheck, you are not Luke Skywalker. You are a storm trooper. And if you

00:12:23.040 are like the Parkland Institute, you probably have the same aim from the looks of it. Parents are the

00:12:31.280 citizens here. They're the ones paying the bills. They're the ones raising the kids. And they deserve

00:12:37.040 a save. Trustee elections are coming next month. And I hope that parents will ask every candidate one

00:12:44.720 single question. Will you keep sexualized books on school shelves? Or will you stand with parents?

00:12:51.840 Beyond that, we are sending out the survey to every trustee candidate. And we will be asking

00:13:00.160 everyone possible to answer 10 simple questions that will help parents get a better sense of where

00:13:06.240 they stand on things. So I think that's, as Forrest Gump said, all I've got to say about that.

00:13:16.320 Okay, well, that's pretty interesting. That covered some of my questions on the report, definitely.

00:13:22.160 Because you're basically saying it's kind of all connected. And trustees are have like a big fund

00:13:30.720 for like, keeping things going in the direction they want to go with like the ATA with all of that. So I

00:13:38.640 guess my question also, because the report itself was called, what was it called challenging

00:13:46.320 independent education, challenging parental parental rights. Oh, my bad. Okay. Yeah. So it's challenging

00:13:52.880 print. Like, but I'm just confused. I don't know if you can explain this to me. Why do they want to

00:13:58.960 challenge parental rights so badly? Like, it's their kids. I just don't get it. Well,

00:14:06.080 it's not about parents. It's not about voters. This is about a group of political elites, right?

00:14:13.120 Union members of these public sector unions may not even be aware that their managers have a seat at

00:14:20.560 Parkland Institute and Parkland, sorry, not Parkland, but Public Interest Alberta. They probably don't

00:14:28.160 know they wouldn't approve. This is a management side project. And what it does is help these and

00:14:34.560 these people on these boards keep power. And make no mistake, they've got a lot of power and prestige.

00:14:41.920 And that is definitely worth something. They've got a lot at stake. Right. Yeah. I guess. Yeah. It

00:14:49.760 doesn't make sense then. The key difference between now and last time is that the province is trying

00:14:58.400 to rein in spending by third party advocacy groups, right? They want restricted to $5,000. And they're

00:15:07.600 trying to say, no, no, every local doesn't get to spend $5,000 as a third party advertiser. Your whole

00:15:14.880 union gets to spend $5,000. And right now, these guys are trying to find a way around that. And this

00:15:22.320 is one of the ways they're doing it. So consider that report. That report was prepared for the Parkland

00:15:29.840 Institute by the research director for a group called Support Our Students. They're an activist group

00:15:39.680 on the left. And they push for very progressive agendas. But what's happened is Parkland Institute

00:15:50.320 may have paid the money to produce the report, possibly more than you would think reasonable. We will never

00:15:58.960 know because their reporting is completely opaque. There is no way to access that information.

00:16:05.840 However, that would fund support our students. So that would get money into the hands of an activist 0.99

00:16:12.000 group. That's one more group to spend $5,000 as a third party advertiser. And that's one more

00:16:18.560 group that can donate money to candidates. Wow.

00:16:23.280 So you're seeing workarounds here. Yeah, definitely. Well, okay. Other than that,

00:16:32.080 I guess you also in the Parkland Institute report, they were talking about how your organization,

00:16:42.000 they said they're you're trying to influence public education by approach school trustee

00:16:49.440 workshops that you guys do. So why don't you tell us more about these workshops? Like,

00:16:54.000 what do they entail? And how is it going to help like parents and students and like school boards and

00:16:58.480 stuff? So we are planning to do another workshop in Calgary towards the end of this month. But we have

00:17:06.800 already been running workshops for the last four years. Part of the reason why the unions are worried is that

00:17:15.520 we did this during for the first time during the last school board elections. Out of the people we

00:17:23.200 trained, a dozen people ran for office, and four of those apparently got their seats. Since then, we've

00:17:31.040 trained over 300 people. So we could look forward to more independent minded people getting seats.

00:17:39.920 Not all of the people that we train are necessarily conservative. We train whoever comes in the door,

00:17:47.440 because simply put, having a healthy political process at the school board level would be a

00:17:53.440 wonderful thing. Because right now, most of us don't know who's running. And more than half of us don't

00:17:58.880 know who our local school board trustee is. We would like to fix this.

00:18:02.640 But to the union, this is a terrible threat to their control. When I say that those school boards

00:18:11.360 control 2.5 million dollars in spending, if you can get a friendly superintendent installed at one,

00:18:19.200 if you can get policies that favor hiring your own people in administrative positions,

00:18:27.760 that's a key bit of political patronage. And so there's a lot on the line here.

00:18:33.680 2.5 million dollars, just the leavings from that, involve a considerable amount of power.

00:18:41.680 Yeah. Now I'm wondering if I actually answered your question.

00:18:48.160 So what are the workshops? So the workshops themselves are usually a day and a bed. I start on Friday night.

00:18:56.080 And first I do a workshop on how to be an effective trustee. And I'm covering things like how to avoid

00:19:03.840 groupthink, how to get through interpersonal issues, how to work with a work plan, and how to actually get

00:19:14.320 things done. It's good advice for anybody on any board, honestly. And it's hard learned from me being on

00:19:21.760 far too many boards, geeked out with the fact that I was trained as a social worker, and all of those

00:19:27.840 group work classes come in really handy. Friday morning, or early Saturday afternoon, if we're

00:19:36.320 trying to jam this into a single day, we cover the nuts and bolts of campaigning. How is it actually done?

00:19:43.280 Concrete examples, right? Occasionally a role play if we have time. So all the things you need to know

00:19:52.160 about how to do the acts of campaigning. Because strangely, not a lot of people actually understand

00:19:59.760 them. Then in the afternoon or late afternoon and early evening, if we're jamming it into a single day,

00:20:07.520 we talk about messaging and issues. We talk about things like, how many issues do you actually get

00:20:13.280 to talk about? How are those connected to what you can actually do as a trustee? How do you

00:20:20.080 turn this into statecraft rather than mere politics? And then we talk about how you pick issues that reflect

00:20:28.480 your agenda, and how you go about choosing them. So we go through possible issues at different levels,

00:20:37.440 and we perhaps do a little role playing for a team trying to figure out what to run. Because after all,

00:20:44.880 school board trustees and municipal councillors have to pick their own issues. They're not chosen by any

00:20:50.320 party. So that's pretty much the whole workshop. We have written a textbook for it that comes as

00:20:57.920 part of signing up for the workshop. We have generally positive reviews from the workshop,

00:21:04.000 people praise it. And we do it as a straight through consistent thing. So you've got a clear

00:21:11.200 idea of what you're enlisting for. But here's the key problem, Leah, and this is what we're really

00:21:18.560 trying to address. For 45 years, Alberta had a conservative government, well, progressive

00:21:25.680 conservative. And we got used to the idea that politics was taken care of, so we didn't need to

00:21:31.920 worry about it. And we got out of the habit of doing competitive campaigns. And what's happened with

00:21:41.760 unions and progressives taking over our school boards and making such an effective bid for provincial

00:21:49.920 government is that conservatives aren't very good at campaigning. When I started on the original board

00:21:58.080 of the Wild Rose Party and we went into our first election, I found out that none of us had actually

00:22:04.240 had a meaningful role in an election. Those who had had been board members and hadn't done any actual

00:22:10.320 campaigning. So I set about trying to change that. What we want people to do is start treating politics

00:22:17.200 as a hobby. This is not the most important election ever. You don't go for this election and then never

00:22:27.200 again. You have to plan to be involved more than once. Treat it like a hobby, like fishing or boxing.

00:22:35.440 And you train, you get your original equipment, you try it out, you get your feet wet a little,

00:22:45.040 you come back, you get a little more training, and you try it again. That's what we need to do for

00:22:51.440 conservatives to be effective in political campaigns. And that's a culture shift that we're trying to

00:22:57.760 accomplish here. Because when that happens, parents have a more meaningful voice in politics and deciding

00:23:06.640 what's happening at those schools, at the levels those decisions are made.

00:23:10.640 Well, thank you very much, John. I feel like it was very informative.

00:23:15.040 I really appreciate you going into more detail on like the Parkland Institute, what it actually means,

00:23:21.120 why they're writing the report to begin with. Yeah, I really appreciate it a lot. And sorry,

00:23:27.280 is there something you want to say? Go ahead. This is very, very long. I'm not sure if you'll be able to

00:23:32.720 use all of us. But if you need to ask any questions while you're constructing the story, I'll be happy to

00:23:39.600 hop on a brief call like this. Okay, yeah, no, no problem. I feel like maybe I'll just like,

00:23:45.760 because you said you wanted to send a survey. So maybe I'll link it in the article as well.

00:23:50.560 Like you're still constructing it. It won't really be done. It won't be complete, probably until

00:23:58.320 the last day to declare as a candidate, which is something like the 19th or the 19th.

00:24:04.880 We will be starting to send it out as we go. If people were, if people want to help make that

00:24:13.600 survey come, they could send an email to us at admin at parentchoice.ca. Okay, yeah. Okay,

00:24:20.880 then we'll just do that. We'll tell them about that. Maybe like link it either in the YouTube

00:24:25.840 description or in the article. Yeah, that would be great. Sweet, sweet. Okay, well, thanks again.

00:24:33.520 And if you guys enjoyed this video, then you can subscribe to the Western Standard YouTube channel,

00:24:40.000 as well as check out our website at Western Standard, where you can subscribe for $10 a month.

00:24:47.120 Yeah, that's all we have for you guys today. So thank you very much. And bye bye. Thank you.

Western Standard - September 17, 2025

Who has the power in Alberta's school board system？

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript