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Bill 44 - Human Rights, Citizenship and Multiculturalism Amendment Act, 2009

Reasoned Amendment

Ms Blakeman: Yes. Absolutely, Mr. Speaker. I would like to speak in favour of the amendment because I think this was true. There may well have been consultations after the fact between the drafters of the bill and representatives of the educational sector, but I would argue pretty strongly that there was not sufficient consultation prior to going into this bill.

I mean, it’s hard to get the four organizations together that have come together as a coalition almost in reaction to what this bill has brought forward. But this government managed to do it with this particular legislation. We had the Alberta Teachers’ Association, the College of Alberta School Superintendents, the Alberta School Boards Association, and the Alberta School Councils’ Association. I mean, this government does some impressive things sometimes, and getting those four groups to come together as a coalition to speak with one voice in opposition to this bill is really impressive. I have to hand it to the government because that’s no mean feat, to get those four groups all motivated to come together. They did a joint press release. They had it all co-ordinated. Wow. This government must have really done something to get them that motivated.

Indeed, they did. They put a section in this bill that has thrown – chaos is a strong word to use in this context.

Dr. Taft: Confusion.

Ms Blakeman: Thank you. A colleague suggests that “confusion” would be more appropriate.

Dr. Taft: Disarray.

Ms Blakeman: Disarray is another possible wording. Actually, I like “disarray.” I think that’s pretty accurate. I mean, we don’t actually have this bill in play yet. It hasn’t passed, and I hope it doesn’t pass in the form that it’s in.

You know, the guards are kind of making fun of me every day as I haul all this stuff up the stairs. A significant portion of it, all this stuff in the pink here, is the reaction that we’re getting into my office on the proposals in this bill, and 99 per cent of that reaction is about section 9, which is amending section 11.1. It’s being casually referred to as the parental opt-out.

I’m coming at it as the daughter of teachers and someone who grew up in a household that was all about education. To me this section is about creating disarray, confusion, and possibly, finally, chaos in our classrooms, in our schools, and in our education system. This comes about because we don’t end up with the kind of consultation that should have brought us to this point.

I’m going to back up a little bit here. I think that the minister got into this for all the right reasons. I think the government got into this for the right reasons. It may have been that the minister came on board when this process was already in the pipeline, and that’s quite likely.

First of all was to streamline the actual process of the Human Rights Commission. Yes. Needed to happen. I’ve now gone back and consulted with some of the people I know who knew that system well. You know, I’m just reading through some of the notes from these people, and they’re saying: “Yes, absolutely. Needed that. Good to see this. Glad they chose to call it a tribunal, not a panel.” So a lot of administrative changes that really needed to happen.

One of the perennial sets of questions that I inherited as the human rights critic from my predecessor, the previous member by two for Calgary-Buffalo, the venerable Gary Dickson, was a series of questions about how many cases had been opened by the Human Rights Commission, how many cases had been closed by the Human Rights Commission, how many had been carried over the year, how many were more than 300 days old as open cases, et cetera, et cetera. What it really showed us was year from year the commission was falling behind in its ability to deal fairly swiftly with these cases and investigate them and either mediate to a conclusion or move them on. It just really dragged out.

So they got into it for the right reasons. Of course, once the act was open, they’d really look very silly if they didn’t include the sexual orientation, which they did. I’m very glad to see that, and so are many of my constituents and many of those that I claim as constituents.

Then they didn’t do what this motion is suggesting they should have done, which was to do sufficient consultation with the teachers and the school boards before they got into this section 9, which is amending section 11.1, suggesting that we start to create this disarray, confusion, chaos in our classrooms. The argument that comes back at us is: well, we always did this. Yeah. Good. So why did you feel the need to write something that properly should be situated in the School Act and write it into a different piece of legislation? Can you imagine writing something that affected the beef producers into an act on education because someone decided that that should now…

Dr. Taft: We should all be taught to eat beef.

Ms Blakeman: Yes. We should all be taught to eat beef.

Yet we’ve talked about this so much now that everybody is going, “Yeah, that sounds very reasonable” when the Minister of Education says: “We already do this. This is why we put it in the act.” Huh? No. If this is affecting what is going on in the classroom, it should be under the School Act, not under the human rights act. Well, then I’m told that it’s already there. Okay. Then if it’s already there and it’s working, why are you, one, writing it into a piece of legislation and, two, writing it into a different piece of legislation?

You know there are nights – and it always seems to happen at night; there we are, 25 after 9 at night – when I start thinking: why does this government insist on exposing our taxpayers to yet another constitutional challenge? Every time I stand here in this House and say, “Mark my words; this one’s going to come back as a constitutional challenge,” a couple of years later there it is on the front pages of the paper, and the taxpayers are on the hook to chase through on why this government decided to do this. Maybe they need to do it to satisfy their own internal politics. I don’t know. But if that’s the case, can you not just work that out the way other caucuses work it out?

Mr. Mason: Because they have free will.

Ms Blakeman: Yeah. Right. Voting with the free will and all of that kind of thing.

To expose taxpayers to what is surely going to be a pretty clearcut constitutional challenge on these grounds is really unfair to the taxpayers, especially when I suspect you know that going in. You’ve got a lot of smart people working for you. You’ve got a lot of lawyers working for you. [interjection] I’m sorry; the minister is interested in something. I’m sure he’s going to get up and respond to me when he gets his chance. [interjection] Oh, yeah. I’ve come back to the amendment a number of times. It’s talking about: we can’t read this a second time because we didn’t consult with teachers. You bet you didn’t, and you didn’t consult with them particularly on section 9, which is amending section 11.1, which is about why the government chose to put something that affects the School Act into human rights legislation and the fact that – are you following along? – that is going to end up being a constitutional challenge and cost taxpayers money. There’s the total thread recast for you. Thank you so much.

The other things that have come up repeatedly here are: well, you know, if you just notify parents of what’s going to happen, you can adjust the modules, and kids can be opted out of classes or given alternate instruction. Here I’m going to come and stand alongside my colleague from Edmonton-Riverview to say: we really need to be working forward in a way that is about coming together, not about highlighting differences, not about taking people apart, not about taking children out of the classroom.

I’m just going to pause here and say that part of this is about religious education. There have been other discussions earlier in the day about, you know, parents’ rights to educate their children in a particular religious faith. Absolutely. But to me that doesn’t mean that that faith is then used to remove a child from the teaching that all other children are getting in that system. To me as the child of educators I want to know that when we say, “This is someone that graduated from 12 years of education in Alberta,” we know that this is what they know. We know that this is the instruction that they’ve had, that they can think, that they have analytical skills, that they’ve been challenged on some things that maybe make them a little uncomfortable.

I mean, let’s face it. If everybody in this room had been allowed to opt out of everything that made them a little uncomfortable, this would be a much harder place to work toward some kind of a solution in. As part of our education in Alberta we were taught how to be able to construct those arguments and bring them forward and to recognize that you disagree with someone and to be able to develop those arguments and put them out on a public platform and debate those ideas out there.

What are we trying to create here when we say, “No, we don’t want children involved in these discussions or exposed to these ideas or challenged by this; we want them taken out of this and not exposed to that”? Everything I’ve been reading about what we really need children to do and all the stuff that’s actually in the School Act and in the manual that they use about, you know, creating opportunities for kids to learn, to find controversial issues, to help them work their way through that process – and Sheldon Chumir, you know, has also weighed back in on this a couple of times.

Dr. Taft: You mean the Sheldon Chumir foundation.

Ms Blakeman: I’m sorry. I mean the Sheldon Chumir foundation. For those of us that actually knew Sheldon Chumir, yes. Now there is a foundation in his name, which he funded. Much of the work that they did in the consultation process was freely adopted by the minister in charge of this bill, but not all of the suggestions that the Sheldon Chumir foundation made were in fact adopted and incorporated into this.

I’m aware that my time is running out here, and I’m not going to be able to find the references fast enough to speak to them. But the point that I was trying to make is that the world gets more complex. It’s not getting simpler. It’s not getting easier the more times we look at a problem, and in many ways we’ve not solved problems. How many times do you hear people say, “Well, we’re coming around on this one again”? Child poverty: you know, here we are; we’re still dealing with it. Is it an easier issue to deal with now than 50 years ago? No, it isn’t. We’ve got all kinds of other complications in it, so in many ways the issues are still here, but they’re increasingly multilayered. They’re much more of a woven tapestry. We need to be able to educate the next generation to be able to understand the complexity of that and to be able to put forward their point of view with confidence, with some factual backup to it, and be able to argue those ideas out in a public context. I really feel strongly that removing kids from controversial issues and from the classroom is a bad idea.

It also puts enormous pressure on teachers to somehow deal with impromptu ideas coming up, that with questions from students or current affairs that are brought up in the day, a teacher now has to say: “Oh, okay. Whoa. Stop. Just let me send a note home to the parents to let everybody know that this is controversial, and we’ll get back to you in two weeks.”

Thanks very much, Mr. Speaker.