The news release from the Northwest Territories Government doesn’t even mention Alberta, but just the same it’s a powerful symbol of what’s gone awry in the province to the south under the United Conservative Party Government of Premier Jason Kenney.
The release published yesterday in Yellowknife said that the N.W.T.’s education minister, R.J. Simpson, and his British Columbia counterpart, Jennifer Whiteside, were pleased to announce the two Canadian jurisdictions have agreed to partner on a new Junior Kindergarten to Grade 12 curriculum.
There’s not a word in the statement about how for 40 years at least, the N.W.T. has used its neighbour Alberta’s K-12 curriculum as the foundation of its public education system.
Indeed, the N.W.T.’s long educational partnership with Alberta could easily have continued quite comfortably for another 40 years had it not been for the election of Mr. Kenney and his UCP Government.
It was in 2019, the news release noted, that the N.W.T. education department began to look into what it should do to modernize its school curriculum “to meet the needs of students in an ever-changing world.”
That was also the year, as it happened, that Premier Kenney, the scion of a private school principal, became premier of Alberta and had the opportunity to put his eccentric notions about education into practice.
He was heavily influenced by religious zealots and their private-school movement in the United States, and seized with the idea students were being “hard-wired with collectivist ideas” by a school system run by liberals. “That’s kind of a cultural challenge for any conservative party,” he told his friend, the right-wing commentator Ezra Levant, in 2016. “We’ve got to figure out how to break that nut.”
Alberta Progressive Conservative governments had been at work for years on a revision of the curriculum, work that the NDP Government elected in 2015 had continued. It’s likely that curriculum, if the work had been completed, would have been happily adopted by the N.W.T.
But a few months after the UCP’s election, Alberta Education Minister Adriana Lagrange, doubtless operating on Mr. Kenney’s instructions, spiked that work. She ripped up a memorandum of agreement with the Alberta Teachers Association to collaborate on the curriculum, and hurriedly began cobbling together a new curriculum that would meet the premier’s ideological metrics. No teachers were involved in writing the draft.
The historian hired to advise on the social studies curriculum, a former political aide to Premier Kenney when he was a minister in the Conservative federal government, was known to have downplayed the deaths of Indigenous children in Residential School system and dismissed the teaching of First Nations perspectives as a “fad” and “agit-prop.”
The partial result was the K-6 curriculum released by the Kenney Government in late March, panned by teachers, reviled by curriculum experts and mocked internationally as age-inappropriate, outdated, Eurocentric, jargon-riddled, inaccurate, unconcerned with developing critical thinking skills, and rife with plagiarism from such sources as the Wikipedia and Cotton Belt U.S. states’ textbooks.
Which brings us back to the N.W.T. Education Department, conducting research and consulting with educators, Indigenous governments and the Northwest Territories Teachers Association. What they must have made of Alberta’s “reforms” was politely left out of yesterday’s release.
But reading between its lines, it’s pretty easy to imagine.
“B.C.’s curriculum was very clearly the most aligned to the N.W.T.,” the news release says, noting that it “builds on students’ natural curiosity, inventiveness, and creativity.”
By contrast, the new Alberta curriculum emphasizes rote memorization of lists of facts and dates, and seems intended to stifle creativity, at least if it leads graduates to reconsider the policies traditionally associated with conservative parties, as per Mr. Kenney’s remarks to Mr. Levant.
“Crucially, Indigenous worldviews, knowledge, and perspectives are integrated in all of B.C.’s curricula in a meaningful and intentional way, and are reflected in students’ mandatory learning outcomes,” the N.W.T. release goes on to say. “B.C. designed its curriculum and assessments to be flexible, which allows the N.W.T. to adapt the curriculum to fit our territorial context and ensures that local Indigenous content can be integrated across the curriculum.”
“With an emphasis on Indigenous knowledge, and a focus on literacy and numeracy skills, I am confident that this curriculum will benefit all of the N.W.T.’s JK-12 students,” said Mr. Simpson.
“First Peoples’ principles, histories and ways of knowing are woven throughout our curriculum, and it allows for hands-on and career-centred learning to create equity and opportunities for all students,” Ms. Whiteside added.
“This an embarrassing blow to Alberta’s reputation,” said Sarah Hoffman, the Alberta NDP Opposition’s education critic. “Adriana LaGrange needs to explain: if this curriculum is not good enough for students in the Northwest Territories, why should anyone believe it’s good enough for Alberta’s kids?”
In early March, Ms. Hoffman warned that the N.W.T. was considering the switch.
Now that is has happened, she said yesterday, “this decision by the Northwest Territories should be a wake-up call for the UCP.”
Moving from the specific to the general, as one often needs to do to understand the impact of policy decisions, the Kenney Curriculum is a microcosm of much else that has gone awry under the UCP government, from the abandonment of efforts to diversify the economy, to the defunding of post-secondary education, to the ludicrous “Energy War Room,” to the deadly mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Alas, this is a government that doesn’t accept the premise of the wake-up calls it keeps receiving.
CBC loses top investigative journalists
Investigative journalists Charles Rusnell and Jennie Russell revealed yesterday on Twitter that they are leaving the CBC – bad news for citizens who depend on news that digs beyond the press releases sent out by governments and corporations.
Mr. Rusnell and Ms. Russell have broken a steady stream of important stories for CBC Edmonton – embarrassing Progressive Conservative, NDP and UCP governments alike over the years. They often encountered considerable resistance from the CBC’s timid editors.
“We are proud of the work we did and we believe it’s now more important than ever to hold power to account in Alberta,” Mr. Rusnell tweeted yesterday. “To that end, we hope we can find new outlets for our investigative accountability journalism in 2022.”
“If anyone is looking for two investigative reporters with a lot of experience and a proven track record, our DMs are open,” he added in another tweet.
I guess this means that the government of N.W.T. will become a new target for the increasingly thin-skinned and tantrum raging Premier Crying & Screaming Midget. No doubt, Kenney will claim that the N.W.T. has come under the influence of commies and liberals, seeking to indoctrinate youth into their leftist cult and destroy the traditional family unit
Now that it has become apparent that Alberta is becoming an increasingly pariah state, one wonders how much further this will go? Scott Moe of Saskatchewan, always a reliable stooge for Kenney and the Sask Party’s Calgary-based donors, will start to feel the pressure to keep away from the stupid going on in Alberta. Now that Manitoba’s Brian Pallister has left the scene, leaving behind a new premier and government desperate to break from whatever connections the Pallister had with Kenney, Alberta to becoming even more isolated within Western Canada. Even Doug Ford, once a cornerstone of Kenney’s resistance against PMJT, is now constantly mentioning the supportive efforts of Trudeau and Freeland for Ontario. There can be no doubt that Ford likely doesn’t even return Kenney’s phone calls anymore, because he’s just not very important these days. Ford is such a bad ally and boyfriend.
This must just completely test Kenney’s temperament to no end, now that the much vaunted Resistance has completely crumbled. What else is he to do, apart from walling himself up inside the SkyPalace/Führerbunker, planning all kinds of diversions to confuse Alberta, while dreaming up even more schemes to deny Brian Jean his nomination? Of course, Kenney is also plowing through his mountain of cough syrup, becoming more desperate for some kind of avenue to save his political career and his birthright to claim his place in the PMO.
At some point, Brian Jean will come pounding on the door, demanding that his nomination be recognized. Or, he will go on the road to every rural UCP riding and slam Kenney into oblivion.
There is no Prime Minister Andrew Scheer or Erin O’Toole to save Kenney now. One wonders if Erin O’Toole believes Kenney is the one behind the effort to oust him as the CPC’s leader. Maybe O’Toole’s not returning Kenney’s phone calls, either. Judging by the ‘wall of diversity’ behind O’Toole and Skippy Poilievre these days, which features no white middle-aged men, but plenty of non-blond women (CONs do love their blondes, however) one Sikh CPC MP (Jasraj Singh Hallan and Tom Uppal) and one member of the LGBT2Q+ community. (Melissa Lantsman, another Hill+Knowlton pinhead) Much to Kenney’s dismay, O’Toole wants a Red Tory veneer to his benches.
Alberta is becoming known, like North Korea, as a Hermit Kingdom. And I need more popcorn.
Very bad news related here and another blow to democracy. The people must have a strong independant press and the way things are going we will be left with Facebook.
JFK said it the best:
https://youtu.be/qvSD6If3zds
In the same way that the NWT decision reflects on the UCP, it seems to me the Rusnells’ decision appears to reflect on the CBC.
Well few schools and educators in Alberta were enthusiastic about Kenney’s curriculum revisions, so it should not be a surprise a jurisdiction freer to choose would say we’re not going along with this nonsense any more. Of course, their message was put more politely, but in the end they dropped the Alberta curriculum just the same.
This is very embarrassing for Kenney. This is not some eastern jurisdiction that Kenney likes to demonize or dismiss at times, but a neighbouring one that historically has a particularly close relationship with Alberta due to its size and location.
I doubt this will have much impact on Kenney. He has already dug a deep hole here with no easy way out, even if he wanted. However this should serve as a wake up call for most other Albertans. There are negative effects from continuing to go down the path of kookiness the UCP seems inclined to do. One big one, of course, is the quality and reputation of Alberta’s education system will continue to be diminished, particularly outside of Alberta.
We have a sick, deluded government in our province. We are a national disgrace, certainly, and an international disgrace, definitely.
What a shame to lose two of the few Alberta journalists who have been holding this bent and twisted regime to account.
Pity about the CBC throwing out two investigative reporters working in Alberta. But hasn’t this has happened before? When thinking about the CBC the words of Scottish poet Robbie Burns come to mind: “Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie.”
Although reputation is important and should not be underestimated, the damage caused by reputational loss is nothing compared to the real damage that this retrograde, “new” curriculum will do to the province’s students and, as a long-term consequence, our economy and social fabric.
How many ways can Premier Bumbles find to make this province a worse place to live than it was when he found it? It seems there is no limit to his willful, blinkered blindness, ignorance, and incompetence. I read a headline today that he is now musing to return to the regressive flat tax that the NDP rightly removed. More give aways to the rich.
That is sad news indeed about Charles Rusnell and Jennie Russell. Their reporting was always top notch.
“That is sad news indeed about Charles Rusnell and Jennie Russell”.
Yes, it’s a big loss.
I wonder what caused their departure.
And will the local CBC replace them with other investigative journalists?
If I had to guess I would imagine the geniuses at head office cut their funding or their journalistic freedom.
Maybe China can start using the BC curriculum also:
https://unherd.com/2021/12/does-the-ccp-control-extinction-rebellion/
Let’s say China is secretly pulling the strings of one, some, or even all of the world’s international climate change organizations. The best thing we could do to combat this initiative would be do address the concerns of ordinary Canadians worries about climate change, because without them, these organizations would have no funding, purpose or social license to operate in Canada.
Pretending climate change is a scam does not address their concerns, it amplifies them, because a reasonable adult who believes that our biosphere will be rendered uninhabitable in part by the actions of our governments, neighbours and employers may find very rash and even self destructive ideas to be rational, or even necessary.
“Greenhouse gasses” causing a “greenhouse effect” is why Venus is hotter than mercury, even though mercury is closer to the sun. This was an astronomical fact decades before the real world implications became clear to society as a whole. President Xi is a bad man who has more power than I would like him to, but I do not believe he secretly influenced astronomy textbooks from half a century ago as part of some far ranging communist plot.
There will always be climate Quislings willing to lie to us for money, which oil companies have plenty of. What evidence would they require in order to accept that the climate is changing? By the time we have that evidence, it may be too late to do anything about it.
Just a thought. This was intended respectfully, hope it came across that way. Civil conversation on the internet is hard :/
The science says, some of the increase in temperature we have seen in the last 10 years, can be attributed to man made causes. It doesnt say whether a higher temperature is good or bad nor what you should do about it.
Personally I think if you were terraforming the earth a higher temperature might be desirable. There would be some tradeoffs though.
Using coal to provide grid electricity has extended life spans and increased quality of life across the jurisdictions that can sustain it. Technologically we dont have any easy solution currently and I dont think such a thing is imminent. And of course I havent said anything about hydrocarbons used for transportation farming and travel.
Such feed the world, and people dont do well with a shortage in such things.
Yes the evil oil barons feed the world. And of course green NGO’s are full of people also. They run a business going green stuff. Are they feeding anybody?
As to Mars and Venus, its funny you should bring them up. Its almost as if you are trivializing climate change with a bs comparison.
I guess you may feel better when I confirm climate change is a self fixing problem. Too many people with too high of a life style has caused it. If there is a die off it will be mitigated.
Science does predict that a rising temperature will cause effects such as increased forest fires, flooding in some areas, droughts in others, more extreme weather events and rising sea levels. These effects will, at best, kill many, many humans and will accelerate the extinction event we are living through/have created. At worst, these effects will cause our species to go extinct.
Coal powered electricity improved many peoples lives for a long time. Is improving some people’s lives worth rendering our species extinct?
re:”Oil barons feed the world” I understand that we require fossil fuels to get food to grocery stores. For what it’s worth, “we should pollute less” is not the same as “we should stop all pollution right now no matter how absurd the consequences.”
“Are green NGO’s feeding people?” No, that’s not their purpose. You had may as well ask if police officers are feeding people – they’re not, and that’s okay because it’s not their job to feed people. Green NGOs are trying to convince the rest of us that we shouldn’t cause our own extinction.
To the best of my knowledge, we don’t have a technological solution to the problems of climate change that will allow us to continue to increase fossil fuel production. That is not the same as “we don’t have a technological solution to the problems of climate change.” Too many Canadians are unwilling to accept any solution that would inconvenience them.
“If there is a die off it will be mitigated.” The casual acceptance of the loss of potentially hundreds of millions of people is very alarming to me. I’ve noticed it with COVID, too. “The earth is overpopulated anyway.” “It’s mostly old people being killed, and they’re basically dead already.” Seems every month or so I am shocked anew at the incredible cruelty publicly and proudly displayed by a vocal minority of wealthy humans. If you feel the Earth is overpopulated and somebody needs to be sacrificed, I would point out that the only person you have the right to sacrifice is yourself.
I would certainly feel better IF you could confirm climate change is a self fixing problem. We could have prevented climate change by polluting less if we had started decades ago, but we cannot reverse climate change that easily. Sort of like how reducing spending on luxuries can prevent debt, but once you are deeply in debt, it is not enough to get you out of debt.
Well, if we go extinct we won’t have to worry about climate change. The earth is going to persist. Populations will adapt. Things will change though, best get used to it.
Here is some more good news:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth
I always wondered how they managed to break those stories on the CBC. Not exactly a muckraking organization these days.
You can hardly blame them.
Our son taught senior high IB program. One of the biggest challenges was senior level student who came from Christian schools for their last grade. Shockingly poor critical thinking skill. His colleagues who taught senior math had similar challenges.
Brett, with poor critical thinking skills, how did these students qualify for the IB program?
Here’s how to apply, in the Calgary public system.
https://cbe.ab.ca/programs/program-options/internationally-recognized-programs/Pages/International-Baccalaureate-Programme-(IB).aspx
Good marks on paper do not equate with critical thinking skills. Rote memorization is one thing. Critical thinking is another. People who want to be admitted say the right things. This does not ensure success. Teaching to the provincial exams also does not ensure critical thinking skills.
It was widely known among parents back in the day that certain parents choose a certain Christian school for its good marks. Many of these parents transferred their children into their preferred choice schools in the public system for the higher grades, where their amazing children became small fish in a big pond, academically speaking, even among students in the regular stream at the same school. Go figure.
In regards to the direction that the education system is taking, American commentators point to Justice Lewis Powell. He was tasked (in a manner of speaking) with changing the path forward, once the de-segregation took place in the public school system (Brown v. Board of Education), at or about the time of the Johnson Administration. The result became the growth in charter schools and other policies that would block a more equitable education system.
Indeed, the Powell memo should be common knowledge In Canada but few folks know about it. I would wager JSon has studied it rather closely…
The pretend conservatives and Reformers in the UCP, just have that effect on things, and it’s not in a good way.
There was a saying used by English colonizers during the years of the British Empire. “Make the world England,” was the motto on the lips of many an oppressor of millions of peoples. These days, it could be said that the motto is “Make Alberta Kenney”.
Jason Kenney created the the UCP as little more than a vehicle for his own self-aggrandizement. If one has read the article “True Blue”, one was exposed to a description of the nature of Kenney’s character.
https://thewalrus.ca/true-blue/
It was well know that Kenney was ambitious and wanted to lead the CPC. He mission was to be PM and nothing else. The problem was that even the CPC couldn’t bring themselves to support Kenney. For one thing his abrasive personality is not exactly what’s needed to maintain the coalition that is the Canadian conservative movement. How could Kenney be expected to get along with Ontario’s conservatives if he’s constantly at war with Red Tories? The second thing about Kenney that troubled the party was Kenney wasn’t married. In fact, in terms of any adult relationships, Kenney was a complete enigma. It’s recognized in partisan circles that, while a total commitment to a mission is a laudable trait, living a life without any companionship of a spouse or a partner makes for a singular existence. How can one hope to meet anyone in compromise if it’s always their way or the highway? Clearly, Kenney was not a desirable choice for leadership.
Kenney, I suppose in a pique of annoyance, but also in a desire to prove the doubters wrong, Kenney decided to return to Alberta and unite the broken conservative coalition. It should be easy work, in Kenney’s mind. If he’s successful, he’ll win the next election and enjoy another timely oil boom. And then…the PMO was his for the taking.
Things didn’t turn out that way. Worse, Kenney’s tendency to deny compromise and destroy opposition with reckless fits of anger and pugilism reveal far too much about Kenney’s character. Kenney favours only one world — his world. He alone defines the reality that must exist for everyone. Any criticism of that reality must be brutally crushed and smashed beyond all recognition. And if allies are needed, Kenney simply buys them, because everyone has a price.
Kenney’s motto is clearly to make Alberta in his own image. That notion should trouble everyone in Alberta, because Kenney is truly an unstable shell of a human being.
Thank you for the link to the Walrus article, JM. As I read it, it became clear that Jason Kenney wants Alberta’s children to have the same classical education he had. Unfortunately, given his pathetic performance responding to Covid, it is becoming really clear he would have been better off if he had spent a bit more time developing problem solving skills, and less learning about the classics. In other words, he is a perfect argument against the curriculum he is proposing.
Let’s be clear, curriculum was controversial long before the childless, unmarried Jason Kenney set his Neanderthal sights on it, thanks to loudly and widely disseminated baseless conspiracy theories that arose very soon after the Notley Government took office and took up the project started under the previous PC Government’s watch.
School curriculum has long been, in Canada, the principal battlefield of Canada’s version of the culture war going on in the Benighted States that down there is being fought primarily over women’s reproductive choice and control of deadly weapons. We have seen skirmishes fought in Ontario, primarily over sexual education, among other places, and here in Alberta the whole GSA discussion that was going on during the dying days of the Prentice Government was another such skirmish.
The Government of Alberta began working on curriculum years before the 2015 election. Much of this work was apolitical and done by Ministry of Education staff — aka “bureaucrats”, to use that often-pejorative term for dedicated career public servants. When the Notley Government was elected, veteran MLA and former schoolteacher David Eggen was named its Minister of Education. (Former Edmonton Public School Board Chair Sarah Hoffman would have been another fine choice, but she went to Health; however, now in Opposition she is Education Critic, while Mr Eggen is Advanced Education Critic).
The work continued within the Ministry of Education, but pundits and online trolls from the right wing falsely labelled it the “ideological NDP curriculum”. Fear of harassment of subject matter experts and volunteer working group participants from the teaching profession led to masking of the identities of participants, which in turn led to those same right-wing pundits and trolls accusing the NDP of “secrecy” in curriculum development.
Then Jason Kenney came along, and seeing the anti-NDP, anti-curriculum bandwagon passing by, decided not just to jump aboard but take the reins. But the bandwagon started along its route long before he left federal politics.