KristopherWells

He was hoping you wouldn’t notice...

Between the long weekend and getting ready for back-to-school, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tried to slip two Senate appointments by you.

In theory, federal politics should have nothing to do with education policy, given that's provincial jurisdiction.

So, we normally wouldn’t have anything to say about appointments to the Senate.

Kristopher Wells being appointed to the Red Chamber, though, is not something we can overlook.

For one thing, Wells does not agree that federal politics should have nothing to do with education policy.

He proudly lists that he is an “expert scientific consultant” to the Canadian Teachers’ Federation.

The Alberta Parents’ Union has, to the best of our knowledge, stood alone in raising the alarm for the last two years about how the Canadian Teachers’ Federation exists solely to demand unconstitutional federal overreach into the purely provincial jurisdiction of education.

And, to be clear, Wells has been focused on education policy first and foremost, as a quick scan of his biography would make clear.

So why would he agree to be appointed to the Senate, unless it was to continue that advocacy - on a federal level, where it does not belong?

Moreover, why would Justin Trudeau appoint someone with such a focus to the Senate, unless it was to continue his ambition to bring education under some form of federal jurisdiction?

And since Senate appointments are until age 75, Wells could conceivably continue Trudeau’s influence on this file well beyond the time Canadian voters reject Trudeau’s own ambitions.

The best place for decisions to be made about children’s education is at their own kitchen tables, not in the Legislature in Edmonton, and certainly not in the Red Chamber in Ottawa.

Parents and those who support us have another reason to be particularly concerned about this appointment, though.

On August 24, 2023, Wells said:

"Don’t be fooled. So called “parental rights” are a dog whistle for an explicit anti-2SLGBTQI+ agenda, which is focused on banning books, restricting access to inclusive curriculum, and targeting trans and nonbinary youth in schools. This is an organized hate movement."

There are plenty of other things Wells has said and done - some much more inflammatory, in fact - that we are confident this represents the views for which he was appointed to the Senate.

Obviously, anyone who supports parental rights should be concerned by the appointment of someone who dismisses and defames us as a hate movement.

Statements like these also reveal that Wells’ ignorance of the constitution is not limited to his visions of federal mandates of all his favourite things and federal bans of all his least favourite things in education.

Parental rights are explicitly invoked in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and are a constitutional value that Canadian courts have found relevant to a host of cases.

That’s why “parental rights”, or an equivalent phrase, are mentioned in over 2,500 Canadian court cases.

There are, at last count, 90 duly passed Canadian laws that enshrine parental rights.

You would think someone appointed to a law-making body should know that.

Finally, you know his charges are a misrepresentation of our movement, but just for fun, let’s take the “book banning” charge.

Wells supports students as young as five having access to sexually explicit material and calls attempts to limit that access “book banning”.

To avoid being censored ourselves by your email provider, we’ll have to leave you to search out those examples yourselves … carefully, without kids around.

But we could find no condemnation from him at all of Peel District School Board requiring a “cull” of books - not because they contained sexually explicit material, but because they supposedly lacked cultural relevance when viewed through an “equity lens”.

With just one librarian saying she sent over 2,000 of her school library’s nearly 6,500 to be buried, this is by far the most significant instance of book banning in Canada.

Wells does not limit himself from speaking on Peel District School Board’s decisions, though, as he praised their 2015 decision to not allow families to opt their children out of certain classes on sexual orientation and gender identity.

He crowed, “If you don’t like it, don’t use public education.”

The teacher unions he avidly supports, of course, seek to make sure families who “don’t like it” are trapped in the public education options they still have to pay for in taxes.

We may not be able to do anything about Kristopher Wells now getting to call himself a Senator, but we can call on the Government of Alberta to stop the funding of his unconstitutional ideological project via the Alberta Teachers’ Association sending off our tax dollars to the Canadian Teachers’ Federation.

Forcing Alberta taxpayers to fund an organization premised exclusively on asking Trudeau to tell us how to run our own education system is just wrong.

We think it’s well past time for the Alberta government to put a stop to this.

They should use their power - whether in legislation or their ongoing negotiations with the Alberta Teachers’ Association - to stop forcing Albertans to fund this blatant advocacy against our interests.