Peter Wallace has “no regrets at all” that he didn’t win his campaign for trustee on the Trillium Lakeland’s District School Board.
He told True North a few days after the election he made a lot of connections “of like-minded people” both during his campaign and through blueprintforcanada.ca — the insightful and thought provoking website he created to help other candidates and parents understand what could be done to better public education in Canada.
He’s very humble about the website — calling it a “nice little project for the summer.” But it’s clear it was indeed a labour of love. He created a blueprint with common sense policies that reject the influence of the radical left and extreme right and which adopts a “centrist” approach to education.
His common sense ideas include more instruction in personal finance, computer skills and the sciences, a call for school boards to reverse the ban on police officers in schools and the need to address the concerns of parents in a non-judgemental manner.
In the area of gender ideology, his blueprint proposes that students be given a better awareness of the potential “catastrophic” physical and mental side effects of gender affirming medical care and procedures, particularly that given before puberty.
The blueprint does not mince any words when it says actively promoting gender affirming ideology to children is “abusive” and that Critical Race Theory generates “animosity, divsion and hate” and actively promotes anti-Semitism, anti-Asian and anti-Caucasian sentiment.
The trouble was that as soon as the activists and NDP-backed teachers unions started catching wind of the blueprint and the anti-woke trustee candidates supporting what should be common sense ideas, the hit pieces started coming.
Part of it, in my view, was that these dangerous ideologies were finally being exposed to parents who perhaps should have paid more attention to what was occurring in the school system long ago.
The legacy media chimed in with stories claiming —absurdly — that the anti-woke trustee candidates were “transphobic” and “racist” and a danger to the future of education.
Wallace said he wasn’t surprised to see hit pieces from the Canadian Anti-Hate network, which has received funds from the federal Liberals and is run by self-described human rights activist and leftist Bernie Farber, as well as Press Progress.
But other legacy media picked up the story, many decidedly avoiding mention of the blueprint website.
Wallace feels if more parents had reviewed it, they would have agreed with its policies.
Wallace said all of the teachers unions supported the “woke” trustees (even by rights they are supposed to be apolitical) as they are ideologically aligned with the NDP.
None of the anti-woke slate got elected — except for Dr. Weidong Pei who beat out Toronto District School Board (TDSB) chairman Alex Brown in Toronto’s Willowdale ward.
“I suppose the results were predictable in hindsight,” says Wallace, adding that the senior demographic that voted were probably the “least likely” to know what is going on in K-12 classrooms.
Chanel Pfahl, who ran for school trustee in Ottawa, was the subject of a concerted campaign on social media and in the press.
The accredited teacher was labelled “transphobic” many times even though she is a lesbian and not the least bit anti-trans.
She is still under review by the Ontario College of Teachers for a post she made on a private Facebook feed more than a year ago stating that kids should not be indoctrinated with CRT.
She told me she’s “really scared for society” considering that people just repeated erroneous information about her without doing their own research.
“There are no critical thinking skills,” she said over coffee. “It’s like a broken telephone game on steroids.”
Running for trustee was a great challenge and she likes to look at the results of her race as “hopeful” — even though the board composition is more “woke” than ever.
She says despite the fact that she was slandered in the media for months and she lives in a very Liberal area of Ottawa, some 2,200 people voted for her.
“I think in four years the tables are going to turn,” she said. “They’re waking up in the States.”
