Unpacking Rustad’s Pledge to Review BC’s Textbooks

The big story in provincial politics lately has been the ascendancy of John Rustad’s Conservative Party of BC. For decades, the right-wing party has been an afterthought in provincial politics, but with polling now placing them in a statistical tie with Premier David Eby’s incumbent BC NDP, it’s crucial to pay attention to what Rustad has said the party will do if elected.

In an interview with the Globe and Mail’s editorial board at the start of the summer, Rustad revealed one plank of his party’s election platform: a proposal to review literature and textbooks in B.C. schools, removing content deemed inappropriate for students. The Conservative party leader vowed that his party would strike a committee to ensure the books on offer in school libraries and classrooms are “neutral.”

Inappropriate for whom? According to whom? Neutral by whose standards? Who would sit on this committee, and what sort of mandate would they have? Rustad didn’t say, and he has thus far failed to elaborate much on the censorship side of the BC Conservatives’ plan beyond his party’s pledge to “remove ideology from the classroom.”

“It shouldn’t be about indoctrination of anything, whether that’s environmental or whether that’s political or whether that’s sexual,” Rustad told the Globe and Mail in June.

Those are big adjectives, especially in light of Rustad’s history of climate denial and insistence that sexual orientation and gender identity policies in schools violate “parents’ rights” and indoctrinate children.

Climate science and queer or queer-inclusive literature are almost certain to be flagged by Rustad’s “committee,” whose definition of indoctrination will undoubtedly be rooted in the party’s far-right, anti-scientific ideology. There is nothing non-partisan or neutral about censorship, especially censorship aimed at facts proven beyond doubt, and disputed only by Rustad and his coalition.

What this might mean for school textbooks and libraries remains to be seen.

An old-fashioned yet familiar fight in BC

But B.C. educators have seen it before, most notably in a historic legal challenge to include books depicting LGBTQ2S+ families in elementary school libraries at the turn of this century.

“It's something that's been a topic of conversation in B.C. schools for lots of years,” Robin Tosczak, the BC Teachers’ Federation’s second vice-president, told The Tyee. “It reached a bit of an apex in 2002 with the [Surrey] school district's efforts to ban books, specifically books that were about same-sex relationships.”

At the heart of this controversy was a trio of picture books depicting queer families that Surrey kindergarten teacher James Chamberlain wanted to bring into his classroom: Asha’s Mums; One Dad, Two Dads, Brown Dad, Blue Dads; and Belinda’s Bouquet, by nine-time Lambda Literary Award finalist Lesléa Newman. Chamberlain argued the books were necessary to teach his pupils about diversity and tolerance.

The district school board said no in a 4-2 vote, claiming the books were not suitable for five-to-six-year-olds and that many district parents felt that homosexuality was sinful.

The ensuing legal battle, Chamberlain v. Surrey School District No. 36, went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, which sided with Chamberlain, 7-2.

“Tolerance is always age-appropriate,” wrote Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin in her decision. “Children cannot learn unless they are exposed to views that differ from those they are taught at home.”

Two decades later, the BC Conservatives’ regressively queerphobic ideology threatens to bring us right back to 2002.

It’s an old-fashioned fight, but one that’s found a home in Rustad’s new-look Conservative coalition. In 2022, Chilliwack school trustee Heather Maahs spoke out against the coming-of-age memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue, calling the George M. Johnson book “pornographic.”

“We are now in the situation where books of, I’m going to call them a pornographic nature, are now in our schools — elementary, middle and high school, and the board now has no parameters setting what is or isn't appropriate for students,” Maahs told CBC.

Later that school year, Maahs was supportive of a complaint that the far-right group Action4Canada filed to the Chilliwack RCMP. They alleged that the availability in public school libraries of titles like All Boys Aren’t Blue — as well as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, among other books by queer and racialized authors — meant the community’s school libraries contained “child pornography.”

This prompted the police to take the unusual step of publicly rebutting the trustees’ concerns.

During her time as a trustee, Maahs has been censured three times by the Chilliwack board of education, the third time in 2023 for “actions demonstrating her continued public opposition to inclusive practices.”

Maahs is now the Conservative MLA candidate for Chilliwack North.

Who’s really doing the indoctrinating?

“I think what we're seeing is adults who are stoking transphobia, and attempting to influence what's happening in schools.... In reality, what's happening in schools is that our schools are increasingly safe places for kids to be themselves,” Tosczak said. “But there's something brewing among adults who want to depict that as somehow dangerous or nefarious.”

Actually nefarious, Tosczak argued, is targeting trans people and kids to stoke fear and division.

“It's really important that we push back on the idea that there are resources and books in schools that are indoctrinating children,” she said. “[The BC Conservatives] are talking about banning books. They’re talking about censoring the information that kids have access to, and when that's done for a political purpose by partisan politicians, that’s indoctrination.”

We need to push back on the idea that teachers, not politicians, are doing the indoctrinating, Tosczak added.

Tosczak anticipates “very strong” grassroots resistance to any plan from Rustad’s party to ban or censor books in B.C. schools. And she’s not alone. The BC Civil Liberties Association is at the ready, too.

“Organizations like ours exist to protect Charter rights that allow our democracy to flourish, and that very much includes these fundamental freedoms of freedom of thought, freedom of expression,” said Aislin Jackson, policy staff counsel for the BCCLA.

The Conservatives’ move to review school textbooks is “deeply concerning,” Jackson added. “It seems like the most extreme, nonsensical, anti-democratic, political ideas from the States are being imported into B.C., and that’s very concerning, because they're fundamentally contrary to the values that we have that are expressed through our Constitution.”

It’s also not going to work, Jackson told The Tyee.

“They’re not going to be able to cut off these students’ access to information entirely, because we exist in a world where information is freely available through the internet, through libraries, through people’s friends,” she said.

“What they're going to do is prevent educators from being able to guide these students in developing the skills they need to be literate in terms of the media they're consuming.”

Jackson also pushed back on the idea that there was anything “conservative” about the BC Conservatives’ proposal to “review” school library books and textbooks. Censorship like this is a very bad look for governments, she said, but especially so for the side of small government.

Rustad has proposed, after all, the formation of a new government outfit, the censorship committee he intends to strike, whose mandate and work would be ardently opposed by a whole host of civil rights groups, and almost certainly gobble up taxpayer money and time.

“It's going to take so many public resources, and that's not even talking about the public resources that would be required to defend the inevitable Charter challenges to this government practice,” she said.

The 2002 book-banning case cost Surrey taxpayers $1.2 million.

Rustad and company seem to believe that this battle is worth the exorbitant cost. As the thinking goes, our children’s minds are on the line.

Rustad’s BC Conservatives, as well as Pierre Poilievre’s federal Conservatives, thrive in online, alt-right echo chambers, where falsehoods come too fast for fact checks and facts are derided, if not denied outright.

Equipping the next generation to see through online propaganda runs counter to modern conservatism. It’s one of the primary reasons that Rustad himself has abandoned the student-centred philosophy that governed his days as a school trustee, pivoting instead to parents’ rights — most notably, their right to keep their children from becoming too media literate.

“Education is not about politics,” Rustad said in 2002, when he served as a trustee with School District No. 57 Prince George, three years before joining the BC Liberal caucus. “It is about providing our children with the tools to be successful in life. We need to restore balance in decision-making that will put students’ aspirations and interests at the centre of every decision this school board makes.”

That balance is clearly long gone.

With files from Katie Hyslop.

---

Want to get even more of The Tyee’s election coverage? Sign up today for The Run. It’s a free B.C. election newsletter full of smart voices unpacking key issues, fact-checking politicians and exposing disinformation to clarifying light. Go beyond the horse-race headlines and subscribe now.