How Activists Shape Education Policy in Canada, Often Against the Wishes of Elected Officials

News Analysis

Alberta recently became the latest province to be subjected to legal action by activist groups on parental rights and school legislation. But there have been many other examples, including in the case of Saskatchewan’s pronoun law, and Ontario’s sex-education revamp that Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives had campaigned on before winning the election in 2018.

Nadine Ness, director of Saskatchewan-based grassroots group Unified Grassroots, says it’s not right that unelected school administrators and activists get to overrule elected governments—who reflect the will of the public who voted for them—on parental rights.

“The only people it serves are certain teachers and the government, and that is more harmful to students than we can ever imagine,” Ness, a mother of four, told The Epoch Times.

When unelected individuals or organizations make decisions on education policy, “the parents have no voice, and not just that, the students have no voice,” she said.

“Some people say, ‘well, parental rights are not that important,’ but they forget that parental rights is the child’s voice.”

Activist Pressure

The latest legal challenge to government of Alberta legislation is over its recently introduced pronoun law, requiring parental consent before students change their pronouns or names at schools. Saskatchewan has also introduced similar legislation, and has likewise been subjected to a legal challenge.

In the case of Saskatchewan’s law, the presiding court sided with the activist groups, prompting the government to invoke the notwithstanding clause to overrule it, while the court challenge remains ongoing. In the case of Alberta, which is in the early stages of the legal challenge, Premier Danielle Smith has said she would consider using the notwithstanding clause if required. The province is also facing other court challenges, including to its recent restriction on gender transition procedures for minors, as well as its restriction of female sports leagues to biological females.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith speaks in Calgary on May 16, 2025. The Canadian Press/Jeff McIntosh

While Alberta has said it would hold its ground on these laws, it recently appeared to partially retreat on a policy regarding sexually explicit content in school libraries amid activist backlash, with media reports featuring voices accusing it of banning books and the province’s teachers’ association claiming the government was targeting LGBT themes.

The province had said it introduced the policy to remove sexually explicit content, such as written descriptions of incest, out of elementary schools. However, the province ultimately narrowed the restrictions to sexually explicit images, removing the previous guidelines’ limitations on explicit text—a move that sparked concern among parental groups, which argued that elementary school-aged children should not be exposed to any kind of sexually explicit content.

In Saskatchewan, during the 2024 provincial election campaign, Premier Scott Moe said he would bring in a new policy requiring students to use change rooms corresponding to their biological sex as the “first order of business.” However, he backtracked on that commitment after winning the election, saying instead that he will leave it to school divisions to develop the policy on their own.

In Ontario, after winning the 2018 election, Progressive Conservative Premier Doug Ford’s government faced court action from activist groups and teachers’ unions after announcing it would scrap the modernized sex-ed curriculum introduced by former Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne’s government. Ford said he was opposing the curriculum because it had “introduced the sex curriculum based on ideology—a curriculum that teaches sensitive topics starting at an early age.” Proponents of the curriculum said it was needed to ensure the issues of consent, same-sex relationships, and gender identity are taught at an early age.

Before winning the election, Ford campaigned on repealing the controversial curriculum, which had faced backlash from parents who questioned its age-appropriateness—with some even pulling their children out of school.

In the end, the province released a new sex-ed curriculum that kept much of the same material as the old curriculum, but in some cases moved them to later grades. It also introduced an opt-out option for parents. The government said this fulfilled its 2018 promise to “repeal, consult, and replace” the previous curriculum, though critics argued the changes didn’t go far enough.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford during a press announcement at the Queens Park Legislature in Toronto on Aug. 9, 2018. The Canadian Press/Chris Young

Jack Fonseca, director of political operations at the advocacy group Campaign Life Coalition, said the province fell short of the promised repeal because it didn’t want to fight the “powerful teachers’ unions and the media.”

“They said, ‘let’s just give them what they want and reinstate it.’ And that’s exactly what they did,” Fonseca previously told The Epoch Times.

Targeting of Candidates

In recent years, pro-parental rights organizations like Blueprint for Canada and ParentsVoiceBC have emerged across the country to try to effect change at the school board level by supporting trustee candidates who prioritize parental rights.

In Blueprint’s case, while some of its candidates were elected during Ontario’s 2022 trustee elections, many were unsuccessful. During the election campaign, many of the candidates were subjects of reports that labelled them with slurs such as “far-right,” which they reject.

ParentsVoiceBC had three of its 28 candidates elected in the 2022 B.C. municipal elections. The group viewed the results as encouraging but acknowledged that factors like negative media coverage that portrayed its candidates as “right-wing” or “anti-SOGI” likely impacted the election outcome.

Ness says in Saskatchewan, Unified Grassroots can be considered a success story for parental rights because of the strategy the group employed. Through grassroots efforts—mainly word of mouth and on-the-ground organizing—the group saw 25 of its 30 school board trustee candidates elected in last year’s elections.

Ness attributes the positive results to a strategy of indirect support, choosing not to publicly associate the candidates with the organization to avoid having them targeted by activists or smeared in certain media reports.

“One of the things that we’ve noticed for the [other parental rights] groups is that they posted their candidates publicly, and there were massive attack campaigns against the candidates who were named publicly,” Ness said.

“Because of that, [activists] built this giant monster to attack those candidates, so even though they were working really hard door-knocking, they weren’t successful.”

Nadine Ness, founder of Unified Grassroots. Courtesy of Nadine Ness

Her organization helps candidates in a “roundabout way” through methods such as providing them with training on how to do political campaigns or supporting them with online comments, Ness said.

“We work in a very different time, and we are working against a very big machine of the left, and we need to counter that with just as big of an organization, which we don’t yet have in Canada,” she said.

Ness added that beyond political labels like “left” or “right,” many parents without a specific affiliation want to be involved in their children’s education—but don’t engage with organizations like hers because activist groups and certain media reports have portrayed her and her group as “extreme.”

“Mainstream media or the leftist activists have gone on massive campaigns to paint organizations that even say, ‘hey, something is not right,’ as extreme,” she said.

Ness says that following the election of the trustees supported by her organization, Saskatchewan has seen positive changes such as increased pushback against policies that limit parental rights.

School Boards

Ness says one way non-elected individuals and activist groups are shaping education policy is by influencing school administrators—such as superintendents and principals—who, she says, have gradually been given more decision-making power than school boards over the past few decades.

“It’s coming at the administration level,” she said. “They keep pushing the woke agenda at the administration level [and] the provincial government gets completely attacked if they do anything about it.”

Rain falls as a man and child make their way to a school serving as a voting station in Esquimalt, B.C., on Oct. 19, 2024. The Canadian Press/Chad Hipolito

She became aware of the issue after her group began reviewing school policies on gender and sexual orientation, which she says had not been approved at either the provincial or school board level.

“The activist groups would do meetings in front of [school administrators], and they ended up being the ones who passed the policy,” Ness said. “It subverted any democratic process, the public wasn’t even made aware, and that was becoming the rule.”

She says it requires a shift in mentality and efforts to raise awareness for school boards to regain their decision-making power.

“In order for it to be very effective at influencing change, the power needs to go back to the school board level,” she said.

Public Funds

Another way in which activist groups are shaping education policy rather than elected representatives is by making sure their arguments are well-represented in court and backed by numerous “experts,” says John Hilton-O’Brien, executive director of advocacy group Parents for Choice in Education (PCE).

He recalled when Saskatchewan’s pronoun law was challenged in court and his organization had sent a lawyer after applying to be interveners. In the courtroom, the lawyer noted a significant disparity in legal representation: two lawyers for the government, compared to 14 for the activist group opposing the policy.

“These people are very well-funded,” Hilton-O’Brien told The Epoch Times, noting that a significant portion of that funding is taxpayer funds.

Another way in which taxpayer-funded activist groups try to shape education policy is by participating in the creation of expert or research reports that seek to influence public opinion, Hilton-O’Brien says. He said it’s a concern if public funds disproportionally support research that amplifies certain viewpoints while portraying others negatively, especially at the time of elections.

“They’re spending public money to achieve an election result they desire,” he said.

Breaking the Cycle

Ness says the way parents can turn around the situation is by getting involved. She says most people think they don’t need to get involved because someone else will.

“The fact is, everyone thinks just like you, and because of that, no-one gets involved. We need to break that,” she said.

“If you’re not the personality to run for school boards, then show up. Maybe you can stuff envelopes for a candidate. There are so many different things you can do that can help influence change.”