A New Brunswick mother who launched a petition in support of school reforms by Premier Blaine Higgs claims the CBC has censored comments in favour of her campaign..Faytene Grasseschi, a mother in Quispamsis, New Brunswick, launched DontDeleteParents.ca on June 27. The initiative supports revisions Progressive Conservative Premier Blaine Higgs made to Policy 713 on sexual orientation and gender identity..The policy by the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development in 2020 initially said that students should be referred to by their preferred pronouns and names..Schools would facilitate a workaround solution for children under 16 who did not want their parents approached to receive consent. The policy allowed students to go into the bathroom according to the gender they identified with and to participate in sports according to their declared gender..Under revisions made June 8, school boards with transgender and non-binary students under 16 who did not want their parents approached were advised to “work with [students] in the development of a plan to speak with their parents if and when they are ready to do so.”.Another change takes away a phrase that says students could participate in activities “consistent with their gender identity.” A new policy plank says “private universal changing areas will be available in all schools.”.Two ministers and six other PC MLAs sat out in protest when the changes were made June 8. Now, 26 PC riding association presidents have signed letters to call for a leadership review of Higgs. .A petition on Grasseschi’s website says, “We the undersigned support the Hon. Blaine Higgs in his stand for parents in New Brunswick.”.Grasseschi said 11,000 have signed the petition so far, with New Brunswick accounting for 22% of signatories, despite having only 2% of the Canadian population. Action points on the website encourage people to support Higgs and other pro-family politicians. It also calls for the empowerment of parents to send their education tax dollars to the school of their choice, public or private..A June 14 CBC article on Grasseschi was entitled, “Christian conservative group recruiting thousands to back Higgs." Although Grasseschi heads a Christian non-profit organization called My Canada, she believes the CBC’s angle missed the point..“The fact that some reporters want to make this a religious thing, I think is really low-level journalism to be honest, because there are so many people who have signed on to this petition who are not from a faith background, or that are from many different faiths,” she explained..“Some people are wanting to make this something it's not…it's just parents from across the board who are saying, hey, I love my kids. And I expect the school to create a culture of respect towards parents that keeps them involved in the primary issues of health for their kids.”.Grasseschi encouraged petition signatories to comment on the CBC article, but said they were met with resistance from the public broadcaster..“We let people know about the article; they started going on. And within a couple of hours, we were receiving emails from those same people saying, hey, we tried to comment, and our comments were deleted, or our account was deactivated, or something went sideways in their ability to be able to post the comments,” she said..“That's the type of thing that causes parents, or just people who are getting involved in this conversation from that common sense perspective, to tilt their head and say, what's going on here? Why is my common sense perspective just being completely disregarded?”.The Western Standard emailed Greg Guy, senior communications officer for the CBC in Atlantic Canada, to request comment. An auto-reply said he was out of the office covering the North American Indigenous Games in Halifax..In a recent Facebook post, Grasseschi included screenshots of deleted comments that supporters had sent to her along with their reactions to the censorship. One screenshot sent from “Don_D” included the “content deactivated” banner from the website and the post no longer visible to the public..“I don’t think that this issue has as much to do about religion as it has to do about governments coming between parents and their children. We do have something called ‘the age of majority,’” he wrote..The man, who said he had never posted to CBC before, told Grasseschi: “My post keeps getting deleted, my only explanation received is ‘violating community standards’. I regretfully think that they (CBC) are not going to post any reasonably supportive posts.”.Grasseschi said she wasn’t sure what impact the coverage will have..“I don't know the CBC M.O. on this type of thing,” she said..“To be honest, a lot of people just weren't even aware that CBC was covering this. I think people have really lost faith in CBC and just kind of stopped reading.”.Grasseschi, who also hosts a TV interview program named Faytene, clarified she thought the Western Standard did “fair journalism” in our July 9 article on her website..“I'd say thank you to Western Standard for fair journalism, and just thank you for everybody who took a few minutes to sign [the petition] and to show their support to premier Higgs at this time. It really does appear to be a defining moment on the issue of standing for families.”
