John Hilton-O'Brien, Executive Director of Parents for Choice in Education (PCE), states the Alberta government's order requiring school boards to develop standards for the selection of books in school libraries "is not a war on ideas."This comes after the Edmonton Public School Board (EPSB) announced a banned books list in late August, which included banning sexually explicit books, such as Gender Queer and Two Boys Kissing, but also classics, like 1984 and The Great Gatsby for students K-9."The government always said that classic literature would stay," Hilton-O'Brien says."If you read the original order, it specifically exempted any cases where sexual activity was implied but not clearly described." "And so EPSB had no call banning any of the books they did.""But with the government's announcement, in the revised order, what's being removed is specifically graphic sexual imagery."For more of Hilton-O'Brien's insights into Alberta's school board system click below....The Parkland Institute, an Alberta-based research institute studies economic, social, cultural, and political issues, recently published a report on "Challenging 'Parental Rights': a primer for parents, students, educators and advocates."In the report they mention Hilton O'Brien who they say, "advocates for private and religious education, and against public school boards and supposed “wokeness” in education.""Many of his columns focus on his vision of parental rights.""In one column about gender-affirming care, Hilton-O’Brien made the clearly untruthful claim that the gender clinic at the Alberta Children’s Hospital 'is accepting referrals of children as young as five years old, from teachers. Parents don’t need to be in the loop.'"."They even got a key fact wrong to the point of honestly being pretty much slanderous," Hilton-O'Brien responded. "They said that in an article I wrote for the Western Standard, I had said that teachers were allowed to make referrals to the child gender identity clinic in Alberta without parental consent.""They claimed that I had produced no evidence for this.""But if you read the article, whether it's on our website or on the Western Standard, in the sentence that talks about it, there's a link to documentary evidence.""I found a presentation being made internally at Alberta Health Services saying precisely this," he said.Interested? Then might as well click to watch the clip as well.
