TORONTO — Staff at a York Region District School Board elementary school were shown a slide at a Sept. 14 all-staff meeting listing 10 “anti-oppression agreements,” including a line that “the institution of Education is an instrumental tool for maintaining and furthering the ideology of white supremacy.” The next item asked staff to “dismantle the structures and systems of white supremacy,” according to an image a teacher gave commentator Jonathan Kay.Kay asked whether teachers had to recite the text in a call-and-response. The teacher told him they did not; it was “just styled as an ‘agreement.’” The school was not named.In 2024, YRDSB published a “Dismantling Hate and Oppression” framework that described schools as shot through with “colonial ideology” and staff as unwitting purveyors of white supremacy. That same year, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario issued a 20-page “anti-oppressive framework primer” telling members they work in an inherently oppressive system they must be “working intentionally to dismantle.”The slide is not an isolated instance. Juno News reported this month that 12 Ontario public and Catholic boards disclosed at least $2.89 million in invoices to equity, anti-racism and related consultants between 2017 and 2026, with about 85% of that spend falling between 2021 and 2025. Two vendors took more than half of the documented total.
