John Hilton-O’Brien is the Executive Director of Parents for Choice in Education.On October 1, 2025, Heather Ganshorn posted a column in the Edmonton Journal, claiming that parental rights “threatened to take public education backwards.” For credibility, she cited a report that she had done for the Parkland Institute a month earlier, titled Challenging Parental Rights. In doing so, Ganshorn introduced two pieces of misinformation. The first was a factual error in the report she wrote, tantamount to slander. The second was that she portrayed the parties to the conflict in a misleading way. In Ganshorn’s telling, the parental rights organizations are some sort of evil Empire, while her organization is a plucky Rebel Alliance. Unfortunately, the truth is otherwise..OLDCORN: Eby can’t veto a nation-building pipeline.Let’s deal with the Parkland report first. Two years ago, I wrote a column for the Western Standard. It showed that Alberta’s pediatric gender identity clinic had told school staff that it would accept referrals without parents being informed. Ganshorn’s report asserted that this was “clearly untruthful,” and that I had given no support for the claim. The link that she gave, however, was to a different article, in which no such claim was made. The actual article with this claim included a link to documentary evidence — an internal presentation made at AHS. Whether Ganshorn failed to follow the link, or deliberately misled the reader, is academic: neither looks good on her. On the subject of heroes and villains, there’s a trite saying that “money talks.” In the case of Ganshorn’s organization, it writes a novel. .Ganshorn isn’t a neutral observer. She is the Research Director for Support Our Students, which raised money as a third-party advertiser starting in 2021 — the year of the last school board elections. Her report was paid for by the Parkland Institute, a University of Alberta Research group with revenues over $630,000, and whose “about” page speaks of class analysis, a Marxist perspective on power, and class conflict. Professors come and go on the board — but it always has representatives from the province’s public-sector unions. The Alberta Union of Public Employees (AUPE), the Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL), the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA), the Health Services Association (HSA), and the United Nurses of Alberta (UNA) all have permanent seats. .PINDER: The dangerous myth of carbon dioxide.These same unions sit on the board of Public Interest Alberta (PIA), a $350,000 per year organization which leads “coordinated political advocacy.” There, they are joined by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). Why does this matter? Because all of these unions registered as third-party advertisers during the 2021 trustee campaign period. And their spending was massive. CUPE gave $1.7 million to a fund called Calgary’s Future, which endorsed candidates for the council and the public school board. The others were third-party advertisers — ATA was in for $1.1 million, AFL for $120k, PIA itself was in for $185k, UNA was $263k, AUPE for $20k, and finally HSA for $1.034 million. .Altogether, the unions behind Ganshorn’s group spent $4.4 million in the 2021 election — more than the winning provincial election campaign two years later. They won too: Calgary’s Future endorsed six candidates, most of whom won, and five candidates endorsed by the Edmonton Labour Council won their seats. The result was control of the two largest school boards in Alberta, amounting to $2.5 billion in budgets. .BURTON: Alberta’s failing classrooms: The decline of education goes far beyond funding.This isn’t yesterday’s news, either. In 2022, the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) transferred $16 million from its strike fund to a “Defence and Advocacy Fund.” The ATA’s own professional election handbook tells union locals how to nominate candidates, how to expand the impact of teachers through techniques such as “plumping,” and explains the nuts and bolts of campaigning. Advertising is everywhere.So when Ganshorn slyly insinuates that Parents for Choice in Education is “connected” to the United Conservative Party, she’s projecting. Her organization is the direct recipient of taxpayer money provided by the University of Alberta, which is directly connected to organizations that have spent millions of dollars to successfully control trustee elections. .Parents for Choice in Education, by contrast, has no government contracts. It is not connected to multimillion-dollar organizations. It has a total staff of less than two underpaid full-time equivalents. It is funded by individual parents — not government money.Ironically, Ganshorn is right, in a way. There is a Rebels and Empire analogy to be made. But when you collect government and public union money, you’re not the Rebel Alliance. You’re a stormtrooper.And Lord knows, Ganshorn shoots like it.John Hilton-O’Brien is the Executive Director of Parents for Choice in Education, www.parentchoice.ca.
