John Hilton-O’Brien is the Executive Director of Parents for Choice in Education.Public education in Canada is bleeding out.Across the country, families are lining up for the exits like in a school fire drill. Ten percent of students are already gone. Charter waitlists are double the spaces available. Independent schools are jammed to the rafters. By any fair estimate, a quarter of families are already out or trying to leave. Parents crowd into information nights for charter schools that will never have room for them. Others drive their kids across town to independent schools, or pull them out to homeschool. We are watching the lifeblood of public schools drain away.Why? Parents’ confidence in public schools has collapsed..EDITORIAL: Ottawa’s overreach on the notwithstanding clause threatens provinces rights.For years, parents raised concerns about school libraries, only to be brushed off with the claim that the books weren’t there. Catalogues were usually hidden from the public, making it hard to prove otherwise. But books were only one manifestation: the real problem was activists in power gaslighting people. That is not a strategy that works for long, or at scale. Word spread. Parents started leaving. But parents who weren’t willing to give up ran their own intelligence operation on the book issue — combing catalogues, pulling call numbers, and proving what was on the shelves. Faced with evidence, Education Minister Nicolaides did what boards refused to do: he took parents seriously. The first ministerial order removed explicit sexual content from school libraries, restricted other sexual content to older grades, and clarified that “implied” sexual activity did not fall under the order. It was a serious attempt to restore confidence..That “implied” clarification covered many classic novels. Books where sexual activity was only implied — The Great Gatsby, The Handmaid’s Tale — were defined as non-sexual content. Yet the Edmonton Public School Board pretended otherwise, claiming the order required banning them. It wasn’t confusion. It was gamesmanship.Nicolaides replied with Ministerial Order 034/2025. It restricts only one category: books with explicit visual depictions of sex. This was triage: while there are legitimate concerns about written pornography, images were the most urgent to address — and the hardest for opponents to spin. No novels, no classics, no excuses.More importantly, it forces boards to maintain a public catalogue of library books and inform parents about classroom collections. The order effectively prevents boards from gaslighting parents. .EDITORIAL: ABC/Disney disgracefully hands Kimmel back the mic — day after Charlie Kirk was laid to rest.Critically, it requires that every board create a process where parents can challenge the suitability of any particular book for a school library. However, the order does not dictate what that process will be – that is up to the local board. Alberta is trying to restore confidence while leaving decisions in the hands of the people closest to the libraries — the staff and trustees who deal with parents day to day. This brings us to the root of the problem: who actually controls school boards?In 2021, when the last trustee elections occurred, public-sector unions spent $4.4 million as registered third-party advertisers. The Alberta Teachers’ Association alone spent over a million, while union groups like the union-funded Calgary’s Future and the Edmonton Labour Council were more directly involved. .Their endorsements carried the day: Calgary’s Future saw six of seven endorsed trustees elected, while the Edmonton Labour Council won five out of nine. The result was effective union control of both the Calgary and Edmonton boards — together responsible for $2.5 billion in spending. When tax-funded unions spend more on trustee races than the governing party did in a provincial election, it looks less like democracy and more like a coup.That may be why governments in Newfoundland, New Brunswick, and Quebec have abolished their elected boards, and why Ontario is moving the same way. From a government’s perspective, this may look like the only way to stop captured institutions from being used against the public interest. But for parents, it doesn’t fix the real problem. Many felt provincial officials went too far during COVID, and may not trust them any more than local boards. From that perspective, provincial control looks like overreach while boards look like closed loops: unions funding campaigns, winning boards, and directing budgets back to themselves.The self-interested bleating of self-proclaimed “public education advocates” — echoed faithfully in the media — only drives parents further away. Every time they declare that parents’ views are outside the bounds of respectable opinion, they send a clear message: public schools aren’t for you..Parents are done playing games. Every misrepresentation by boards and media, every display of contempt, only accelerates the exodus. Parents don’t argue anymore: they just leave. And each family that leaves takes $12,000 in funding per child with them — potentially draining as much as $2.5 billion from public education. If we don’t restore parents’ confidence, the system faces catastrophe.That’s why the book challenge process in Nicolaides’ new order matters. Many parents already believe that boards are hostile to their interests. If we want to keep boards — or public education at all — the process boards build will decide whether confidence can be rebuilt. .BERNARDO: Is it mandatory confiscation or voluntary return for compensation?.So, in this trustee election, we need to ask candidates a hard question: what steps will you take to make the library challenge process timely, transparent, and fair? And if we don’t get real answers, public education may receive a pauper’s funeral.John Hilton-O’Brien is the Executive Director of Parents for Choice in Education, www.parentchoice.ca.
