I blogged before about the California school district that is indoctrinating 5-year olds with homosexual propaganda in kindergarten. Well, Canada had a similar problem in the province of British Columbia, where the entire curriculum was going to be designed by gay activists. Now, you might think that the Canadians would be a lot more leftist on such issues, you’d be wrong.

Alberta has a bill in the works to give rights to parents to opt out of programs like this.

Check out this story from the Globe and Mail. (H/T My friend Andrew)

Bill 44, which proposes amendments to Alberta’s Human Rights, Citizenship, and Multiculturalism Act, contains two significant changes. The first adds sexual orientation to proscribed grounds of discrimination. This would bring Alberta’s human rights legislation into conformity with a Supreme Court of Canada ruling that “read in” sexual orientation after it had been deliberately omitted three times by the Legislative Assembly in Edmonton. The amendment has been widely praised.

Section 11 of the new act is more controversial. It requires that parents be notified whenever instructional materials are taught dealing “explicitly with religion, sexuality or sexual orientation.” If parents object in writing, the student can be excused from class.

According to Rob Anderson, Conservative MLA from Airdrie-Chestermere, a riding just north of Calgary, Bill 44 “is one of the most positive and meaningful advances for human rights that this province and this country has seen for many years.” Specifically, he explained, the “parental rights clause” enshrines Article 26 (3) of the United Nations universal declaration of human rights: “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.” Premier Ed Stelmach added that his government “supports a very, very fundamental right and that is parental rights with respect to education.”

This article was written by a political science professor at the University of Calgary, which is the school where their prime minister Stephen Harper got both his degrees in economics. They are known for their conservative views. They even have a special name: the “Calgary School” of economics, just like you might talk about the “Chicago School” and the “Austrian School”. Awesome!

Here’s a letter to the editor from a University of Lethbridge (Alberta) professor that I found in the National Post, (H/T Blazing Cat Fur)

Bill 44 is a response to a B. C. Human Rights Tribunal decision mandating two gay activists to commandeer the Ministry of Education in that province to impose a “social justice” course into the curriculum. Parents’ rights, never mind those of local school boards, were overridden.

The B. C. example and Alberta’s Bill 44 indicate how HRCs have poisoned politics in those two provinces.

Now everyone, not just Christian preachers, has to worry about getting dragged before an HRC. A former chairman of the Calgary School Board once proclaimed the state “owns” children who must be liberated from the supposedly claustrophobic viewpoints of their parents. This goes to show how little this debate has to do with promoting critical thinking or cosmopolitanism, as the Post’s article suggests.

If there is an upside to this, perhaps now there will be sufficient support across the political spectrum to dismantle the HRCs.

Go Canada, eh?