A 60-word message to announce the celebration of Parents’ Day instead of Father’s and Mother’s Day has raised a fronde against a Quebec elementary school and its second-grade teachers. The controversy, fueled by Radio X and seized on by the leader of the Conservative Party of Quebec, Éric Duhaime, even finds an echo in the corridors of the National Assembly.
Originally, it was an initiative to consider the diversity of family realities that cohabit in the classroom. In a message sent to parents on Tuesday, second-grade teachers at La Chanterelle school in Val-Bélair announced their intention not to specifically celebrate mothers and fathers this year, but rather parents.
The morning show of Radio X, claiming the “scoop”, immediately climbed the barricades. “It’s the deconstruction of the traditional family, a frontal attack on parenthood”, was indignant on his Facebook account. A few publications later, the teachers behind the initiative became the spearhead of the “extremist leftist woke agenda” which “rolls at full speed in the offices of the teachers”.
The Center de services scolaire de la Capitale (CSSC) wanted to make a “clarification”, stating from the outset that the teachers had taken the initiative without its knowledge. “Some students in their classes do not have a mother or father or are in foster care,” explains the CSSC. The latter said he was convinced that it was a “benevolent intention”, before adding that “obviously, the communication was clumsy”.
Éric Duhaime quickly got on this workhorse. “The wokism that is invading Quebec schools”, he wrote on social networks, summoning the Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, to “sound the end of recess”.
Echoes to the National Assembly
In a tweet, Minister Drainville said, “It was never about removing moms or dads from our schools. And there will never be any question of it either”. A too timid reaction to the taste of the Conservative Party, which asked, on Wednesday, for the sending of a clear directive “to prohibit the cancellation of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day”, seeing in the initiative of the teachers of the he La Chanterelle school is not “an isolated case, but a trend”.
“It’s not the school’s role to celebrate Mother’s Day first and foremost,” admitted Éric Duhaime in an interview with The duty, THURSDAY. It’s up to the families. But me, what I don’t like is that once again, we’re trying to erase gender. That’s what worries me: the woke drift. In his eyes, the sling against the celebration of a parents’ day in schools is similar to another crusade recently led by his party, this time against the reading of children’s stories by drag artists.
On Wednesday morning, the parties reacted to the controversy. “We must not suggest that we are going to erase or that we are going to question Mother’s Day,” indicated the interim Liberal leader, Marc Tanguay. I think that those on the ground who put forward this initiative were in good faith, since there is no question in the morning of erasing Mother’s Day. »
The spokesperson for solidarity, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, quickly opposed an end of inadmissibility to the claims of the conservative leader to the effect that a movement is underway, in Quebec, to cancel Mother’s and Father’s Day.
“There are so many real problems in education: teachers are missing everywhere, there are schools in ruins and there are politicians who try to make us believe that the priority, that the affair of state, today is Mother’s Day, it’s Father’s Day. This is not serious. »
Teachers taken to task
The identity of the teacher who signed the letter at the origin of the controversy quickly circulated on social networks. Since then, she has closed all her accounts on social networks, without responding to requests from the Duty.
Éric Duhaime denies having fueled the controversy that today splatters a handful of primary school teachers in Quebec. “If there are people who want to bully these girls […], of course I condemn him in the strongest possible terms, affirms the Conservative leader. The discourse of people who think like us must take place in the public square rather than through insults or threats. »
Mr. Duhaime and his party have recently seized several controversies by the horns to attract media attention. The government’s recent about-face on the third link has fueled an anger that the Conservative leader hopes to translate into a vote in his favor in the next election. In the process, the party launched a petition to demand the resignation of Minister Éric Caire.
Online, it had collected 3,500 signatures in just 55 minutes. A month later, the craze is slowing down: the digital petition totals around 12,000 signatures while the door-to-door campaign has collected 3,000 more. The objective was to obtain, in the space of 60 days, some 30,000 signatures — the number sufficient to dismiss the CAQ minister under the bill that the latter himself had tabled when he sat on the benches of the opposition.