A former top-ranking Ontario education official and appointee of Premier Kathleen Wynne charged with making and distributing child pornography 11 months ago will face a preliminary hearing in November.
In July 2013, University of Toronto professor Dr. Benjamin Levin was arrested and charged with seven counts of child exploitation, including making and distributing child pornography as well as arranging for a sexual offense with a child.
The charges were filed after an international child pornography sting led investigators to his doorstep.
The upcoming three-day hearing will determine whether or not the Crown has sufficient evidence to bring Levin’s case to trial, reported Toronto Star.
Under his 2004-2009 watch as Ontario’s top education official, Levin oversaw the development of the now-shelved provincial sex-education curriculum themed around “sexual diversity.”
In the program young school children were to be taught about gender identity, homosexuality, masturbation, oral sex, and other similar topics.
“Exploring your body by touching or masturbating is something that many people will do and find pleasurable,” states the manual in what it calls a “teacher prompt” to students.
After strong backlash from outraged parents the curriculum was shelved by then-Premier Dalton McGuinty in 2010.
Campaign Life Coalition (CLC) says that Mr. Levin’s involvement in the sex-ed program has people questioning “whether ‘grooming’ could have been a reason for introducing these explicit subjects at such delicate ages.”
“When an alleged pedophile is found to have been in charge of what many parents perceive to be age-inappropriate, Sex Ed curriculum, serious questions about the curriculum deserve to be asked. The safety of children is too important to ignore it,” CLC states on a webpage detailing the sexually explicit content of the curriculum.
After gaining a majority government in the June election, Premier Wynne — the country’s first openly homosexual head of government — promised to make Ontario the “most inclusive place in the world.”
Wynne also said after being elected that she would continue to “push” for acceptance of homosexuality in the province’s Catholic schools.
Toronto Star columnist Martin Regg Cohn said he believes that Wynne is preparing to fulfill her 2013 promise to bring back the sex-ed curriculum.
“Her education minister, Liz Sandals, has been given the green light to launch fresh consultations on the long-delayed reforms this fall to allow implementation by the following year,” he wrote in a piece a month after Wynne’s election, titled “Four years of foreplay and afterthoughts on sex-ed.”