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Former Deputy Minister of Education Dr. Benjamin Levin (L), who was arrested in 2013 for making child pornography, attends Toronto Pride in 2013 with Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, and former Liberal leader Bob Rae.Justin Trudeau's Flickr page

Sign a petition to stop Ontario's graphic sex-ed curriculum here

TORONTO, March 4, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Just-convicted child pornographer Ben Levin played a key role in developing Ontario’s new sex-education curriculum, according to documents revealed by Toronto Sun columnist Joe Warmington, despite claims to the contrary by Premier Kathleen Wynne.

Since Levin was charged with seven child pornography offences, and pled guilty to three, Wynne and her subordinates have repeatedly claimed that Levin, her deputy minister when she was education minister, had nothing to do with her reviled 2010 sex-ed curriculum, which had to be withdrawn in the face of hostile parents.

When reporters asked Wynne back in 2013, when Levin was charged, about any impact on the sex-ed curriculum, she said: “Ministers and deputy ministers do not write curriculum. … Curriculum is written by subject experts in conversation and in consultation with a wide array of people and curriculum is reviewed and written on an ongoing basis.”

So did Wynne really want people to believe curriculums develop organically from “subject writers” so innately talented they function without direction from above? Yes, exactly, for she then said, “So you know, any suggestion that there was that kind of interference, it just demonstrates a lack of understanding of how curriculum actually is written. … Ministers and deputy ministers don’t write curriculum.”

Nor has she changed her tune. Her media spokesperson was still insisting little over a week ago that “Ben Levin had no involvement in the development of the content of the curriculum. Curriculum is developed by subject experts and is based on research in addition to consultations with a wide array of people.”

Yet Warmington’s documents, all statements from Levin while serving as deputy minister of education, reveal him repeatedly taking ownership for the 2010 sex-ed curriculum, which has just been reintroduced with little change.

Levin sent a memo on March 6, 2009 announcing he was taking direct charge of the province’s school curriculum. “Dear colleagues, I am writing to provide an update on our sector’s agenda. … I will be filling the ADM (assistant deputy minster) position previously held by George Zegarac,” he wrote. “The division formerly headed by George Zegarac will be renamed as ‘Learning and Curriculum.’ It will have responsibility for curriculum and for Special Education including Provincial Schools.”

A month later, he announced the first fruits of his labours: “Today, the ministry released its new equity and inclusive education strategy paper. … This province wide strategy has been a priority for our Minister of Education Kathleen Wynne and me.”

Two months further down the line he was claiming that the strategy, “Realizing the Promise of Diversity: Ontario’s Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy,” sets out a “vision for an equitable and inclusive education system.” The sex-ed curriculum that stirred a revolt among parents in 2010, with its premature instructions about abnormal sexual activity and its promotion of homosexuality, was an outgrowth of this “equity and inclusive education strategy” and designed to implement it in that subject area.

In a media interview later that year, Levin said,  “I was the deputy minister of education. In that role, I was the chief civil servant. I was responsible for the operation of the Ministry of Education and everything that they do; I was brought in to implement the new education policy.”

As far as Warmington is concerned, these make for an open-and-shut case: a confessed child sexual abuser’s soiled hands are all over the new sex-education curriculum, which many critics claim encourages sexual activity at an early age.

“No matter what side people sit, these documents should end the narrative that Levin had nothing to do with the curriculum. He was in charge of it,” Warmington wrote.

Charles McVety, the founder of Canada Christian College and a tireless champion of traditional Christian morality, is clear on the implications. “No matter how it is spun this radical curriculum that teaches a lurid sex to little children is Ben Levin’s curriculum since he was the person in charge of it,” he told Warmington. “The introduction of teaching new gender definitions of male, female, two-spirited, transgender, transsexual, intersex is going to confuse children. If it is not changed, parents opposed will have no choice than to withdraw their children.”

Levin was to plead guilty to three charges on March 3, two related to pornography but the third, he admitted in an appeal to friends, concerned encouragement he gave to an undercover policewoman posing as a mother “to sexually assault her child for him.”

Before Levin became a political pariah, he was characterized (by Nova Scotia education professor Paul Bennett) as an aging 1970s radical, one of a group of “leading social democratic reformers,” and “consummate Ontario education policy insiders,” whose dreams of improving society through idealistic government programs were dashed by reality.

Sign a petition to stop Ontario's graphic sex-ed curriculum here