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The mugshot of disgraced former deputy education minister Benjamin Levin.

TORONTO, October 2, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — Benjamin Levin, the former Liberal deputy minister of education sentenced to three years in prison for three child pornography-related convictions, was paroled in January, a parents’ rights group has discovered.

Levin went to jail May 29, 2015, after pleading guilty in March to one count of possession of child pornography, one count of making written child pornography and one count of counselling someone to commit the indictable offence of rape.

Tanya Granic Allen, executive director of Parents As First Educators (PAFE), revealed in an email to supporters last week that Levin was paroled January 10, 2017, after serving 19 months and 12 days.

Typically, Canada releases convicted criminals after they serve two-thirds of their sentence; Levin was some six months shy of that.

“While Mr. Levin has served 60 percent of his sentence for his crimes, the sex-ed curriculum he helped develop is a plague in 100 percent of our schools — whether politicians and parents want to acknowledge it or not,” wrote Granic Allen.

Jack Fonseca, Campaign Life Coalition’s senior political strategist, agrees.

While “worrisome” Levin has been released “back into the community,” Fonseca told LifeSiteNews in an email that another worry is Levin’s “child-grooming sex curriculum is still on the loose in our schools, actively nudging children towards premature sexual experimentation, lowering their natural inhibitions regarding sex, and making them more vulnerable – not less so – to the advances of sexual predators.”

Levin ‘deviant mentor’ who groomed kids for sex: court

When sentencing Levin to three years in jail, Justice Heather Adair McArthur described Levin as a “deviant mentor” who made “insidious attempts to normalize the sexual exploitation of children” in a “depraved online world.”

The one-time tenured professor at the prestigious Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) was arrested July 8, 2013, by which time he had “collected child pornography over two years,” wrote McArthur in her 23-page ruling.

Levin also had a list of about 1,750 online contacts with whom he communicated on “subversive sexual interests,” primarily “sexual contact between parents and children.”

The agreed statement of fact submitted at Levin’s March 2015 hearing included transcripts of Levin’s online “sex chats” with undercover police officer Janelle Blackadar, who posed as the single mother of an eight-year-old girl.

Levin instructed Blackadar in June 2013 “on how to groom the child to get her ‘used to’ sex,” reads the statement. He told Blackadar “to expose her daughter to pornography, to be nude and to masturbate in front of the child.”

‘Sadistic impulses’ and ‘pedophilic interest’: psychiatrist

In a later chat, Levin encouraged the officer to “continue to show pornography to her child, to masturbate in front of her and to continue to sexually assault her on a regular basis by penetrating the child with her fingers and sexual implements.”

Levin knew “the woman he was chatting with could, in fact, be a mother sexually interested in her eight-year-old daughter,” McArthur said in her sentencing ruling.

Nevertheless, Levin “knowingly counseled the ‘mother’ to sexually assault her daughter while aware of the unjustified risk” that what he counseled could in fact be committed “as a result of his conduct.”

The “sadistic overtones to the counselling adds a disturbing dimension to the offence,” McArthur stated, adding psychiatrist Dr. Julian Gojer testified Levin had a “pedophiliac interest in children” which was “intense” for three to four years.

Gojer testified Levin “had sadistic impulses that seemed interwoven with his pedophilic interest” and “was on the extreme end of the sadomasochistic spectrum as it relates to the sexual abuse of children.”

Link between Levin and Ontario sex-ed

When Premier Kathleen Wynne and then Education Minister Liz Sandals introduced their sex-ed curriculum in February 2015 for rollout the following fall, they denied Levin had anything to do with it.

But pro-family groups countered the timeline and Levin’s own statements as deputy minister of education between 2008 and 2009 show otherwise.

As education minister, Wynne rolled out in 2009 her Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy that included a planned overhaul of all curricula.

Levin, her deputy minister, stated in a March 6, 2009, memo that he was taking over the department’s new division on “learning and curriculum,” which would “have responsibility for curriculum and for Special Education including Provincial Schools.”

According to Toronto Sun’s Joe Warmington, Levin reiterated in a 2009 interview published in OISE’s winter newsletter: “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.”

Levin was no longer deputy minister when Wynne introduced an updated sex-ed curriculum in 2010, which then-premier Dalton McGuinty shelved because of the parental outcry.

Sex-ed must be repealed

Premier Wynne brought the curriculum back in 2015 and her Liberal majority rammed it through despite massive parental protest.

According to analysis by Campaign Life, the “only difference” between the 2010 version and the current curriculum is that the latter is “even more explicit and more age-inappropriate than before, dramatically increasing the mentions of ‘Gender Identity’ theory, sexual ‘identities’ and ‘orientations’.”

Fonseca hopes PAFE’s revelation “serves as a reminder to parents that they must continue to fight this age-inappropriate, child-sexualizing curriculum.”

That can be done at the “micro level” by “talking to their child’s teacher,” and at the “macro level” by making it “a top ballot issues in the 2018 provincial election,” he said.

“We must continue to remember this one important fact: The sex-ed in our children and grandchildren’s schools was developed by a convicted child pornographer,” wrote Granic Allen.

“On that basis alone, this curriculum should be repealed.”

Premier Kathleen Wynne “doesn’t care,” she added. Progressive Conservative leader “Patrick Brown doesn’t care. You must care.”

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