VANCOUVER, British Columbia, May 24, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – The University of British Columbia’s Education Faculty has partnered with a homosexual advocacy group to train all of its faculty in LGBT “inclusion,” with hopes to take the program to the rest of the university faculties.
DailyXtra reported last week: “Starting in September 2016, every faculty member, staff person and student in UBC’s Faculty of Education will get training on every level: from bathrooms to teacher-training to policy inclusion and climate within the faculty, all the way to the dean, says the faculty’s senior associate dean, Mary K Bryson.”
The rest of UBC, Bryson adds, will gradually follow her school through the process to “create and maintain an LGB/T2/Q inclusive curriculum, culture, work place, and learning environment.”
Constitutional lawyer John Carpay of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms warns that the program could violate faculty or staff employment rights, if people are required to subscribe to beliefs or attitudes.
“As a general rule, employers can require employees to undergo job-related training,” Carpay told LifeSiteNews in an email. “However, if the ‘training’ consists of promoting a worldview or ideology, with an expectation that employees agree with that ideology or worldview, it would not be a bona fide job requirement that employers could impose.”
The program, funded by a Vancouver-based homosexual rights charity called ARC, will pour $125,000 into the “UBC-ARC Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Fund.” Its goals, if not entirely clear, are certainly not modest. Goal two, for example, is “to prioritize systemic, faculty-wide interventions that focus on sexual orientation and gender identity as critical pillars in the architecture of human rights risks, resiliencies and interventions that aim to redress inequities and enhance social sustainability.”
Every member of the staff, faculty and student body will be enlisted in the overarching crusade to make the education faculty a “positive space” for homosexuals, transgenders, transsexuals, queers and bisexuals, and to carry this message to the public school classrooms throughout the province and the world.
There will be “transformation towards social justice goals,” interventions “to transform the impacts of systemic discrimination,” as well as “a focus on intersectional approaches to thinking about sexual and gender diversity in public education settings.”
The ARC Foundation is “delighted” to be working with the UBC faculty of education, according to its executive director Brad Beattie. The UBC faculty of education is “thrilled” to partner with ARC, says its associate dean Wendy Carr.
But Carpay of the Justice Centre is concerned that “this ‘training’ sounds like it could be indoctrination, in which case it would be up to one or more people to challenge it. If everyone acquiesces and goes along with it, that will be the new reality.”
Carpay added that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms with its protection for freedom of thought does not apply to “internal contracts” between a university and its employees. Any faculty members who objected to this “training” would have to appeal to “the principles of employment law, not constitutional law.”
Asked by the DailyXtra to justify the project, senior associate dean Mary K. Bryson quoted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. “Because it’s 2016.”