Achi news desk-
The Province of New Brunswick will seek to abolish an education council over litigation fees.
Education Minister Bill Hogan sent a strongly worded letter to Harry Doyle, chairman of the Eastern Anglophone District Education Council (DEC), on Tuesday.
The DEC is in the process of taking the province to court over changes it made to Policy 713 — which refers to sexual orientation and gender in schools — last summer.
In the letter, Hogan said as of April 16 the DEC had spent $279,917 on litigation fees.
On Thursday, Hogan said he had made it clear that DEC leadership was using money in what he called irresponsibility.
“They are diverting almost $300,000 from classrooms to Ontario lawyers to file a motion to fight the rights of parents to be informed about their children under the age of 16,” Hogan said in a statement released by the province at 6 p.m. Thursday .
Hogan said he had identified clear steps the DEC could take to resolve the situation, but his deadline of 5 pm on Thursday came and went without a satisfactory response.
“They (DEC) have left me no options but to start the process for the dissolution of the Eastern Anglophone DEC. As repeal under the Education Act requires an application to the court, I will not comment further,” said Hogan.
In his letter to Doyle, Hogan said he believes the litigation spending does not conform to any of the allowable spending categories set out in the state’s Education Act and is a “misuse of public funds. “
“These are funds that were supposed to support public education and it is a missed opportunity to support better educational outcomes in your district and your schools,” Hogan wrote in the letter.
He went on to say that the litigation expenditure was evidence that the DEC was spending resources irresponsibly.
In the event of non-compliance, the minister told Doyle that he intended to abolish the DEC in accordance with the Education Act.
Constitutional lawyer Lyle Skinner was asked if the minister could do that.
“Yes and no. What the Education Act says is that the minister can apply to a judge to dissolve. So there’s a bit of a cushion,” Skinner said. “The maximum the minister can do on his own is to apply to the court.”
Skinner said the decision on whether DEC can be dissolved or not is in the hands of a judge and not the minister.
Megan Mitton, Green MLA for Tantramar-Memramcook, called Hogan’s letter disturbing.
“This is a locally elected school board that we are talking about. The Education Minister is threatening to abolish it. That is completely unacceptable. And so we see Higgs and Hogan attacking democratic institutions in New Brunswick.”
The province announced changes to Policy 713 last June.
Under the changes, students aged 16 or younger who are exploring their gender identity must get parental permission before teachers can use their first names or preferred pronouns in school.
Two months later, the Progressive Conservative government clarified their changes, saying that psychologists, social workers and those in informal settings will be allowed to use children’s preferred names and pronouns without their parents’ permission.
Many youth and LGBTQ+ advocates in the province have said the changes make the policy more discriminatory.
Mitton thinks the changes are harmful.
“What they did was they took a policy that was written by experts and people in the LGBTQ+ community and they changed it so that it no longer served that community. And it violates the rights of non-binary and transgender students,” Mitton said.
The East Anglophone School District and its board of education declined to comment.
