Over 200 people rallied in Ottawa’s streets against the new Ontario government’s rollback on the current high school sex education curriculum.
The rally comes after Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced schools would start teaching the 1998 curriculum which excludes topics such as sexting, LGBTQ+ issues, and consent.
Earlier this month, Ontario education minister, Lisa Thompson, said that sex-ed will still deal with consent and cyber safety, according to Global News.
Joel Harden, the newly-elected NDP MPP for Ottawa-Centre, was among several speakers at the rally.
He called on teachers to continue teaching the 2015 modernized sex-ed curriculum in defiance of the “new regime.”
RJ Jones, an Indigenous, queer organizer and president of the Kind Space, a local LGTBQ+ advocacy group, said learning about sexuality and gender identity at school is especially important for youth who come from communities where these issues are not discussed or where they are considered taboo.
Jones said it was in school that they learned about gender identity.
“These were just things that were talked about from peer-to-peer. I think it’s really powerful when it actually starts to happen in reflection to what people are learning in curriculums,” they said. “For me, having that aspect in my life, when I was able to come out as trans, it completely changed my life in a positive way.”
Jones said they struggled with depression in the past, which was linked to not being able to live the way they do today.
“I looked very different than I do today, and it was just from having that access to this information . . . it completely changed my life and I see it changes other Indigenous peoples’ lives,” they said.
Maddie Webber, a rally attendee, said if she had better education around consent and healthy relationships, she would have been better equipped to deal with unhealthy relationships.
Webber said the most comprehensive sex-ed she recalls was when she was in Grade 1, where no one was allowed to leave the classroom until everyone was able to say “penis” and “vagina” without giggling.
“In Grade 6—it was gender-divided at that point—our teacher passed around her diva cup, her own personal diva cup, for everyone to touch,” she said.
Webber said in Grade 10, she recalls her gym teacher telling the classroom her birthing story and how her epidural went wrong.
“Those three instances formed the basis of my education, left me no insight into how to have a healthy relationship, when to say no, how to keep myself safe online,” she said. “There was nothing that really empowered me to have a healthy sexual relationship.”
Webber said she felt a lot of confusion when she heard about Ford’s plan to repeal the current curriculum.
“It’s not like we’re asking for anything else to be done, there’s no additional ask, we’re just asking for things to be kept the same,” she said.
A group of five counter-demonstrators interrupted the rally as Lyra Evans, former NDP candidate in Ottawa-Vanier, was speaking.
One of them wore a shirt with a Worldwide Coalition Against Islam Canada logo on it.
The police separated the two groups and defused the situation.
Jones said the next steps after the rally are to make the information as accessible as possible for the public.
“I think it’s important to note that there’s always going to be marginalizations of people that will never have access fully to this kind of information, and being a representative of those communities, we have to keep moving forward and allowing their voices to be heard and their experiences to be normalized,” they said.
According to the Toronto Star, the Tories are going to begin consultation in September with parents around what would be included in the curriculum. θ
— With files from Karen-Luz Sison
