Members of the public hoping to voice their concerns about a Catholic school board’s policy to fly the Pride flag were completely shut out of a meeting on Monday night.
The Durham Catholic District School Board held a regular board meeting in Oshawa Ont., Monday where an activist group, Action for Canada was denied the ability to present a delegation on the issue that evening or at a future date. Only two out of seven trustees voted in favour of hearing from the delegation at a later date.
At the start of the publicly live-streamed meeting, Trustee Richard Damianopolous, for Scugog, Uxbridge and Brock, raised the issue, arguing that the board had a duty to hear out the concerns of the public even if it disagrees with them.
“I’m greatly concerned about a decision I learned of last week to decline a request for a delegation to speak to the Board of Trustees,” Damianopolous said. “I learned the matter was referred to staff, even though it was addressed directly to trustees in our governance role at the board as an accountable and transparent local democratic government.”
He said the board must listen to members of the public regardless of whether they agree with their position or not.
“The impacts of declining to hear them publicly are very real,” he said. “Shutting down public discussion, a failure to listen, a lack of transparency and allowing administrative procedure to trump our policy intention on public delegations, which emphasizes our desire to listen.”
Monique Forster, the Chair of the DCDSB, said the Pride flag debate was not on the agenda and had “no place in the meeting”
Damianopolous then moved to have the delegation be heard at “the next feasible opportunity.” Five Trustees rejected the motion: Marisa Hall, Janelle Emanuel, Robert De Souza, Kim Beatty and Jim McCafferty. Damianopolous and Morgan Ste. Marie, Oshawa’s Trustee, voted in favour of allowing the delegate to speak at a later time.
“If we set aside the topic at hand, the idea of offering an opportunity for the public to speak to us at these meetings is a good one, and we’ve always had that ability,” Ste. Marie said at the meeting. “It would seem that in this particular instance, we may have taken a different approach to make up our minds on that topic. And so I think it would be worthwhile at a future point to allow people to speak their mind.”
Terry Rekar, the Oshawa chapter leader for Action for Canada, a national movement “committed to protecting faith, family, and freedom,” was the delegate who was denied.
Rekar told True North outside the meeting that she applied a month prior and even forwarded a letter from the Archdiocese of Toronto, the Catholic body that has jurisdiction over the school board in matters of faith.
She said she learned “a couple of days” before the meeting that she was excluded from the agenda. She was referred to the board’s superintendent but she was on holiday. She was told that the superintendent was supposed to get in touch with Rekar “sometime this week” to discuss the reasons she was denied.
She said as a taxpayer, she should be able to have her voice heard, and wanted to open the discussion up in light of a successful Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board decision against flying the flag last month.
Rekar said in a Catholic school, that the cross and the Canadian flag are the only two symbols that should be used to represent inclusivity for all people, and that argument is backed up by the archdiocese’s current and former cardinals.
In a pastoral letter released in June last year, Cardinal Frank Leo affirmed that “the crucifix and Sacred Heart of Jesus” were the “authentic and unsurpassed symbols of love, welcoming and compassion.”
“This is a Catholic school and it’s under the jurisdiction of the Archdiocese of Toronto, so the board should be beholden to the archdiocese,” Rekar said. “A Catholic school should not be promoting political or cultural beliefs that are not biblical and not in accordance with Church teaching.”
She said she wasn’t there to give her opinion only to remind the Catholic school board that they should “trust the experts” who lead the Catholic community and who are authorities on matters of the faith.
She argued that Section 93 of the Constitution Act enshrined Catholic schools’ rights to be publicly funded and was implemented to protect Catholic education, ensuring it remained Catholic.
Jess Street, a member of the Durham District School Board Concerned Parents activist group said that she was there because her group also supports the parental rights of those in the Catholic board in Durham.
“(The Catholic parents) have had a huge issue with the ideological frameworks that have been pushed upon our children, where they’re being forced into celebrations that they did not sign up for, and they keep forgetting that for celebration does not equal acceptance,” Street said. “Our children are being forced to stand for flags that they do not participate in, and that’s not right.”
She said that nothing will change unless Durham Region residents vote for trustees who support their values.
“More people within the Durham Region need to remember that their vote counts, and that going out for municipal elections is imperative because by them not participating, this is how we get trustees that are pushing activist agendas over academics,” she said.
True North spoke to one parent who came to the meeting to hear the delegation who supports the Pride flag being raised, saying the issue was personal for her because she has a transgender child.
Others in support of the Pride flag being flown at the school board refused to comment.