Parents' Voice members want the Burnaby school board to address racist online comments targeting their supporters.
Gordon World, a Burnaby Parents' Voice school board candidate, broached the subject of hate speech at Tuesday night's board meeting.
The new civic party is running five school trustee candidates in the upcoming election. The group formed out of opposition to Burnaby's policy 5.45, designed to protect staff and students from homophobic bullying and harassment.
Parents' Voice believes that if the board had consulted more while developing the policy and had been more forthright in response to parents' questioning, the oppositional parents, many of whom were Asian, would not have been set up for racist attacks online after they made their objections public.
"Let me show you what your actions generated," World said in a speech to trustees.
"My wife is Chinese. The racist hatred contained in the comments below (has) been fanned by your ignorance and failure to provide sound, non-partisan governance and by not following B.C. Ministry of Education's requirements for creating policy under the Safe, Caring and Orderly Schools Guide. As a result, parents, students and staff had to risk their safety by publicly asking questions about the policy and are now in fear due to hate speech that is directed at them."
World cited some examples of racist online comments made on stories about the issue, spelling rather than saying the swear words, since students and parents were present.
One comment from a reader at Xtra!, a newspaper for Vancouver's gay and lesbian community, read: "Say goodbye to your businesses you Asian pr**ks, you will be run out of town. We will protest your stay in Canada and your f***ing corner shops. Goodbye!"
When questioned by the NOW, World said the examples of hate speech occurred because trustees' created the policy in violation of the Education Ministry's requirements for creating policy under the Safe, Caring and Orderly Schools Guide, and that the trustees did not adequately consult parents, students and staff when forming the policy.
"As a result, parents, students and staff had to risk their safety by publicly asking question about the policy. Months since questions have been asked, the Burnaby trustees have still not provided Burnaby parents and taxpayers with answers," he wrote in an email to the NOW.
"Worse, the Burnaby trustees have done nothing to address hate speech that has been directed at parents and their families and has resulted in fear throughout the community."
Parents' Voice supporter George Kovacic noted that many of the people against the policy are from former Communist countries where repression is common.
"Hate speech is something that hurts them a lot, and hate speech is something that has been circulating around and has scared many people," he said.
Parents did not know what was going on in regards to the policy, Kovacic said.
"We only found out at the last moment. I couldn't find a single parent or teacher that knew anything about policy 5.45. Now months after the fact, I still do not have information in question about 5.45, period. Now what's happened is because parents have had to speak up, because trustees did not do their job appropriately, parents had to ask questions, and now parents are being bullied and hate speech is being directed to them and their families, which is causing the problem. If the trustees would have done their job and consulted parents properly, this would have not happened."
Kovacic wants the board to address the hate speech issue, although he conceded that it's not the trustees' role to moderate comments made online.
"I've asked them at every single board meeting, please address this because at your board meeting and how this is going to be dealt with because it puts fear in our communities," he said. "This is hate speech. This is worse than bullying. And it's being directed to families and their parents. It's wrong and you guys are the
direct result of this."
But longtime trustee Ron Burton doesn't buy it. Burton said that World is opposed to homosexuality because he thinks it is a sin.
"For them to say if we had had all the information, we wouldn't have been set up for attack - I don't agree they set themselves up for attack any more than anyone who gives their opinion," he said. "Both sides have had those kind of comments."
When it comes to racist backlash, Burton said trustees don't control what's said in the media.
"It's unfortunate that there's backlash against the Chinese, or the Asians. They are predominantly the ones who have been front and centre, so I guess they have been singled out," he said.
"There's nothing we can do. If we start, every time there's an article that's racist, - we can't track all that down. - We can only deal with what's inside our school system and students. And hopefully, the education of students - as we brought in the anti-racism policy, and now the anti-homophobia policy - hopefully in the future it will prevent those such letters from being written because they'll be educated very young."
Burton took offence to World's speech to the trustees.
"I thought he was completely inappropriate at the meeting. There were students there, as well as a number of Asians, and he's talking about hate language. What was coming out of his mouth was like hate language - attacking the board, attacking the policy. Just his whole demeanour and his language is very angry," he said.
"I think he's looking for an election issue, that's what he's looking for. That's the bottom line. They have nothing else to go on, so they are looking for something."
