Show Transcript – May 2

Transcript for Sunday, May 2, 2010 – 0700, 1130 and 2400

Monday, May 3, 2010 – 0630

Sex Education

GUESTS –

Alex McKay, Sex Information and Education Council of Canada

Murielle Boudreau, Greater Toronto Catholic Parents Network

Jim Coyle, Toronto Star Columnist

Karen Howlett, Globe and Mail Queen’s Park Correspondent

SEAN MALLEN: Sex education of a sort was taught in the Catholic school I attended in Kingston. I just forget whether it happened in Grade 7 or 8, but I do remember that there were life-size models of the male and female mid-sections, which opened up to show the interior plumbing. The teacher made a point of telling us that it was better to learn these things from him than on the street. In retrospect I imagine he had to give the same explanation to parents, wondering what was going on. Anyway we all accepted the information calmly, although there were rumours of girls fainting in some other classes. How far we have come since those days, or have we?

(video clip)

It seems sex education in 2010 remains as sensitive a subject as it ever was.

Streeter: It is not something that you can talk about very easily.

Streeter: It is very difficult, because I never grew up in that kind of environment.

For two years the Ministry of Education worked on a revision of the curriculum, trying to update it for the age of instant information. It was supposed to start in September, a revised health and phys ed program. Grade 1 kids were to learn the proper names to body parts; Grade 3’s were to be introduced to diversity issues surrounding sexual orientation; in Grade 6 masturbation might be discussed; and the words oral and anal sex might come up in Grade 7. They were also to get information on delaying the first exposure to sex, and about the dangers of disease.

Susan Flynn, Planned Parenthood of Toronto: Instead of hearing this as gossip and information that may not be factually correct from their peers.

But when the news of it got out, conservative church groups exploded.

Dr Charles McVety, Canada Christian College: Can the Premier please give us a definition of sexual orientation. This is nonsense, but worse than that it borderlines on corruption of children.

After days of defending the curriculum the Premier felt the heat and withdrew it for a rethink.

Premier Dalton McGuinty: I decided that we had not properly consulted Ontario parents on this issue, not fully. This is a very sensitive issue and I think we failed to do our job.

On this week’s Focus – The Facts of Life.

From the Global News Room in Toronto, Focus Ontario with Sean Mallen.

SEAN MALLEN: Thanks for joining me again. We’re going to pursue this subject from three different angles. Shortly I’ll be joined by a representative of a Catholic parents’ group, and later in the program I’ll speak with two colleagues from the Queen’s Park Press Gallery about the politics of sex education. But first, the curriculum. The Sex Information and Education Council of Canada is a national charity that promotes public knowledge about sexuality and sexual health. Alex McKay is its research coordinator, he’s in our Queen’s Park bureau. Welcome to Focus Ontario, Mr McKay.

Alex McKay: Good to be here.

SEAN MALLEN: Can you give me an idea, the current curriculum is about twelve years old, the one that kids are learning right now. Do you have a sense as to why it was in need of an update?

Alex McKay: Well, I think any aspect of the school curriculum is going to be reviewed and updated periodically. So in terms of the health curriculum an update and revision was long overdue.

SEAN MALLEN: I gather twelve years ago, if not quite before the age of the Internet, certainly age of the Internet in its infancy. Is one of the issues here that kids just have so many more sources of information, some of which might not be so great?

Alex McKay: Well, I mean I think the way the world has evolved in recent years probably makes getting accurate information that much more important, don’t you. But I think in terms of actual stuff in the curriculum that was being proposed, in terms of the messages that it was sending to youth about protecting their sexual and reproductive health, essentially were the same. But I think a lot of the discussion more recently has revolved around the enhanced need for accurate information among youth, and certainly the Internet age has pushed that on us.

SEAN MALLEN: I think we were hearing from health officials as well about increasing levels of sexually transmitted diseases among teenagers, and a greater level of certain promiscuity, promiscuous practices among teenagers, yes?

Alex McKay: Well, no actually I don’t think that’s accurate at all.

SEAN MALLEN: Okay, correct me.

Alex McKay: If you look at the basic indicators of sexual health among Canadian youth, in fact things are going in the right direction. So for example the teenage pregnancy rate in Canada has been falling for years. It’s at an all-time low right now. The percentage of youth who are sexually active is about the same that it was ten or fifteen years ago. Those youth who are sexually active today are more likely to be using condoms than used in the past. When you hear that rates of sexually transmitted infections are going up it’s really important to remember that those are reported rates, they’re not prevalence rates, and reported rates can be influenced by a whole number of things, including increased testing. I think when we look at overall prevalence, which we don’t have a good account of in Canada, it’s very likely been probably stable, but certainly high, and sexually transmitted infections are something that we do need to be addressing with our youth, and sex education in the schools is one of the fundamental ways of doing that.

SEAN MALLEN: Okay, well thanks for clarifying that for me. As you know the arguments from the opponents of the new curriculum are – one of the many arguments – is that this is something that parents should be doing. These are very personal issues, issues of morals, issues of values, and it’s really up to the parents, not to the schools, to be dealing with this. What’s your take on that?

Alex McKay: Well, I really believe and I think most Ontario parents would agree with this, that setting up parents in opposition to schools in terms of a battle over who’s going to be providing sexual health education, it’s really a false dichotomy. Most parents want to communicate their values around sexuality to their children, set out expectations for their children’s behaviour and provide them with guidance around that. The school on the other hand, is playing a quite different role by complementing what the parents are doing by providing sound, up-to-date, concrete information which kids really aren’t getting from any other source. And most parents, in the few surveys that are available on the subject, endorse the idea of their children receiving sexual health information in the school. So I really think it’s a false dichotomy to say that it’s a battle between the two over who is going to do this job, rather that they have very distinct and different roles in providing sexual health education.

SEAN MALLEN: Just over a minute left in this segment. Now that it’s all been put on the shelf and with the politics of it all, who knows when we’re going to get a new curriculum, what have we lost do you think by setting this new curriculum aside?

Alex McKay: Well, we may not have lost anything as long as we go forward you know, and obviously this is a sensitive issue, so there can be constructive dialogue between groups of different points of view, and I think if we do that we may come out the other end with a strong curriculum that’s supported by the vast majority of parents. I think when it comes to issues of sexuality and sexual health it’s not realistic to say you know we’re going to please one hundred percent of the people, but I think arriving at a curriculum that will have certainly majority support among Ontario parents, is easily achievable and I see no reason why that can’t happen very soon.

SEAN MALLEN: Okay, well we’re going to find that put to the test over the next few months, and maybe years or so. In any case I appreciate you coming on the program, Alex McKay.

Alex McKay: Thank you very much.

SEAN MALLEN: And coming up, a talk with the parents.

* * *

SEAN MALLEN: A column in the Toronto Sun this past week described the new sex education curriculum as an insult to parents. That column was written by Murielle Boudreau, who is the Chair of the Greater Toronto Catholic Parents Network. Welcome to Focus Ontario.

Murielle Boudreau: Thank you.

SEAN MALLEN: So how this was an insult to parents?

Murielle Boudreau: This document takes away all rights of parents. If you look at it, especially the lewd language for the young grades, absolutely takes no consideration of parents whatsoever. It’s basically a document for regulating behaviour which we all know you cannot do.

SEAN MALLEN: You focussed on one thing, what kids would be learning in Grade 3 for example, and in Grade 3 they’re talking about – the proposed curriculum would talk about respecting differences. It mentions that some kids might have one parent, some kids might have two parents, some kids might have two mothers, or two fathers. It doesn’t mention the word gay or homosexual or same-sex marriage. It puts it in those terms. What’s your problem with that, it seemed to be trying to encourage tolerance.

Murielle Boudreau: No, what it was doing was confusing children, if you’re a boy or a girl and giving them – even if you’re a boy, you can be a girl; and if you’re a girl – it was confusing them. That’s what the language in the curriculum does.

SEAN MALLEN: In the later grades where they get into more specifics of the sexual awakening that kids have when they’re in puberty, there’s an argument and it’s in the document as well, that kids need to know some of these things in advance of having to make the big decisions about sex, to have that information out there. What do you think of that argument?

Murielle Boudreau: That is a parental choice. Parents would like to keep their choices of teaching their children about intimate sexual behaviour or parts, or whatever, they want to keep that choice to themselves and it’s up to the parent, depending on their culture, and their religious beliefs, and the sensibilities of the child, it’s up to the parent to decide when that information is given to the child, and they’re the experts on their children.

SEAN MALLEN: Isn’t it harder to control kids in this regard though now in the age of the Internet and so much is out there that might be the wrong kind of information?

Murielle Boudreau: Absolutely. It’s very difficult for parents now to control anything, and this document actually takes all control away, and that was the problem that we had with it. And as far as the government if they want to help parents, they should control the Internet and remove the pornography from the Internet, because they have the technology to do that now.

SEAN MALLEN: What about the aspect of – I think the head of the public health in Toronto, Dr McKeown, suggested that he would like to see it happen because there’s a rising prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases. In a lot of cases kids just aren’t understanding how you can catch sexually transmitted diseases. Isn’t that useful kind of health information to have though?

Murielle Boudreau: That’s useful information for older children in older grades, perhaps like in high school, grades 7 – 8, you have to keep them informed, but you don’t feed them that information, plant the seed, when they’re in grade one, two and three. We like to keep our children innocent, that is our right as parents to decide that.

SEAN MALLEN: This week the Premier said that whenever the new curriculum comes out, we don’t know when that might be, the Catholic boards will have to teach the same curriculum as the public boards. Do you have a problem with that?

Murielle Boudreau: My problem with that is that we already have a sex curriculum, in the Catholic board we already have that. This is not our problem, this has been going on for thirty years. The problem is that when they try to introduce this explicit language that has no business with children, it belongs in bedrooms with consenting adults, and they’re trying to tell us that they have to know this information, this has to go through the bishops of Ontario. They have to tell us; they’re the ones that will decide on the curriculum that we can teach our children, because we are in a Catholic school after all.

SEAN MALLEN: Just about forty seconds left. Archbishop Collins and some other people in the Catholic board sent out a news release in the week saying that we can work this out, we can find a way to do this, and still keep it true to the Catholic traditions. Do you think they can do that, teach these kinds of things and still keep to the Catholic tradition?

Murielle Boudreau: Well, this explicit language will never be seen in the Catholic schools in grade school, that’s for sure.

SEAN MALLEN: Teaching differences like people having two fathers or two mothers, or that kind of thing.

Murielle Boudreau: I can’t see it; no, I can’t.

SEAN MALLEN: Isn’t that a reality of today’s society, whether we might approve or not?

Murielle Boudreau: You see if I have a child coming to me and say I have two daddies, I am going to say good for you; and I would say to my child, if my child tells me about it, I would say good for you, see he has two daddies and I hope they’re very loving parents. And I would say you have a mommy and daddy and they’re very loving. And I would never say to the little one, depending on their age, that this child is adopted, because I don’t know what these parents have told their child, and I don’t want to start something in the school yard. And I would tell the little child not to talk about this, because I don’t know what the parents, and I’m concerned about that child because I don’t want anything said in the playground about him.

SEAN MALLEN: Okay, I have to leave it there. Interesting talk from Murielle Boudreau, thanks for coming on the program.

Murielle Boudreau: Thank you.

SEAN MALLEN: And back in a moment for some analysis of the politics of this affair.

* * *

SEAN MALLEN: Well, sex and politics are a poor mix, unless of course you’re a reporter getting lots of ink and air time covering the uproar. Here are two of my colleagues who have been doing that. Jim Coyle is the Queen’s Park columnist for the Toronto Star; Karen Howlett covers the legislature for the Globe and Mail. Welcome to Focus Ontario.

Jim Coyle: Thanks Sean.

Karen Howlett: Thank you.

SEAN MALLEN: So, two years of preparation and consultation – two days of heat forced it back on the shelf. What went wrong, Jim?

Jim Coyle: Just about everything went wrong, Sean. It was sort of a policy rolled out by Keystone Cops, and it’s been one mistake after another. It’s got the Premier first endorsing it without having read it by is own admission now. Then the predictable sources began denouncing it as a road map to Sodom and Gomorrah, and the Premier finally decided it might be an idea to read it, or at least the naughty bits, rather like the people who read the naughty bits in novels and want them to be banned, and he yanks the thing back, and you know he looks like a man trapped in a revolving door he’s spun so often. He basically kneecapped three of his ministers who were defending it in the legislature, and he totally ended up satisfying no one. You know the critics still consider him the voice of the depraved, and now we heard from most of the progressive voices, most credible experts, who will point out that this is actually a wholesome and necessary document.

SEAN MALLEN: Karen, as we’ve seen, often they put out a press release in this government on just about anything. No press release on this one. Do you think they hurt themselves by not trying to take more command of the agenda on this with getting their own rollout?

Karen Howlett: Oh, I think so. I mean you’re right, they’ll put out a press release about a new OPP detachment in Barrie and once people realize that they had brought absolutely no attention to this, it just fed into the whole idea that there was something underhanded about this, that they were trying to slip one by. And then of course when we found out that there were talks that had progressed quite far with the Catholic officials about adapting a curriculum that would not follow the one that had been set out by the province, it started to look like some kind of a fix or a conspiracy.

SEAN MALLEN: You would have to think – I’ll get you both on this – once the Catholic boards got involved, suggesting we might not be prepared to teach this exactly as said, Mr McGuinty’s on record as saying same curriculum for both. That’s certainly a recipe for disaster, yes?

Karen Howlett: That was a big problem. I think that’s probably one of the big reasons why the Premier moved at warp speed to pull this back, because he was looking vulnerable on that. We know what the defining issue was in the last election campaign, and we know that he was saying repeatedly as he attacked the Tories’ faith-based school thing, one curriculum for all publicly funded schools. And here we had a separate curriculum for the Catholic school that was drafted for Grades 1 – 7, with the full knowledge and discussion with the ministry.

SEAN MALLEN: There had to be some teeth-grinding. You mentioned Minister Sandra Pupatello, as acting premier, a mere hours before in question period, suggesting the Tories were wanting things back in the Dark Ages, not knowing the boss was about to pull it. There had to be some tension in the cabinet room after that, don’t you think?

Jim Coyle: Oh, it must be hugely embarrassing for them to have done this, and because they know, because it’s fairly apparent that this is a pure political calculation by the Premier. He knows that some of the more socially conservative ethnic groups around the Greater Toronto Area, where a lot of Liberals are elected, were digging in against this, and Karen’s right, he could see this leading back to the most incendiary sort of issue in the history of Ontario politics, and it’s separate school funding. It’s neatly coincidental that this weekend is the 25th anniversary of the 1985 election, because you will recall, is when –

SEAN MALLEN: When the Tories lost.

Jim Coyle: – Bill Davis had extended full funding to Catholic schools, which basically put an albatross, it finished off Frank Miller, though he won the election by a margin in 1985, he was shortly ousted by the Liberals under David Peterson.

SEAN MALLEN: Just about a minute and a half left. You have written this week about maybe too many fires at once. You’ve got the pharmacists, you’ve got issues about energy, maybe it’s time to stop doing things that will annoy people, there was another word used, but annoy?

Jim Coyle: Yes, there’s no question he’s got a lot of fires. And this one is one, you know it’s emotional. You get an emotional reaction from people. You know we cover a lot of things at Queen’s Park that no one pays attention to, and this was one of the water cooler talkers of the week. The funny thing is – that’s the report, 208 pages –

SEAN MALLEN: Mainly about physical education.

Jim Coyle: It venerates the family, it’s about the benefit of family meals, family exercise. It deals on everything from walking facing traffic to wearing your bike helmet, to using sunscreen. Very, very little of it is about sex, but two or three references are what touched off the fire, and it says it’s a document for the 21st century –

SEAN MALLEN: And the rest of it apparently is being implemented. Just about thirty seconds left, Karen. Do you think there’s any chance anyone is going to touch this with a barge-pole before the next election?

Karen Howlett: I don’t think so. And I think what we’re going to see is a very watered-down document, because we had Tim Hudak, the Tory leader, playing the whole family values card, and making the Premier actually look like he was doing something extreme by introducing kids who were just learning how to tie their shoes to something that seemed – wrong.

SEAN MALLEN: Pretty clearly said I think. The current curriculum might be just fine, and we’ll just stay away from any changes. Karen Howlett, Jim Coyle, thanks for coming on the program.

Jim Coyle: Thanks Sean.

Karen Howlett: You’re welcome.

SEAN MALLEN: And one more segment to go on Focus, with your comments and the Play of the Week – Lessons from the Old Country.

* * *

Play of the Week

(video clip – Queen’s Park)

Hon Steve Peters, Speaker of the House: The members will please come to order – on both sides.

SEAN MALLEN: Sometimes Speaker Steve Peters has to be stern to try to maintain order in the legislature, but it’s all relative.

(video clip – mayhem in Ukraine parliament)

This is the Ukrainian parliament, and behind that big black umbrella is their speaker, taking cover from the eggs flung in his direction.

Tim Hudak, PC Leader: And we understand that Dalton McGuinty believes that he knows best.

And while opposition leader Tim Hudak may hope that his words score stinging points, his barbs are pretty tame in comparison with Ukraine. There a dispute over extending Russian access to a port on the Black Sea, lead to fisticuffs on the floor of the parliament, and even a smoke bomb..

– – –

And now your comments. Last week we spoke about how Ontario’s First Nations object to paying the harmonized sales tax, which prompted this voice-mail: “As far as taxes it should be the same for all. We are all equal to one another. And what gives anyone the right to put up barricades, road blocks, etc., from others keeping them from the land, just to be heard or get their way.” Linda

And even before we did a program on sex education we already received some comments. Here’s another voice-mail: “Sex education to me is not allowed to be in school. I raised two daughters, they’re both in their late thirties, and my wife and I we both taught them what they were supposed to learn. And I think if parents would be parents, as they should be, we wouldn’t have this problem right now. These kids are going to learn way too much at a very, very early age, so I’m totally against what McGuinty was going to do. So I’m very happy that he changed his mind.” Sam Macaluso

Well, I bet a lot of you have opinions about sex education. Here’s how you can register them. You can write me a letter to:

Focus Ontario

Global Television

81 Barber Greene Road

Toronto, Ontario

M3C 2A2

e-mail: focusontario@globaltv.com

voice-mail message at 1-866-895-9555

Here’s our web information: http://www.globaltoronto.com/focusontario

This program will be streamed starting sometime Monday in case you want an instant replay.

And that’s our program for this week; I’m Sean Mallen, thanks for watching. See you next weekend.

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