Here's How the Sask Party Gave Itself Absolute Power Over K-12 Education

Next up, new bridges engineered by Scott Moe.

“Education should be treated no differently than a civil engineering project: government provides funding and ensures the goals of the civil function, and then expert builders and engineers fill in the details, taking into account realities on the ground and utilizing a wealth of experience and training that is completely unavailable to most elected officials.” - P.L. Thomas, associate professor of education at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, for The Atlantic.

Would you drive across a bridge engineered by Scott Moe?

Would you expect calm, orderly productivity on a construction site ran by a guy who can’t even hold a pair of novelty scissors with conviction?

Let’s leave building skyscrapers to the people not wearing white pants on a construction site, shall we?

Then why the hell are we letting these guys control our kids’ minds?

This is a copy of Saskatchewan’s Education Act, 1995 (I’ll refer to it here as “the Act” or “the Education Act”).

As the name suggests, it became Legislation twenty-five years ago, in 1995.

When you open any copy of any provincial Act, the cover page looks like similar to this:

It shows the name of the Act, the date it became effective, then links to a copy of every subsequent amendment made to that Act. In order to change a provincial Act, an Amendment Act (AKA a bill) must first be produced and put before the Legislature.

As you can see above, the Education Act was amended eighteen times by the NDP prior to its downfall in 2007, then twenty-two more times by the Sask Party after it formed government.

One of those amendments was Bill No. 63, which passed through the Legislature on May 17, 2017 (Section 65, pg 38), which assigned the provincial Cabinet, via the Minister of Education, unprecedented, unilateral, unequivocable power and control over K-12 education.

You can find the original version of the Education Act here and the current Act here if you’d like to compare the amendments to Section 370 yourself.

If by “amendments” I mean completely gutting the intent and purpose of the Act, in order to transfer unprecedented control over schools to partisan politicians.

(I do.)