Was Doug Ford's public consultation rigged? Here's evidence it may have been.
Yesterday, I shared evidence of collusion between the media, leftwing activists, and progressive moles in the Ford administration, to cook up a fake news story that was clearly designed to pressure Doug Ford to abandon his promise to repeal the Wynne/Levin sex curriculum.
Today, I will share disturbing evidence that the whole consultation process may have been rigged from the start, against the parents who elected Doug Ford in the first place.
Voices opposed to radical sex-ed were screened out of town halls
As telephone town hall sessions took place between October and December, CLC kept receiving emails and calls from parents who had just participated, informing us that they felt the session had been rigged against opponents of the Wynne sex curriculum.
For example, a parent, let’s call her Charlene, sent us the following email report of striking irregularities at the October 30th french-language town hall for Ottawa residents. She believed that opponents of the Wynne curriculum, including herself, were deliberately denied the ability to to speak, and that the session was ended 30+ minutes early to guarantee they didn’t get the chance. From Charlene's email to CLC:
“It was a disappointing experience. Most of the time was spent on various subjects other than the sex ed. It was always the same 2 or 3 people who were allowed to speak and they sounded as though they were educators themselves (for example they knew that only students that don’t plan on going to college or university learn about finances in high school and knew the frustration of trying to keep teens off their phones during class time)."
“I was never given an opportunity to speak even though I signalled that I wanted to say something. Someone took my name and asked if I was a teacher or a parent, I was put on hold, and never given an opportunity to speak. They only took a couple of calls (one stating medical professionals should be invited to teach sex ed in schools, the other enthusiastically promoting the Wynne sex ed curriculum) and ended the town hall more than half an hour early. Whatever this was, it wasn’t a real consultation of parents about the sex ed curriculum.”
Could this have been a simple technical error or mistake? Not likely. We know this because, independently of Charlene, we received a report from a second parent, let's call her Marcy, who had participated in the exact same October 30th town hall. She related almost the exact same experience. Marcy had signaled she wanted to speak. The screener asked what she wanted to say, but never gave her the floor to talk, although they repeatedly gave the mic to the same, pro-Wynne sex ed advocates.
When you witness something take place once, you can safely ignore it. However, when it happens twice in the same session, you can bet it’s a pattern.
Criticism of gender identity theory not permitted?
We also received many complaints from parents who had participated in the telephone town halls, who suspected that they were not chosen to speak for the reason that they had revealed to the call screener that they were going to criticize the teaching of gender identity theory.
As I said before, if it happens once, you dismiss the concern as a one-off. But when multiple people, from different town halls, all indicate that after they revealed they wanted to speak against gender identity lessons, and never got selected, it does look like a pattern.
Suppression of new immigrant voices?
One of the government’s consultation mechanisms, the Online Survey, had a glaring omission. This omission, whether by design or by accident, had the effect of suppressing the voices of parents from the Muslim community.
As you may recall, Muslim families were at the forefront of the massive parental rebellion against the Wynne/Levin curriculum. The government provided language translations of the online survey in Chinese, Urdu, Punjabi & Korean. Curiously, however, an Arabic translation was not made available.
Here’s an excerpt from an email complaint that CLC received from a parental rights leader in the Muslim community:
“Why ARABIC hasn't been added? Arabic is spoken by a large number of Ontario Parents.”
The Muslim parent leader also questioned whether Arabic was deliberately omitted because the government staffers or bureaucrats knew that it would be an effective strategy for excluding the voices of the thousands of Muslim immigrant families. For these communities, English is a second language, and they would likely not be comfortable taking an English language survey.
Was this a voter suppression tactic? Sure looks like it.
What happened to real town halls?
Who decided to have town halls via telephone, anyway? This format has a built-in lack of transparency. A phone meeting conducted by call-screeners gives to the meeting's organizers, if they want it, the ability to filter out certain undesirable opinions, in order to manipulate the proportion of responses for and against an issue.
During the general election campaign, Doug Ford promised that a PC government would be "visiting all 124 electoral ridings across Ontario to compile parental feedback". Just like I did, most everyone assumed that Doug meant there would actually be physical town halls where people would get to line up at a mic and share their views, unfiltered.
How did we end up getting no physical town halls whatsoever, and instead, an opaque phone process that is vulnerable to manipulation?
Parents did not receive what they were promised. Was that by design? Did some progressive PC staffer or bureaucrat decide they wanted a process that could be more easily hi-jacked by the political left, so as to skew the number of respondents for and against? Who got to Doug and convinced him that physicial town halls would be a bad idea?
Many respondents favouring the Wynne curriculum were probably paid activists, or fake submissions from outside Ontario
Here at CLC we have studied, for years, how the left works. It is well-moneyed, extremely well-organized, and isn’t above lying, cheating and using unethical tactics.
Knowing this background, it would not be beyond the realm of possibilities that there were a huge number of illegitimate submissions from leftists who were paid $20/hour, for example, to sit at a computer and type out hundreds or thousands of submissions from dummy email addresses.
With the left, especially from the LGBTTIQ lobby, we’ve also seen that they very often get their comrades-in-arms from across the country, and even from the U.S. and other countries, to pounce on a local issue, even though they should have no standing to comment. The strategy here is to artificially swell their numbers, and to make it look to conservative politicians that everybody is against them, so that they crumple like paper. That strategy usually works.
During this sex-ed consultation, it was very easy to fake being from Ontario via the email submission which had no controls that a free gmail address couldn’t get around, and even from the vehicles which one could fake by inputting any 3-digit Ontario postal code prefix that can easily be found on Wikipedia. In fact, the Online Survey gave you the option of not having to provide a postal code. See the screen capture below.
What is the likelihood that, as we’ve seen in other culture war situations, a lot of the pro-leftist submissions came from places like Vancouver, Calgary, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and many other cities that aren’t even in Ontario? Does the Ford administration even have this potential problem on it's radar? Or is this problem by design?
Some people might put all of these worrisome signs down to mistakes, human error and coincidence. I don't buy it. It reeks of a a set-up.