Ford’s snitch site and the chilly climate of surveillance culture
In the past week the Ford administration has been increasing the political stakes around their discriminatory sex-ed repeal. In order to impose punitive measures to ensure compliance to their repeal, they rolled out a snitch site for parents to file complaints if they believe that their teachers aren’t following the newly reinstated 1998 sex-ed curriculum. In his statement to the press, he declared, “We will not tolerate anybody using our children as pawns for grandstanding and political games. And, make no mistake, if we find somebody failing to do their job, we will act”. The governments implementation of a snitch system is a blatant use of surveillance technology to punish teachers through a punitive use of citizen tattle tailing that will only lead to a divisive and chilly climate in Ontario politics.
This is highly significant, as invasive surveillance has become a cornerstone of contemporary society. Our media saturated lives have allowed for the development of a wider surveillance culture where being watched and being visible has become ingrained in our everyday lives. Ford’s decision to implement a Snitch Site is moving the bar of what we consider a normal quantity of surveillance, and we must actively resist the normalization of state-sponsored, punitive surveillance strategies.
The sex-ed repeal
The sex-ed repeal is among the Ford Nation’s more controversial political interventions into the lives of Ontario citizens. I’ve argued in The Conversation that Ford’s initiative to roll back to the fossilized, 1998 sex-ed curriculum is explicitly discriminatory against LGBTQ+ children and will make life incredibly difficult for queer kids who just want to live normal lives as they navigate their school lives.
The move to repeal sex-ed curriculum is a dog-whistle for cis- and hetero- sexism, meaning that the Ford government is enacting legislation to attack LGBTQ+ rights, while actively disguising their homophobic and transphobic motives with talk around “parent consultations”. This has allowed the Ford administration to roll back the curriculum with a promise of future modernization after consulting parents. Of course, the status of queer inclusion into the curriculum is unknown, but if we take a lesson from the state of populist style politics, queer folks are typically left behind or actively discriminated against. The 1998 curriculum was designed in a time before the Internet, the legalization of same-sex marriage, and the various human rights changes that were designed to protect queer folks.
The snitch site, aptly named For the Parents is both an attempt to roll out a public consultation, as well as a surveillance mechanism to ensure compliance to the repeal. The Ford government makes no attempt to hide their motives, for any teacher who wishes to teach scientifically supported sex-ed curricula, Ford’s staffers are out for blood.
The chilly climate of surveillance culture
The Ford government ran on a neoliberal platform that seeks to treat our democratic process as a capitalist playground of top-down leadership strategies. Doug Ford is no stranger to using management strategies that belong in capitalist businesses to obfuscate democratic institutions and government transparency. This mentality is readily present in his attempts to strong arm his decision to cut down on democratically representative councillors in Toronto’s City Hall. As well as his attempts to lash out against government transparency by dodging the press. This was certainly the case when politically appointed staffers engaged in intentional applause to drown out questions from reporters at a press conference concerning an increase in funding for the Toronto police. When reporters pressed the staffers on why they were engaging in this behaviour, they scurried away to avoid answering.
The Ford government is pulling strategies out of the far-right playbook to engage in authoritarian practices in our Provincial political institutions. As Ford Nation becomes more comfortable flexing its muscles, the dangers of utilizing online surveillance systems radically increase.
The more state-sponsored, punitive surveillance practices become normalized in our wider social practices, the more we feed a chilly climate informed by deep fears and anxieties. In other words, it feeds into a wider culture of surveillance where, as sociologist David Lyon has observed, “[surveillance is] no longer merely something external that impinges on our lives. It is something that everyday citizens comply with — willingly and unwittingly, or not — negotiate, resist, engage with, and, in novel ways, even initiate and desire”. As surveillance culture becomes more entrenched in our everyday lives, we become increasingly comfortable with invasive forms of watching and policing.
The Ford snitch site relies on the ability for parents to issue complaints about the pedagogical strategies of teachers in the relative anonymity of the Government’s servers. As I found in my yet-to-be-published research on social behaviour in anonymous communities, the use folks ire as a form of disciplinary practice will likely only lead to false accusations, over-exaggerations, shit slinging, and a communicative environment punctuated with vitriol and bigotry. All the while it sets a climate of fear for teachers just trying to do their job and now having to do it under the omnipresent pretext of hostile parents snitching on them and putting their employment at risk.
When Ford won the Ontario provincial election with a majority government, it set in place a nightmare scenario for LGBTQ+ folks as the “Overton window” shifted to the political right. Ford’s landslide victory in Ontario politics broadcasted that homophobia and transphobia were once again supported by social and political institutions. This anti-queer mentality, coupled with the chilly climate of a wider surveillance culture, is threatening to send our communities back into hiding. We must not let that happen.
There is hope for resistance
The Ford governments quick and decisive actions to strike at the curriculum have left many, including myself, feeling hopeless in the face of an a right-wing partisan crusade against teaching children about consent, safer sex, and sexual and gender diversity. It is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate hostile publics to resist public displays of discrimination and oppression that seek to lash out first and foremost at queer children and youth.
However, there has been an uplifting surge of resistance from folks in Ontario.
Not surprisingly, the sex-ed repeal will likely violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms as it directly discriminates against LGBTQ+ students by removing mentions of their existence from the curriculum. Following Ford’s decision to roll out the repeal in time for coming fall semester of school, there have been a handful of legal challenges. Earlier in August, six families led an effort to file complaints with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario to challenge the negative impacts the repeal will have on queer children. In the forefront of this legal challenge is an 11-year-old transgender student who is bravely standing up to the anti-queer political entities that seek to erase her identity and thus, stigmatize her existence. And more recently, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association have moved to sue the Ford government, accusing the their efforts as being a “ham-fisted dog whistle of bigotry, of homophobia, dressed up in a consultation fix”.
And this is on top of active resistance from school boards and teachers across the province condemning the Ford government for playing politics with children and ignoring educational experts in favor of the social conservative, Ford Nation platform. More recently, teacher unions have come on the public record to declare that they will do what they can to protect teachers who defy the sex-ed repeal in the coming fall semester.
If you are as enraged by all of this as I am, there is something that you can do to actively resist the increasingly chilly climate set up by the Ford snitch site. Follow this link to the snitch site and lodge a complaint against the Ford administration using their own surveillance strategies against them. Either send a message of critique, your thoughts on why a robust sex-ed curriculum is widely beneficial to our youth, or straight up spam their systems so their punitive tactics will be rendered unmanageable.
We can protect educators in this province and their acts of resistance to the discriminatory imposition of fossilized, socially conservative pedagogical methods by flooding their servers with criticism. If enough of us send in complaints, they will be unable to process punitive action against teachers who defy their bigotry. And in doing this, we can support the LGBTQ+ children who will be most affected by this.
Share the snitch site with your friends across social media and encourage them to complain as well.
Also, happy pride week ❤
P.S. check out my blog Socionocular for more articles about surveillance politics: http://socionocular.com/
References
Lyon, David. 2017. “Surveillance culture: Engagement, exposure, and ethics in digital modernity,” International Journal of Communication, volume 11, pp. 813–831, at http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/5527.
