The Hall Pass
Alberta's Bill 25 doesn't remove ideology from classrooms. It erases queer students while waving religious belief straight through.
I have been doing queer rights advocacy work for a long time. Long enough to remember when we fought simply to be named, when the word “gay” in a school hallway was an insult and a threat simultaneously, when queer kids learned early that the safest version of themselves was the invisible one. I watched that change, slowly and then not so slowly, as schools began to say out loud that every child belongs here. As the word “belonging” made it into law. Alberta just took that word out. It’s Alberta’s version of “don’t say gay.”
Bill 25, tabled on March 31, removes from the province’s Education Act the requirement that schools be “welcoming, caring, respectful and safe learning environments that respect diversity and nurture a sense of belonging and a positive sense of self.” The replacement language is behavioural: schools must now foster “respectful and responsible behaviours.” The institution no longer owes the child belonging. The child owes the institution conduct.
The government calls what it is doing the removal of ideology from classrooms. Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides has been consistent on this point. Politics and ideology have no place in Alberta schools. Teachers must be neutral and impartial. School boards must refrain from taking positions on social and ideological matters. The word he keeps reaching for is “neutral.”
But neutrality is not what this bill delivers. What it delivers is a precise and deliberate asymmetry.
Under Bill 25, any external organization wishing to bring materials into a classroom about gender identity or sexual orientation must first obtain the Minister’s personal approval. Any organization. Every time. The 2024 law that created this requirement is left intact and applied in full, with one exception: materials used for religious instruction are exempt. A group wishing to teach children that same-sex relationships are disordered, that gender is fixed and binary and ordained, that queer people are a deviation from the natural order, faces no ministerial review. They walk straight in.
Read that again. The government that claims to have removed ideology from classrooms has written into law a system where queer existence requires state approval to be acknowledged, and religious conviction requires none. This is not neutrality. This is a sponsored position.
And the architecture goes further. The bill protects employees who refuse to participate in activities that conflict with their conscience. In a public school, a teacher can now decline, on conscience grounds, to use a trans student’s preferred name. To acknowledge a child with two mothers. To treat a queer student as a full member of the community the school is supposed to serve. The legislation provides cover. The child absorbs the cost.
Meanwhile, the same minister who insists that ideology must leave the classroom sent an official letter on Alberta Education letterhead to parents across the province in December, explicitly celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, invoking the Incarnation, grounding his message in the nativity. He was not disciplined. He was not asked to retract it. He never apologized. Three months later he tabled a bill mandating that schools be free from ideology.
It is worth being clear about who is behind this, because Nicolaides has consistently presented these policies as responses to concerned parents. That framing does not survive scrutiny. The Investigative Journalism Foundation documented that the list of books flagged for removal from school libraries was supplied to government officials by Parents for Choice in Education (PCE) and Action4Canada. PCE took explicit credit in its own newsletter, describing a coordinated effort to provide government officials with evidence of titles it wanted removed. Action4Canada published a public statement thanking Nicolaides for meeting with its team and responding to their concerns.
These are not concerned parents writing letters. These are organized, well-funded lobby groups with explicit ideological agendas, and their priorities are now encoded in Alberta law. The pipeline runs from their binders to the minister’s desk to the statute books. PCE’s executive director, a founding board member of the Wildrose Party, sat at the table when Danielle Smith and other UCP leadership candidates attended PCE’s 2022 education forum. This is not coincidence. It is access.
The Supreme Court of Canada said in 2002, in Chamberlain v. Surrey School District, that religious views that deny equal recognition and respect to minority groups cannot be used to exclude those groups from public education. The government is now legislating what the Court already said cannot be done. Bill 25 does not invoke the notwithstanding clause, which means its provisions are fully open to Charter challenge. The government’s own track record tells you what it already knows about that exposure: it has invoked the notwithstanding clause four times in two months to shield earlier anti-trans measures from the courts. The clause is a legal tool. Its repeated use against one community is a political statement.
I want to be precise about what is being built here, because the architecture matters. Each measure has a justification that sounds, in isolation, reasonable enough. Parental rights. Age-appropriateness. Neutrality. Safety. But the books targeted were overwhelmingly queer titles. The pronoun rules apply exclusively to gender identity. The flag regulations will eliminate Pride flags from schools. The conscience protections will be used against trans and queer students. The religious exemption will be used to bring in materials that teach against them. None of this is accidental.
What is being removed from Alberta’s schools is not ideology. What is being removed is the legal recognition that queer children exist, belong, and are owed the same protection as every other child.
I think about the kids who are in those schools right now. The one who has not yet told anyone, who comes to school and looks for a signal that they will be okay. The flag that used to be there. The teacher who used to say their name. The statutory language that used to say they belonged. All of it being taken, piece by piece, in the name of neutrality.
There is nothing neutral about a child learning to be invisible again.
We have been here before. We know what this costs. We have buried people it cost everything. The grief I carry today is not only for what is being lost in a legislative chamber in Edmonton. It is for what is being extinguished in hallways and classrooms across Alberta, in children who will search for their reflection in the institution that is supposed to serve them, and find that the government has made sure there is nothing there to find.
They call it ideology.
We call it belonging.
For readers who want the full picture, I have published a detailed backgrounder on Bill 25 at wilburturner.com/alberta-bill-25 — covering every provision of the bill, the book ban, the Christmas letter, the legal conflicts with the Alberta Human Rights Act and the Charter, and a history of the lobby groups driving this agenda. It is the first entry in a new section of my website dedicated to backgrounders on the issues I write about here.
This is heartbreaking. Your integrity shines through, in your concern for the children who will suffer because of this legislation. And that includes not only 2SLGBTQ+ children deprived of the right to be seen fully, and read about themselves; but also straight children, deprived of literature that gives them a broader view of humanity, and friendships that take no note of gender identity.
I fear it extends beyond queer students in schools, but to any child who might have queer parents or family members. Will a teacher be unable to validate the experience of a student who might have, say, two mothers without being accused of "promoting" LGBTQ lifestyles"? I transitioned 25 years ago when my children were 8 and 11. As a single transgender male parent I worried about my kids might face some discrimination, but apart from one principal, their teachers, their friends and their friends' parents were all fine. We've gone backwards since then.