Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides speak at a news conference at Bow Valley High School in Cochrane, Alta., on March 5.Dayne Patterson/The Canadian Press
Alberta’s new legislation limiting “ideology” in classrooms is its own type of ideological flag – which is ironic, since one of the changes proposed by Bill 25 is to prohibit, with limited exceptions, the display of all flags other than Canada’s and Alberta’s.
This Bill 25 flag, also known as the “Act to Remove Politics and Ideology from Classrooms and Amend the Education Act, 2026,” is multi-functional. On paper, it is designed to “ensure that classrooms remain neutral”; it also “protect(s) employees from being required to take part in activities that conflict with their personal beliefs” (though their abstention could be perceived as an expression of personal belief, but never mind).
In practice, Bill 25 is first and foremost a muleta: a flag used to distract a raging bull during a fight and/or a curious electorate from the collection of small fires burning across the province. Schools in Alberta are overcrowded, and emergency rooms are so over capacity that preventable deaths are occurring with alarming frequency.
So the obvious solution is to invite the electorate to debate whether provincial legislation should restrict teachers from expressing political opinions in schools, and hope that no one gets chest pains. Alberta separatists have just said they have enough signatures for a referendum, and the RCMP has searched the offices of a firm owned by a government appointee. So Premier Danielle Smith is on it: with this new bill, schools in Alberta will be required to play the national anthem at least once a week. Boom. Done.
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But it’s more than just a distraction. Bill 25 also functions as a symbol of a certain allegiance: a sign that you are on the right team, the righteous team. If you wave the Bill 25 flag, you know that “political, social, or ideological positions” should not be expressed in schools – with the exception of the political, social or ideological positions written into the curriculum by this very government.
In 2024, Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides published a ministerial order that outlined that students in the province will “know the global significance of Alberta’s vast oil reserves and Alberta’s reputation as the most ethical producer of oil in the world.” Ostensibly that lesson is still kosher; indeed, Bill 25 flagbearers would likely argue that that statement is a fact, not a political or ideological position. Very well. But is it also a fact that air pollution caused by oil sands operations has been vastly underreported by industry? And will that lesson also be taught in schools? Perhaps we will discuss – in fact, we shall discuss, for roughly as long as it takes for the RCMP to conclude its probe of contracting practices involving Alberta Health Services.
On Monday, Mr. Nicolaides spoke to CBC News to outline the intention behind Bill 25 in more detail. “I firmly believe that it’s a professional responsibility of teachers to ensure that they are neutral and impartial in their own personal views,” he said. That is a reasonable perspective on its own, and indeed, most people would agree that classrooms should not offer pulpits from which teachers preach their own personal opinions.
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But by drafting actual legislation that explicitly prohibits ideological expression in the classroom, Alberta’s government is practically inviting students, parents and other teachers to form homeroom auxiliary forces to document and report verboten expressions of opinion. It also imposes a standard of neutrality that will seem absurd in the context of certain classroom discussions.
Mr. Nicolaides told CBC that teachers should ensure that “both sides of the debate are accurately represented” during lessons on important political or historical events. How will that be upheld during classroom instruction on the Holocaust, or on the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
But never mind the details. This isn’t really about ridding classrooms of personal bias; unless and until teachers are replaced with AI chatbots (just wait until they unionize …) there will always be some level of ideology in the classroom. Teachers are human, and humans come with biases. Rather, this is about a government trying to desperately change the channel on festering scandal; a government trying to gin up support from a conservative base that lapped up previous changes to education (including requiring parents to opt-in to sex education lessons for their kids); and a government trying to legislate something that cannot possibly be measured, controlled, or reasonably curtailed. Bill 25 will purge ideology from schools just as effectively as it will stop dogs from barking and ban ice from melting.
The Smith government has opted for legislation when a simple, informal directive – a “Hey, try to keep personal opinions out of classrooms as much as possible” – would have sufficed. But the point is not to ensure neutrality in schools; it’s to wave a bright red flag, and hope everyone looks in its direction.