Bittersweet Infamy - #76 - One Book, Two Books, Banned Books, Blue Books

Episode Date: August 6, 2023

In this 604 studio special, Taylor tells Josie about children's educator and LGBTQ+ activist James Chamberlain, and his fight against Surrey School District 36 to teach kids that parents come in every colour of the rainbow—featuring an original interview with James himself. Plus: W̱SÁNEĆ elder Dave Elliott Sr., and the thrift store typewriter he used to save the SENĆOŦEN language from extinction.

Taylor here from the podcast you're just about to listen to. I just wanted to give you a heads up that this episode will contain descriptions of homophobic abuse, as well as discussions of the abuses committed against Indigenous children in the residential school system in Canada, and the traumatic legacies of those schools on Indigenous communities. These stories are presented in the context of narratives about activists and educators who do amazing things for their communities. With that in mind? Welcome to Bittersweet 604. That group came 1927 and here at poverty exploitation funded to torture and the unspeakable vulgarity of a self-proclaimed Messiah.

I even looked under my pocket to sleep because I'm bummed. I thought if it was all going to pull those sleeping, I don't want to be here. Fitting, staying here, swindler and perhaps even murder. You are about to enter downtown East Side. You think you're not a Fraser, around Monk? Not all of a sudden we went in on Bangalore. Talks about it, sense. I think it's a local hale.

And Ted Norris, Empress of Canada. Who was he? What was he? That is the search use. The search use of rugged violence. You just look right at my screen didn't you? No I didn't! I looked into your beautiful eyes.

What color are they? They're like a hazel brown. They're green. They're in this light. The direct light. Is the direct light. And you know why? I can see your eyes so clearly, do you?

Why can you see my eyes so clearly, Josh? Because we are in person. Is that what the cameras are about? Hi, hi, hi. I'm Eda. I'm Eda. Why are we? Look? I can touch you. Can I touch you? Yeah. I can touch you. You can touch me. It's real. It's all real. It's real. Is it all real? Yeah, it's all real. He's a real boy. I've arrived. I'm in British Columbia Vancouver, Cordova Street. Yeah. 798. 795. 4-5. 6-04. 6, 4, baby. We are visiting the 6,

oh, four podcast network slash 6, oh, four records, studios. And it's fans. It's so nice. And here everyone's been so nice. There's a water dispenser. Yeah, the all the worlds are black. And there, but there's like recessed lighting that changes color. Pretty fancy. We had a fantastic time so far. Yeah, really, really lovely. So nice.

We took some promo photography, which is brand new to us. If you'll recall, we have been doing this podcast largely over Zoom since the pandemic. Yeah, in our, well, I'm in my bedroom. It's all bedroom, baby. I live in a studio. You're in the kitchen. Yeah, in our, well, I'm in my bedroom. It's all a bedroom baby, I live in a studio. You're in the kitchen, you're in the living room, you're everywhere. You're in the bathroom, I'm in everywhere, everything all at once baby.

But yeah, we got to meet Azea, who we have been corresponding with by an email and who we've spoken to a little bit on Zoom. Yeah. We got our photos taken all day by Luke and Alexi is right here doing the the audio mixing. Say hi. Just yell word. Hi.

That was me. Everyone's been next level, lovely. So rad. And it's a cool space and we're really grateful to have these opportunities because of the 604 network. So thank you. I know I said a picture to my mom of Taylor dabbing. Yeah. And she laughed. She sent about eight. Ha ha ha ha. It's because I'm a picture to my mom of Taylor dabbing. Yeah. And she laughed.

She sent about eight, ha, ha, ha, ha. It's because I'm really, really, really, really funny. Yeah, yeah. So it's real professional, real good. That's it. Yeah. What is BC, Josie? Where is BC?

We've been talking about where in BC, we're in Vancouver, British Columbia. What does that mean? That means we're in Western Canada. I was just recounting how when I first moved here, What does that mean? Mm-hmm. That means we're in Western Canada. Mm-hmm. I was just recounting how when I first moved here, there were some Americans who were unsure where Vancouver might be.

So let's start. Universe, planet Earth, North America, West Coast, lower left hand corner. Lower left hand corner, what you yanks called the Pacific Northwest? Pacific Northwest. P&Ubs. Really, it's the Pacific Southwest.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. You're taking notes. So I'm saying, take those notes. I've got notes. I have so, I... They're in a Moomin book. Mitchell has his, I called you Mitchell. I knew I was gonna call you Mitchell.

My middle name is Mitchell, so it's a lot. I know. You can call me Mitchell. That's the first time you've actually done that ever. It's first time we're in the studio. So you're nervous, and you're calling me by your fiance's name. The lighting is recessed,

and it changes colors here. That's true. That's what I can't. Everything. Once I start to go from blue to green, everything went blank. May I share some of my notes? From the Moomin book. Yes. Yes. So I've prepared some very organized notes. Some BC by the numbers notes. This will let all of you, all you at home, all of you, you know, in ranch or Santa Fe, ranch of Cucamanga, whatever rancho you're in. We've got you covered. Here's what's the deal. So the colonizer name is British Columbia. Joke name. Joke name. Real

ones know that this is the home of more than 200 First Nations, speaking 30 plus languages, 60 plus dialects. Yes, sir. And right now we are situated on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, the Squamish, and the Slay with Truth people. And that is the case anytime that we bemo from Vancouver, which is pretty much anytime I do this podcast that is for my aunt. We've got 8,000 named mountain peaks. 8,000.

More than, I mean, these are approximate numbers. But if I'm saying 8,000, assume it's probably like 8109. You know, we're right. Yeah. 27 kilometers of coastline. Did you say 27 kilometers? What do you think? What do you think I said?

I don't know. Check the tape. Check, roll it back. 27,000 kilometers of coastline. We've got 6,000 islands, including the Gulf Islands, including the cheaper islands where we will be going shortly. Yeah. Which we haven't really announced, but we'll tell you more about that as we go.

Yeah. We've got 5,000 glaciers. G-bees. Cold, put on a coat, put on that winter coat. Population, you play along at home. OK. What do you think the population of BC is? 2.3 million.

Terrible, guys. OK. More, more, more. More. 10 million. Less. Oh, OK. OK.

OK. 6.66 million. That's's right 5.071 million I heard you do the devil number. I got it right on the dial first time. I got it Thank you this is the home of 15 series of supernatural Never seen seasons. I guess I should say, unless I'm not British. 10 seasons of smallville, that was filmed in Cloverdale, in which is the Yeehaw Part of Surrey.

Uh-huh. Seven seasons of Riverdale. Oh. Yeah, somehow. And five seasons of the X-Files, that is not all of them. That was very controversial when the X-Files and the Dead of Vancouver. We were not happy of them. That was very controversial in the Xbox and Dead of Income. We were not happy about it.

We've had one prime minister from BC. Do you know who it is? This is your citizenship test. If you fuck this up on tape, they won't let you in again. Fuck Taylor, you really put me in a little pickle here. You want to show me the notes? No, I don't care to show you the notes. It was. Go with your heart. Wasn't Steven Harper? No. It was. True. No.

Libby Davis. It's not a prime minister. I know. I tried. We were looking, of course, for the only female prime minister, WWE Hall of Famer Kim Campbell. Oh. Real name is Avril, in fact. No.

Yes. Like the month in the singer. And of course, our last number, we have zero Stanley cups. So let's burn some shit down. Let's flip some cars about it. Josie, welcome to welcome home. Oh, welcome home. That's really, that's really sweet.

No problem. It does feel very warm and going to be welcomed home. Yeah. Because I haven't lived here since 2012, like over 10 years. Sounds like it's time for you to come back. I think so. I think so, which was really cruel of you to corner me with the King Campbell question. I...

Well, you know. It's in my head now, though. You'll remember next time you see Kim Campbell walking by in the street, which you could, because she's from here. Yeah. I know that now. She's from Vancouver, you know? Yeah. Oh, yeah, local, local girl, local girl. The senior on the dragon boat. The first Christmas I came back to California from BC. I kept constantly saying like, did you know they're Canadian? Did you know?

Canadian. Canadian. Canadian. That's what I mean when I say with them home, that's how you know that you've assimilated. Yeah, when I can recognize all the white men who are from Canada.

Yes. Yeah. Taylor. Ha, ha, ha. It's pretty bad. No, it's like moving through these streets again and beautiful mountains to the north and like the water to the west.

It's just like Vancouver is the most beautiful goddamn place in the whole world. I am biased, but I agree. Like I BC Beauty does it for me like, yeah. It's special. And it's everything. It's mountains, it's skies, it's oceans,

it's trees, it's snow, it's rain, it smells, it smells you go, no disrespect to New York City, but you go to New York City, it smells like hot fucking garbage. I'm looking at you, New York. I'm just trying to start fights with every major. Actually, I've been shitting on Jersey for a while. Let's bring it back. Atlantic City. There's a shit hole. No, no. No. What I mean to say is the air here smells like clean ocean. Oh my gosh. You step off the plane and it's like, oh my lungs. There's more capacity to them because there's more oxygen in the air. We'll smoke that out of you. Oh, yeah

Yeah, and that's a lovely thing too. Yeah, I just yeah The other thing I don't know if we've mentioned is that as part of our bitter sweet 604 block. Oh, yeah, that we're doing that right now. This is it. This is the first one bitch. This is it We're gonna be coming to you every Sunday in August. Yeah, we're gonna have a little butt-soft. I have a sausage. I'm unironically, I bring down. We melted our butts. Yeah, we've melted our ice cream in our butts.

Yeah, but it's okay, because it's super fun. It's super fun. We actually melted some literal ice cream earlier. We got to do ice cream photoshoot. We did, I mean, it's not honest. I'm really impressed with it. Luke really wanted to do a bunch of shots for Josie was like cocking me with the ice cream

and I put my foot down. Well, if you did it to me, it just was not. No, it looks like I'm a gross girl leader. It's gonna be a little bit of a smell of the glove situation. Did you know that spinal tap? No. Oh, look at that.

A reference to Josie has in Taylor down. Wow. Wow, sometimes the sun comes around the moon. I'm gonna Josie has in Taylor down. Wow. Wow. Sometimes the sun comes around the moon. I'm going to tally for that. What? I stopped keeping down to my aunt. I know, but this is a bittersweet 604.

604 is the telephone area code, the original one for Vancouver since then 770. And we're also going to be spending a little bit of time in the 250 area code because we're going to be going out to do a little bit of sweet road trip. Yeah, we're going to get in the car. Car's going to get off the ferry. Car's going to get off the ferry. We're going to back on the road. We're with the car the whole time.

We're going to get off and get white spot though. Get out of the car in the ferry. Yes, get white spot, which is very important. It's the most crucial, like listen. Buddy, if you've never gotten the white spot on the ferry, that's one of those, like, I'm making a note to describe the white spot. Oh, we're gonna, we will give you live audio

of the white spot on the ferry. And we wanna record us on the ferry, we wanna record us on the road, we wanna record us at the beautiful 1970 VW camper van bus that we have Airbnb and bead. My mother gave us like little lights to put up to make that shit homie. Little twinkle lights.

Little twinkle lights. A dorm room. Like a dorm room. Ah, and a room. And I'm gonna down like this and my parents are good people. Corey has his moments. Corey, love you. That was a good year. That was a bit weird. You're engaged. I don't even down like this and my my my parents are good people Corey has his moments Corey

Love you. You're engaged. You're engaged. Corey take it back. Wow what the fuck is wrong with my brother Corey great guy. Yeah Corey doesn't listen to the podcast. It's okay thing. Okay. Does his girlfriend does? I hate. You're cool, Kay. Yeah, you're cool. Much cool, and Cory. Yeah, so we're going to be coming to you from Capitol BC, not to be confused with the Capitol of BC, which is Victoria. Yeah, that was really, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're careful when you Google

that. Yeah. That was tough. We're going to be in between, if you know, the Western side of Vancouver Island, which is just off the coast of Vancouver, it's a very large island. We're going to be in between Siu Can Port Renfrew by the River Jordan. Oh, me. Thank you.

With the I have a CD with only that song, just different versions of it. They will play on the way. Different versions. Death Quarimax and shit. We do have a CD player, though. I'm going to tell you my Memphis now, though. Okay. Is that okay? You know what? Yes. Cool. Cool. Taylor, you mentioned in our BC by the numbers. Thank you for doing that research. More than 32 Indigenous languages in the province of BC. Sa Sèvré? According to Welcome BC. Yeah, I found it in another source that I'll name later, the end of the show. 32 is quite a lot for unique individualized languages.

How many languages can even like one person know? How many do you know? This has recently changed the sense. Oh my gosh, on the podcast, yeah. On the podcast, so I know English, I know Spanish, and I know Iom de Esperanto. You're a cutie, baby. Actually, no joke.

I've been so slammed this week that I finally lost my dual-lingual Esperanto streak this weekend. Oh, no, the little owl. The owl's really laying in the knuckles now. He wants me to come back, yeah. Towns. Ooh. Oh, 32 indigenous languages in the city.

Yeah. Each beautiful 32 indigenous languages. Yeah. Each beautiful in their own way. But the sad thing is the bitter part is that some of them are on their way to being lost or have been on their way to being lost. But there's been some really wonderful reclamation efforts to get them recorded, get them in school curriculums, get them in communities where children who can learn them or adults who can learn them can connect with their elders and pass culture. And I'm gonna tell you the story of one such language. Okay, we're gonna mentally zip over to the island right now. Car, car on the ferry, yeah, the Carways. Yeah, we're there too. Okay, back on the ferry, yeah, the car was fine. Yeah, and where there too. Okay, back on the car. Yeah, highway four.

Brentwood Bay. Ken Fariban, yeah. There we are. Got it. Okay, it's just kind of south Vancouver Island. I didn't look, well, we might pass a lot. I think we might be. Yeah.

In this area, a man by the name of a David Elliott senior, who's more in 1910, grew up on the tar slip reserve in this area of southern Vancouver Island and grew up as part of the Walshanec nation there. He saw kind of a huge shift happening. Born in 1910, he started seeing the Canadian government come in and put regulations on the traditional hunting and fishing of his people and his community. So much so that it kind of like squeezed out so they could no longer do their traditional hunting and fishing of his people and his community, so much so that it kind of squeezed out so they could no longer do their traditional fishing and hunting.

Also squeezed out was the language. So the language that David Elliott Sr. grew up speaking is called Sin Chothen, and it's a Coastal Salish language group, and he heard it growing up. He knew it as his first language and then he learned English as his second language. He also grew up in a traditional long house. He had a relatively traditional upbringing within his nation, slowly started to get, you know, white people, white people. Yeah, whittled away. White people whittled away. He became a commercial fisherman and he

did that for most of his life, most of his career. He had to let that go kind of early in life because his arthritis was serious enough that he couldn't be anymore. I know. But he took on a job as a caretaker at a local school. The Tarsleep Indian Day School was what it was called when he was there and the late 1960s, he became a first-hand witness to all the youth in his community, not being able to speak this language that he knew. At the time that in the late 1960s, there were only maybe about 15 elders who spoke the language fluently, enough to hold conversation, right? Right. The extinction of various indigenous languages in Canada was deliberate. Totally. Deliberately through means like residential schools, through means like removing children from from their home and punishing them if they spoke their language.

Yeah. These kind of individual vibrant cultures and languages were really deliberately extinguished. Yeah. And David Elliott, he did attend a residential school. And so he was one of the lucky ones who was able to hold on to his first language, and it wasn't completely erased. But yeah, in the residential school, he was instructed,

never to speak it, he was instructed only in English, and there were a lot of youth who didn't have the languages their first language, and they lost it, or they never had it. Exactly. It's like a very deliberate, a very deliberate assimilation that's extremely destructive. Like a cultural gem aside. When Josie and I talk about residential schools, what those are, are those are living schools where indigenous children who were deliberately separated from their parents and their communities

and their culture would be educated by Catholic nuns and Catholic priests and pretty unspeakable violence, sexual violence, physical violence, cultural violence was done to these kids. Many were killed and we're still trying to get to the bottom of how many bodies can be found in these kind of places. Yeah.

And it's a real, one of the great shames of Canadian history. Totally. And it's part of Canadian history. Totally. And it's part of American history too. We just don't talk about it as much, I think. We have a lot of dirt under our fingernails, I think. And we don't talk a lot about a lot of it. So when David Elliott Sr. was working at this local school,

caretaking kind of like, janitorial roles, but you know, like, taking care of things, he realized how little of the language was being preserved within the school curriculum and within the school walls. And so he became really enthralled with the project of preserving the language. Love it. Yeah. And sharing it with these particular students. Katnip Frost, huh? We're like, he's preserving a language. Oh my gosh. He's so sexy, so smart. He taught himself an international alphabet. Wow. Which is like a linguistic, like, it's

phonemes, right? Like when you go on Wikipedia and you're trying to... Yeah, when you see the upside down, you don't know what nobody knows what the fuck this shit means except for them. They don't. Apparently. Yeah, he learned all of that. He worked with some linguists in the Victoria area to kind of educate himself a little bit more on it and how he might go about preserving his language, Xing Chou Thin. And he realized that the

phonetic-elf international alphabet was just, it wasn't able to capture the complex tones in Singtruthin. And so he thought about it and thought about it and worked with it, worked with it. And he realized too that, like, I guess the imperialist method, the like kind of white method with the international alphabet,

that method was gonna take so long to do. Because it wasn't made for this. It wasn't made for this. He was later in his life. He was born 1910, this is the 70s. But also the language was on the clock. The language itself didn't have much longer. He needed to do something really quickly.

And his daughter says he used to dream about it. He used to dream about preserving the language. He'd get up in the middle of the night and work on it. He's got the muse. He's got the muse. He would write out the language as he heard it, as he was kind of transcribing it. From the oral tradition, he would write it on paper towels.

Very jozy. I know, right? No wonder I love that, right? Yeah, just pulling the calendar. Josie loves, Josie loves writing, I've heard that it's done something entirely impractical to handle and read off of. It's her favorite. Yeah, I do have a book this time.

Yeah, you're, what's, this is a very professional look for you today. Thank you. Well, we're in studio. If we were pros today, we were finally pros. Alexie nodded, so she agrees. So David Elliott, senior, he woke up one night and he realized that the international alphabet was just not gonna work for that. Fuck it.

What's a schwa, who cares? Exactly. And so he started devising his own alphabet to capture the Suncham language. And it took him the winter of 1977 to kind of plan it all out, but he realized as he was writing it, he kept on the paper towels, dealing with it, that the letters and the symbols, they were really hard to read from a handwriting. And he needed this to be able to be integrated into a curriculum, able to be dispensed across all the people in the nation.

And the more impractical it is, the harder a time you have spreading it, right? Because people, it's a barrier to entry. Exactly. And so he went ahead, went down to the thrift store, bought a second hand typewriter for $30, and he fixed, tinked, and twiddled with the typewriter, using the keystrokes and everything

that were available to him. And he devised an alphabet with those. So they not only was there an alphabet for St. Trothin, but you could type it out on the typewriter. Interesting, that's so practical. And the other cool thing is because he used just out on the typewriter. Interesting. That's so practical. And the other cool thing is because he used just a second-hand typewriter, he wasn't, sometimes you can, you know, use a, especially when it wasn't as computer software for those hardware things, a typewriter to write a specific language

could be something like thousand and thousand. Yeah, again, which is, people won't do that. Right, exactly. And he kept it extremely accessible so that anybody could access this language, which was really important because everybody needed to access it. All the keys, all the symbols are already in the standard typewriter. Cool. He just kind of rearranges them and moves them a little bit. Interesting.

Yeah, 38 individual characters is what he devised. And that became the base for the written version of the Shinchotin language. He brought this to other Wozsanic elders, and they all agreed this would be the official written language. That ain't nothing. No, I mean, he himself was an elder, but he got everybody's stamp of approval.

David Elliott started working on a dictionary, trying to track all the nouns, trying to track all the vocabulary, right, starting easiest ones nouns, and then kind of moving to more complex things. And then he started kind of working on the grammar of things. Of course, other people from the nation were helping him and other elders. He passed away in 1985. All right, Pete. Yes. And not all the work was done, but his son, David Elliott, Jr. and his daughter, Linda Mahmoud, they are still teaching

the language. Good. Yeah. Good. Yeah. I'm almost saying next land. And they're using the alphabet that their father devised. They're using the dictionary that he helped put together.

Yeah, and constructing the grammar, all of it. And in 1984, the Wosanecch Indian School Board was established and one of their first items that they passed was integrating this alphabet. Good, good, good. Yeah. Oh, a life's work realized. Love those.

I know. It's really sweet. Love those. And now the most senior school board uses computer software to kind of standardize everything and have students access the most thing they can. The Carmen San Diego approach.

Exactly. Exactly. But, you know, David Elliott was the one who like spent nights spent. The winter of 1977 or whatever it was. Yeah, yeah, putting the sky. I'll probably not put in some logs on Stoke and the Fire and then being like, let's figure

if we can make this work. Yeah, and that is the story of the St. Joseph and language and how it's been able to be integrated into the Wocenex curriculum, how it's thriving and doing well and preserved. How do you feel about a little story time? I'm so ready. I'm going to lean back and enjoy. It's about to come at me.

We're talking about like gathering around. We're sitting in the library. Chris Cross, Abla Sous. We're going to be reading a book from 1994. Okay, good year. By a writer named Johnny Valentine, it's illustrated by Melody Sireki, and it's a book called One Dad, Two Dads,

Brown Dad, Blue Dads. Ooh, hold it up so we can make sure to see it. I'm gonna do a little read. From the library too. From the library, I wanna give a big little read. From the library too. From the library, I want to give a big thanks to Elena at the library. Oh. No, this is from the UBC School of Education library.

I've been in that library as a dope library. As a dope library, and I got another book out as well, and these are sort of like historically significant books from the children's section. And before I explain to you why they are significant books, I'm gonna do a little reading. So one dad, two dads, brown dad, blue dads, and Josie, feel free to comment on any drawing, any any.

Okay, tight, I'm ready. And so this book is dedicated to Jacob. He only has one mom and one dad, but don't feel bad for him, they're both pretty great parents. One dad. Two dads. Brown dad. Blue dads.

Okay. Blue dads. Blue dads. Blue dads? I don't know who has dads that are blue. Look at you reading upside down. It's hard. I know it's hard. I had a tough time.

You got to pick that up. You got to pick that up. I do. My name is Lou. I have two dads who both are blue. And so enter Lou. He's showing off his two blue dads and they got a little tabby cat there. Little kitty witty. They both have blue hair.

That's the color it grows. Blue arms and blue fingers, blue legs and blue toes. Okay. What is it like to have blue dads? I said? Do they talk? Do they sing? Not my first question. And the blue does have... What's your question? I'm... is this it? Which one's the woman? You sick fuck? I was gonna say, is there skin condition?

Is there a skin? Well, we get to the... We listen. Those ignorant questions will be asked as well. Well, okay. In the meantime, do they work? Do they play? Do they cook? Do they cough? If they hug you too hard, does the color rub off? Oh. That's a fucked up thing to say. Well, now it's reminding me of that episode from a rest to develop it. Remember when Tobias? Yeah, Lou himself. This is written in a pre-like arrested development era. They couldn't have, they couldn't have future proof.

Okay, okay, sorry, sorry, yeah. They didn't know what was coming down the pipe. Yeah. Of course, blue dads work. And they play and they laugh. They do all of those things, said Lou. Did you think that they simply would stop being dads just because they are blue?

The good question. So here's this, this in the last one, she's coming back with more of her questions. Okay. Curious. It's okay to be curious. That's true. Respectful.

Respectfully curious. Yes. Don't ask people if the color revs off when they give hugs. That's. That's dicey. Yeah. My dad can stand on his head, I told Lou. My dad plays me songs on his purple kazoo.

He even knows how to make chocolate fun do. Can blue dads do all of those things too? Oh, what funny ideas you have replied Lou. Do you think that dads are different because they are blue? My dad's both play piano and one of them cooks. He makes wonderful chocolate cream pies. They have a weird rhyme scheme. It doesn't rhyme, yeah.

But here comes the rhyme. Okay. I have never seen either one stand on his head, They have a weird rhyme scheme. It doesn't rhyme, yeah. But here comes the rhyme. I have never seen either one stand on his head, but I'm sure they both could, if the need should arise. And so we've got the blue boys, doing blue boy things, doing some blue boy headstands and loving life. This one's juggling with his feet

for all the fetish people out there. What I'd like to know now, I went on to say, how did your dads end up being this way? So these are the Josie questions we're getting into now. Yeah, yeah. Did they go through a wash with the ballpoint pen? Okay. Or were they both blue since the young age of 10?

Oh, hereditary. Did they drink too much blueberry juice as young boys? Or as kids, did they play with too many blue toys and Josie what kind of blue toys you see in here. A lot of clowns, a blue elephant, some blocks roller skates, some blue legos, dolls. This looks like maybe Rosita hit some hard times. Oh, oh, we're out. But we're rooting for it again, better. Yeah. Just where did you get all these questions, Lu said? How did such explanations pop into your head? They were blue when I got them and blue they are still,

and it's not from a juice or a toy or a pill. They're blue because well, because they're blue, and I think they're remarkable wonders, don't you? Yes, my dad's both are blue and although you may try, it is hard to see blue dads against a blue sky. But except for that problem, our life is routine, and're just like all other dads. Black, white or green. Oh. Green dads. Green dads. That I never have seen. No, I never have seen a dad who is green.

I have. My name is Jean. I have two dads who both are green. I'd love to let you take a look, but we've run out of room now in this little book. And that is it. And we kind of see a little blue fam. Who published this? This is published by Allison Publications. And they're like, I LGBTQ book. Okay.

Company. Okay. And that's it. That's one dad, two dads, brown dad, blue dads by Johnny Valentine impressions. All right. Interesting book.

I think I get it. Listen, there are no answers. I know, right. Yeah, I think I get it. We can cut out the part where you're wrong. Oh. That's how that works. Okay.

Blue dads, eh? Blue dads, what is the message? Doesn't matter if you got one dad or two, doesn't matter if they're brown or blue. Sounds about right to me. Okay, I made it wrong too. I mean, I stole a rhyme. It doesn't matter if you got no dads too.

Sorry, Josie about that. Yeah. But two dads, me? Glenn. Shows to Glenn. So Josie, how could such an innocuous book about children with blue fathers? Be at the center of the kind of podry tale we tell on this grubby podcast? Oh no, it got banned.

Today, I'll tell you the story of how starting in 1997, kindergarten teacher James Chamberlain, fought the Surrey School Board all the way to the Supreme Court Canada. For the right to teach children that parents can be any color of the rainbow. Rad did. I had the great pleasure of interviewing James and to give you a little bit of context. That is so fucking cool. So it was a great interview and I'm going to thread it throughout this episode. Before we start anything, I might hear me use phrases like LGBT LGBTQ LGBTQ plus in Canada or in BC, a really common one is 2S LGBTQIA plus and the 2S stands for Two Spirit, which is a first nation's concept of sexuality and gender. Any time I say that

to just generally mean the rainbow people, although in this story, you're gonna hear a lot of more talking about gay and lesbian because it happens in, starts in 1997. By James' own admission, he said to me himself, he's like, we weren't as focused on trans teachers and trans youth as we should have been at the time. Yeah. Because we were kind of more ignorant of it then. Right, okay, yeah.

Take for granted any time I say queer LGBTQ plus, who I saw, it's the same sheet of music basically. Yeah, all right. I in my previous life was N. Still M, like an activist type, an LGBTQ plus activist type. You're with the movement. With the movement, I am very famously with the movement. And James too is with the movement.

So I have a real soft swap for stories like this and it was also in that past life that I first encountered James. Okay, I was gonna say, did you have you met him before you just reached out? I knew him. Well, the silly thing is that I knew him and I've always known him in this context.

Like I would have met him when I was kind of doing like going around to high schools and talking about education stuff, that kind of thing. Yeah. And I would have met him via that context and I would have certainly known who he was. I definitely wasn't, oh, James, he's from the case from the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

and he still works blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But somehow I kind of like, that evaporated from my mind so much so that when basically real ones know, I say I'm from Vancouver, but I'm not. I'm from Surrey. The boys from Surrey. The boys from Surrey. The boy, Surrey.

And so I wanted to do a Surrey story. Yeah, boy. Like a true hometown story. And like not even, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. And not even Surrey what? And not even, um, not even for this. Like I've always wanted to do a Surrey story. And this just kind of ended up being

when it came out of the chamber. Yeah. And I had somehow like completely forgotten that James was the dude at the center of it and that I knew him. Yeah. And so when I started to do my research, I was like, oh my god, of course it's fucking James.

Yeah. And I thought, well, I would be stupid not to interview. So I did. And he was very cool. And he was excellent. And he sounds a little bit something like this. My name is James Chamberlain and my claim to fame is suing the Surrey School Board in 1998 for their banning of books about

Samsung's families at the Supreme Court of Canada and my other claim to fame is recently receiving an honorary doctorate degree from the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford for my lifelong work on LGBTQ plus issues in education. Our story starts with a foreign boy named James born in Mount Leamon, a historic rural community in Abbotsford, BC.

Because I wanna sink Josie in the shit, I'm gonna ask you to describe Abbotsford to our audience. Oh! Okay, I'll give you my understanding. Sure. Yeah. Coming up.

Yeah, that's good. Yes, yes. Coming up. Moving to BC and meeting anybody from Abbotsford, they would be like, yeah, I'm from Abbot's Ferd. And there was a sense of like, there was a sense of like, super sorry, there was a sense of like, it was pretty rural, pretty white, pretty religious,

a Jesus camp kind of like, I grew up going to church camp. It's an American feeling city of this city. Yeah, I think so. I think it's a lot of things. I think it Jesus camp kind of like, I grew up going to church camp. It's an American feeling city. Yeah. Yeah, like, Mitchell might be like, oh, I would feel very, at home in Mabasford, that kind of thing.

It's like a big strip mall. Ooh. Okay. With some chain restos. No, no, we love a big strip mall. I mean, we love Wipe Spot. That about covers it. It's not kind of prairie land vibe.

Yeah, we're going kind of out from Vancouver. You get to Surrey, then you get to Langley, then you get to Abbotsford. Yeah. Kind of vibes. So I'm painting James as an Abbey Boy and he is, but he goes to a few different schools going up, he goes to one in Abbotsford, one in Surrey, one in Richmond. Okay, yeah. And even before he realizes his own attraction to the same sex around the fifth grade, he

gets a lot of shit about being perceptibly gay from pretty early on. School ends up being a place that he doesn't like very much because he's being mistreated there and not receiving the kind of support he has. That's not what school's for. Elementary school was hard from grade three to grade 12. My experience was in school where that I was a target of homophobic bullying. Consistently, pretty much every day, I was not the kind of kid who could ignore or hide my emotions, so I was a pretty easy target. They didn't teach us anything about strategies

we're dealing with bullying in those years. I was in elementary school in the 70s, late 60s, and all of the 70s. So there was no conversation in schools about homophobia, homophobic bullying, no positive role models. So it was a pretty isolating experience and I actually really hated school, which is but ironic because I became a teacher. And worked in public education for most of my career. So yeah, it was a pretty lonely experience in school. I knew that I was attracted to boys from a young age. Probably I would say grade five, which is about nine or ten years old, and the homophobic bullying that happened to me was probably perpetuated from a number of reasons.

One, I felt more comfortable hanging out with girls, so I didn't fit the masculine gender stereotype. I was in a rural school in Surrey. I was in a rough neighborhood neighborhood and I was a kid that didn't fit in and it was quite obvious and my last name was different. It wasn't Chamberlain. My last name was Cox, COX. There you go. There's a chance for people to target you based on your last name. I was a pretty shy child. I wasn't an extrovert.

Lots of people wanted to pick fights with me. I got beaten that school called names. Chaseed. The hardest place for me was in PE class because the locker rooms were the most unsafe place. And I also rode the bus to and from school. And so I was targeted on the bus as well. So like the whole bus would call me names as I got on the bus, as I got off the bus and the bus

drivers didn't do anything. So it was pretty much everywhere. The safest place for me was on the family farm. Being at home was where I felt safest but soon as I left for school in the morning, it was basically a day of harassment and torture. And I famed sickness to try to avoid school. My parents were really astute and caught on to that and made me go to school. So I had to go to school, but I never told my parents why I was being harassed. And I opened up to a school counselor once in grade eight and told him that the other kids were calling me fairy. And I was crying and said I didn't know how to deal with it. And he told me to ignore it. And I never went back to see him. And I

never told my parents. They didn't even know that what had been going on with me until they read it in the affidavits for the court case against the service school board. James ends up pursuing agriculture as his degree. Interesting. Yeah, because he's a farm. He liked the farm. The girl, he's the only ranch, you know, that simple life. It leads to him working with veterinary practicum students on the UBC farm. He ends up getting interested in education through this and he does some teaching work at beloved local Otterhaven, the Vancouver Aquarium. Woo! He's stars! Starstroke! And then eventually he gets certified to teach in

public schools. When we next find James in our story it's 1992. He's working as a teacher in Richmond, which is a nearby suburb, although he'll spend most of the story as a full-time teacher in Surrey School District, SD36. So he's an elementary school teacher, the way that the grading works in SD36, which I went to, I'm from the school district in question. In alumnus, here among us. MJ Norris is our school. We're from the school district in question. An alumnus here among us.

MJ Norris is our school. We're all a part of our family. The grading in SD 36 goes kindergarten to grade seven is elementary school. Okay. Grade eight to grade 12 is high school. Okay, okay. So no middle. Just... Yeah, we don't have middle school. Elementary to...

Yeah, yeah. At the time, James and some friends has have started up a group called Gail BC, which is short for Gail lesbian educators of BC. Brad. Men at BGAN is a social club of like-minded teachers, and then it turns into a more public-facing activist group. When I started my career in 92 LGBTQ plus teachers were not out. It was unsafe for them. There's a publication that goes out to every teacher in British Columbia called Teacher magazine.

And I asked to have an article written like I wrote an article about myself, about my experience as a substitute teacher in my second year of being a substitute teacher as an out teacher, but I asked that my name not be attached to it. But I talked about my experience with homophobia being a substitute teacher, and they had never published an article before that was anonymous, but they agreed to it. And when they read it, and they were super supportive. I chose to remain anonymous because I was a substitute teacher and I was trying to get a permanent contract to teach in Richmond to pay our mortgage and live. So I had to have an anonymous. So that was the first article that ever appeared on LGBTQ issues in education in 1992. It was a pretty, it was actually not much different from my school experience.

Pretty isolating. But I was an adult at that point and I had grown a very thick skin over the decades. So my experience of going through that was very different as an adult. But when I was hired in Surrey, I was actually hired on a permanent contract from the get-go by my principal. She knew I was gay and she had been in the district for a long time and she knew how conservative the school district was. And to the best of my knowledge, I was the first openly gay teacher in Surrey in 1995

when I was hired by her. Sometime in the 1996-1997 school year, James finds out that he needs to be handing his reading list to the principal for approval. Oh, that becomes a new rule, kind of thing? It's no, it was the existing rule. He just didn't know about it, because he was new to the principle for approval. Oh, that becomes a new rule kind of thing. It's no, it was the existing rule. He just didn't know about it because he was new to the job. No worries. He's not reading anything.

He shouldn't be. He gives the list to the principle and it includes three books, Ashes Mums by Rosmond Ellwyn and Michelle Paul. This is a 1990 book. I, Josie has it on the desk in front of her there. Illustrated by Don Lee. Illustrated by the Don Lee. There's another book called Belinda's Buké by Les Lea Anumin and then of course there's one dad, two dads,

brown dad, blue dads by Johnny Valentine. And so in the court documents, these will come to be referred to as the three books. The three book. Capital T, the capital T, three capital B books. James's principle expresses some worry that maybe you don't want to push this James. This is a pretty conservative school district. Which it is. I'm in general, Surrey largely votes conservative most parts of it. Okay. But James says, and rightly so, that he has an ethical obligation to teach these

kids about all types of families. Amen, brother. To true. Of course you already heard from one dad, two dads. Asha's mums is about a girl who needs her permission slip signed by her two about all types of families. Amen, brother. Toot true. Of course, you already heard from one dad, two dads. Asha's mums is about a girl who needs her permission slept signed by her two mothers. And the incredulity she meets when she explains to people that she has two mothers.

That's sex. Belinda's bouquet is a story about an overweight girl learning to accept her own beauty. We're in a character just happens to have two mothers totally incidentally to the plot. So it's not the same as the other two. Okay, okay. Where like the book is about like some people have two parents of the same sex. Yeah, that becomes a focus. Yeah. I did read the books in my classroom before they were banned, before I knew they even had to go

to an approval process. And I read one dead two deads, around that blue deads in my classroom because of a boy named Zachary, who has two moms. And at the time Zachary was in kindergarten and he was talking about his birth mom and his real mom. And the other kindergarten kids were like, what?

What are you talking about? That doesn't make sense. And so I read the book around Father's Day and I said to the kids, could a family really have two moms or two dads? And Zachary put up his hand and he's like, I have two moms. I already knew that, but it gave him permission to be validated in the classroom and to talk about his moms. And for the other kids to realize that not every family has one mom and one dad and that that's okay. So it was about teaching acceptance of Zachary's reality

that actually had nothing to do with same sex families when I actually read the book for the first time. Later on, Odie I was reading the book with a tent, but not the first time. So the titles, the three books, get passed on to the school superintendent, and the superintendent seems uneasy, passes the buck to the school board to make the decision. Oh. The Surrey School Board is an elected panel of seven trustees, which make decisions about

school programming on behalf of the community. You are not required to have any particular teaching expertise. You just have to win a public vote. In 1997, there is a pronounced fundamentalist half of the community, you are not required to have any particular teaching expertise, you just have to win a public vote. In 1997, there is a pronounced fundamentalist Christian presence on the board. Most notably among the trustees is Heather Stillwell, a devote Roman Catholic and the co-founder of the Christian Heritage Party of Canada. I'll call them the CHP for sure. What was that in here?

That gas. What's wrong with Christ? Christ, cool guy. We're great sandals, but doesn't need to be mixed with government and education. You would probably argue, no, that's okay. Heather would argue the exact opposite. So she's fighting with Christ.

She, well, she is fighting using Christ. Yes. In 1987, Heather and her husband, as well as a guy named Ed Van Woodenburg and his wife, and some other like-minded folks are sitting around, chatting the ballaks. They lament that there's not a political party advocating that Canada be run on Christian principles. So Heather, Ed, and their spouses create the CHP quote to ensure security, freedom and justice for all Canadian citizens from conception till natural death. Okay. So once that, once the splooge, splooge is once you escape the nut, you're alive. And then once you escape your mother, the rest is up to you because we will not be helping.

Yes. Yeah. And then once you escape your mother, the rest is up to you because we will not be helping. Yes, we're pro-life up to a fucking point. Which is nine months. Here's a quote from the charter, their charter, the CHP's charter. Okay. Concerning the welfare of this nation's citizens, we favor re-criminalizing in the criminal code of Canada, the murder of pre-born children, sexual deviancy, and pornography. And pornography? They don't want you to have anything fun.

I found different versions of the CHP's charter. As of 2017, they were like really concerned about sharia law. It's sort of updates with the moral scares at times. That happens, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's still that general vibe of no abortion, no gay, no trans, no, especially not anything to do with sex, that in kids, especially in this context of like, occupying a school board, let's say.

Right, yeah. Heather still well was the interim leader of the CHP she ran in the 1993 federal election in the writing of Surrey White Rock South Langley. Okay. No Kim Campbell, as you might have observed abortion, is still legal in Canada, so evidently she didn't win that one. Boop, boop, boop, boop I wasn't trying to get that in, sorry.

No, I'm, let's celebrate it. They were new. Yeah, true. In 1994, she co-founded Surrey Traditional School. Let me tell you a little bit about Surrey Traditional School. Yes. Because I did the challenge program there, which is, the challenge program was basically like a gifted program.

Like they would pick. Yeah. They would, if they decided that you were any good at something, in my case, it was writing. That makes sense. It was writing, but they wanted me to write an autobiography. And I was like six and I was like, man, I don't remember most of my life. So maybe you don't let six year olds write autobiographies. Nothing has happened yet.

But, but, where it being, I would go to the Surry Traditional School for this. And Surry Traditional School was, so it's a publicly funded private school. Okay. They play the national anthem every morning, which is very unusual for Canadian schools. Yeah, no, I mean, that's pretty standard

in Americans' games, but. Oh, Canada ringing through those halls, it's not. It's not common. No. They had to wear these like scratch. Yeah, but. Oh, Canada ringing through those halls, it's not. It's not common. No. They had to wear these scratchy looking green uniforms. Oh. Kind of pinch me a my rash, kind of St. Paddy's Day vibes. Yeah.

And the first floor smelled like shit. And the second floor smelled like dust. Now, I have a surgery traditional school. It got torn down. I feel like I'm there. Nobody warned it. Oh, it was there. Okay.

Torn the fact that I think that they still have another, they have another building now. But it's sort of like, as you might imagine, given that Heather still loves the co-founder, it's sort of like, we're going to use public funding to run this school in the way that we think it is more appropriate. And we expect that other parents might agree. Other parents did agree because we went to a traditional schoolman, as much as I want to share on it.

Yeah. In 1995, Heather gets a book ban because it depicts Wicca in a positive light. Ah. The band is later overturned by the school board following public pressure. Oh, okay. Heather's other roles in the movement, parentheses pejorative. The other movement. Lowercase and movement. The other movement. Included president of organizations like Alliance for Life, the Serial Delta Pro Life Association, Pro Life Society of BC, as well as prominent positions in other pro-life and conservative lobby groups, hospital politics, trade politics, truly a famine everybody's pie, whether we want it there or not. Heather uses her role as the newly appointed chair of the Serial School Board to act as a culture

warrior for the types of abstinence-y Bible-ly causes you would expect. We're banning planned parenthood from classrooms, we're taking condom machines at a bathroom. Yeah. She has plenty of support on the board, including Mary Polack, her hand-picked protege, whom she got elected on a slate alongside her, and outgoing chair Robert Pickering,

whom journalist David Beers writing for the tie in 2004 characterizes as an activist crusader against notion that homosexuality might be normal acceptable or must be tolerated. In that same article, Beers mentions that still well told him in 1997, so the time that the book challenge begins, that her own preferred policy around sexuality in schools was don't ask, don't tell.

Oh, that sounds quite familiar. It rings a distant bell. Yeah. Unless people are told about a sexual preference, still all reasoned, people don't know or care. Kids are kids. They get teased about sticky-outy years and anything else different.

So you try and teach them to be kind to everyone. Even so, I don't see people going out of their way to be mean, and she means like to be in lesbian students. Okay. Around that time, their own school board had just surveyed more than 14,000 study students. In grades eight to 12, only to find that 30% of them identified homophobia

as a serious safety concern in school. Okay. These are the people deciding what reading materials should be acceptable to teach baby Taylor Bassa. Ah! I love cutie. I love cutie who doesn't know he's gay because there's no examples presented to him

that such a thing exists. Ooh. I got really angry researching this story. I didn't expect it. I could, yeah. Much in the same way that I had somehow lost that James was the guy. I had somehow also lost that I was in elementary school

when this story took place. So I'm the victim, it's me. You just straight out. No, totally. I had never made the connection that these were the policies that were affecting me because I grew up in an elementary school, as I'm sure many of us did who were like of a certain age, right?

Because like, gay shit in schools is pretty recent. To the point where like, I as a teenager was doing it because I saw that gap, right? Yeah. With the help of like, I as a teenager was doing it because I saw that gap, right? Yeah. With the help of community, which was a great local organization, they did this Pride Speak program and I was one of the speakers. Oh, that's right. Oh, I remember.

Yeah, I remember you doing that. I was still doing it when we met. Yeah. I wonder if maybe I might not have disliked myself so much or been so suspicious of my own sexuality or so eager to hide certain things about myself or so eager to build certain walls around myself. Yeah. If maybe there were like examples provided me or education or resources provided me. Yeah. Soft squishy welcoming examples too. Yeah. A proage appropriate for little Q detail or basketball? Exactly.

And even then, like, I still don't think I would've known I was gay, because that's not something I figured out till later on. But I would've, at the very least, known to be more accepting and respectful of those people. And I wouldn't have had that like, internalized homophobia to beat when you go to school in, it's not a small town. It's like a suburb of about 400,000.

Right. It's a suburb. Yeah. When you go to school in it's not a small town. It's like a suburb of about 400,000 Right. It's a suburb. Yeah. When you go to school in a place like that It's I guess it's easy to kind of grow up internalizing that people are different or bad or weird or freaks or whatever Mm-hmm, and I yeah, maybe wouldn't have felt that way about myself Yeah, and others if I had better education Totally and that feels like the school of points responsibility. Yeah well, and also so rad what James was doing too if I had better education. Totally. And that feels like the school of points responsibility. Yeah. Well, and also, so rad what James was doing too. It's, you know, like, it's, it's, how many pages?

Like 25, like, yeah, this is a 32-page book. Right. Yeah, yeah. These are just small little stories, but they make a really big difference. They make a huge difference. Especially for, like, that kid in his class who needed a way to talk about having two moms, but it wasn't present in the material.

Right. Or, you know, he could have, that student could have had this book at home and understood at home, but to have it in a social context. It normalizes it. Among his peers, exactly. And then you see your peers' reactions and you feed off of that, everything. Yeah, exactly, but like that's- No small feat, right? That's exactly what the school board didn't want was the normalization of that, everything. Yeah, exactly, but like, no small feet, right?

That's exactly what the school board didn't want was the normalization of it, right? Because that's the fear. Yeah. You say, you'll, may I say something? Maybe vulnerable to use. I mean, you have a right here. I've never vulnerable on the podcast.

Yeah, dude. It made me really mad to hear the discussions of whether homosexuality was moral, coming from people who were doing things that I wouldn't do to my worst enemy. And it frustrates me. Here's me getting real controversial. Heather's still well, a staunch Roman Catholic. How dare you impl... Like, the calls coming from inside the parish, sweetheart, if you're gonna, if you're gonna start slinging around, these people are bad for the kids' accusations. Very good point. With no disrespect

met to any person of any faith listening to this. Objectively, you are statistically thousands of times more likely to get wrongly touched by a priest than you are by a gay teacher. And it frustrates me, I guess, to find out that there really were that, were there that many people who think like, oh, no matter what shitty old relationship I have, no matter how badly I treat that person or how neglectful I am of the kids or whatever it is, my relationship is de facto more moral and correct than anything Taylor Vaso does. That hurts. Well, yeah. And then to trot it out as being ethical, at all ethical, but not even just a motor come of ethics.

Like the, you know, like, bull work of it, the highest pinnacle is just like sex effecting certainly weirdly i'm not un empathetic to the internal struggle of the religious doomsday person if you're trying to keep yourself out of hell if you're trying to keep your kids out of hell yeah that's powerful shit i also have not been provided, I guess, an explanation of why being with people of the same sex is so sinful that doesn't rely upon stereotypes that I know for a fact to be untrue, that doesn't rely upon the book of Leviticus, which also advises against many other things that I know good and god damn well, how they're still well was doing.

Yeah. Mixing fabrics, that, you know, like, no, but for real. It's all in the same fucking book. Or add to that like pseudo-scientific fact of this evidence ball, like that's, yeah, all of it, all of it. So I'm not unsympathetic to people who are like, no, my understanding of religion

is that I need to take over the entire country and run it in this particular image. But my empathy, I guess, stops where their empathy for me stops a little bit. And I think that's a good boundary to have. Yeah. Yeah, I'm trying to be better with my boundary. Did you ever take it personally? In terms of personal harassment or taking things personally, there were only two times when it got me down.

One was in 2000. I criticized the school trustees in the newspaper, which is not allowed. And there was a student who had jumped off a bridge into the Fraser River and committed suicide. And in his suicide note, he said that he was the subject of homophobic harassment, and that's why he had to kill himself. So I criticized the school trustees in the media in the newspaper saying that they're in action on LGBTQ issues. And the stance they were taking contributed to his death. As a result of that, they went after me and I was suspended from teaching for two months. That got me a little bit down for about two weeks and then I realized

This is actually them going after me because they were publicly embarrassed by me and because they were publicly embarrassed by me and it's not about me. Yeah, I made a mistake like the lawyers for the series school board said, oh James, bad boy. I was a bit down for that for a couple of weeks and then we had a party at home. We wrote a play about the fundamentals Christian trustees and all the things that have done over the years. And we performed it in our home. There were no pictures. We dressed up as these pictures. And we had a party called Burn Surrey Burn Disco Inferno. It was hugely cathartic.

It shifted my brain from feeling down to feeling re-ambigurated and thinking, okay, this suspended me for two months. Big deal. They didn't kill me. They think they've stopped me from being an advocate. Yes, they might have stopped me from writing a letter into the papers, but I can still be an advocate. So they slowed me down, but they didn't stop. The other time where

something personally happened to me which got me down was when the books were being reviewed by the school trustees, it went through school board meetings, it was very public. And so I attended all those school board meetings and I sat beside reporters and one reporter she covered the story for seven years, which is unusual. Usually they have reporters who change over the years. And I walked into a school board meeting and she says, oh, James, do you know what they're saying about you now? I'm like, what?

She says, they're saying that you changed your name. They found out that you've changed your last name from Crocs to Chamberlain. And they're saying that you changed your last name because you were a pedophile. And you were trying to hide that that so I was upset about that but because I was in the public eye you cannot show your emotion like your anger or upset you have to be a professional 24-7 you're always being watched and so I was home at home and I

was kind of down in the dumps. And I'm a very optimistic, cheerful person by nature. And my husband really worked. And he's like, oh my God, something's happening to you. Like, I think you're depressed. And I'm like, I'm not depressed. I'm never depressed. What are you talking about? And so we talked that through.

And like we had a long talk, a few talks through that process. And I just realized it was just a really mean spirited homophobic attack on me by people that didn't know me as a person. And they were just desperate to stop anything on LGBTQ issues from being in the school system and hence they would stoop to any level. And so when I was able to rationalize that and go, okay, they are going to do terrible things to me, but it's actually all about them. It's not about me.

Then, I was okay with that. I did get a death threat a couple of times, and I just unleashed my phone number. And when, okay, I'm driving into Surrey every day. I got a hateous, not a family value bumper sticker. I stuck it on my car. I drove into Surrey every day. And I thought, these haters can just read my bumper sticker and they can deal with it.

As you might expect, the school board meets and they can deal with it. I meet him with great consternation on April 10th, they attempt to unilaterally ban all materials mentioning homosexuality from serial elementary schools. This gets quashed. So on April 24th, 1997, a meeting occurs that is described in court documents as a heated debate. While this is a public meeting, James expressed to me that he felt that the decision had already been made behind closed doors. Yeah. At this meeting, there are three presentations,

all in support of the books. Okay. One from the BC. The three. The three books. One from the BC Civil Liberties Association, one from Gail BC, Gain, and Lesbian Educators BC of which James is part. Yeah. And one from the parents of the kindergarten class in which James had read the books. Oh! Who presented a petition in support that had been signed by the parents of 17 of the 20 children. Oh, wow. I'm being notes to James, the parents from the class had privately passed the books around

amongst themselves and found no issues with it. So he's like total, yeah, uh, there is your argument against, well, the parents deserve, the parents are fine. You know, you're on the wrong side when you're on the auntie book side. And your school district. Yes. But it's so quiet. It's like the, it's like the most common infamous school board fight.

There is as a band book, right? No, it's true. It's expanding and like in the school districts around me. Yeah, for sure. Katie, a independent school district, I think, has one of the highest number of band books in the the in the US. Get it's good. I'm so like don't ever trust anybody who doesn't want you to learn. Yeah. What are they afraid you're gonna learn? Put that on a bumper sticker.

The tone of the meeting was pretty heated. There were parents who were really wanting the books approved. Parents from my classroom and others. There were people who were there who I don't know whether they were parents or not. They had picket signs and antigay slogans on them, yelling and screaming. There were people yelling and screaming at each other and seated gallery area of the meeting. And so it was pretty hostile. I was in the front row with the three books and I just sat silently holding the three books up.

I didn't say a word because there was nothing you could say. And then the school trustees voted against the use of books. and then the school trustees voted against the use of books. The two trustees that wanted the books said that they had read the books to their grandchildren without the books were great. The fundamentalist Christian trustees said that the books were against family values, particularly people who would have religious values that were opposed to homosexuality.

They said said they were age inappropriate. This topic should not be discussed with young learners in any way, shape or form. They said that LGBTQ issues, if they should be discussed at all, could only be discussed with 15 or 16-year-olds up. And so they banned the use of the books and they also banned the publication Game Lesbian educators had produced and was in Surrey schools in every school in British Columbia for two years and that was called Counseling Lesbian Gayeos. It was a professional resource for counselors on how to support career youth. So they banned that. Even though it was a professional resource, it wasn't produced in classrooms. So they banned anything from gay and lesbian educators at

BC that was for schools and the three folks. And then the room just erupted. It was almost pandemonium. They did have security. I waited until every person had left. I was the last person to leave, even all the politicians that left. And I asked one of the security guards to walk me to my car, because I was a bit nervous that night, in particular, about the personal threat towards me. And I even looked under my car to see if it was a bomb.

You're laughing. You're laughing but that's very scary. And not an unrealistic fear, I guess, given the circumstances, maybe not a bomb specifically, but that you might be a target of somebody else's violence. How do you get to a place where you're laughing? And over, remember when I thought there was a bomb under the car? Ha ha ha. How do you get to that place?

I don't know. I have been through so much over the decades. I mean, from grade three onwards, right? I'm 60 years old now, right? So that's a lot of years of dealing with silly shit. But I also had many, many, many years of fantastic support. I had it quite a varied career. I was out the entire time. I had tons of support. So how do I laugh about that incident? Maybe because of the degree of ridiculousness there was to it. Because I wasn't that big a threat to the school district. They painted me as a massive threat. Like I had thousands and thousands of supporters behind me. They thought that, you know, the sky would fall.

And, you know, it didn't. So in the end of the six trustees present for vote to ban the books. Okay. Two vote in favor of the books. The ban also saw the removal of LGBT materials from elementary schools in Surrey, including resources for educators.

So anything gay has to go now. I'm in grade two or three. Oh, poor day. You're so cute too. Poor A.B. daily. I know you have like a little like striped, like multi colored striped shirt. We love a striped shirt. It just felt like a very 90s vibe.

We love a striped shirt. We love a striped shirt. I like to wear like things 90s vibe. Yeah, we love a striped shirt. I like to wear like a Kanox sweater to like a printed sweater. It was very, oh that's right. A printed sweater like sweatpants set. Mm, yeah. Ooh, spicy.

And we begun this. At this point, another educator, Marie Warren, encourages James to file a lawsuit against the Serious School District. The case in so many words is that these are important teaching tools and promoting diversity and tolerance, and that the school board has aired by favoring specific religious concerns over its broader mandate of maintaining a safe and tolerant school environment. Yeah.

James agrees. Uh-huh. And he begins to gather other plaintiffs. The appellants include James, Marie Warren, Diane Wilcott, who's a parent from his classroom, Blaine Cook, who's a student from his classroom, Blaine Cook, who's a student, and Rosmond Elwyn, who is one of the authors of Ash's Mums. Here, Ros.

Stay sweet. So basically the order of things is the BC Supreme Court takes James in the appellant side, then the Court of Appeals overturns that. So we're just kind of like fighting our way up ping ping ponging through the BC and the money for us and and doing all the interviews, the media is really really into it and and like attempting to remain poised because you're like a fucking gay kindergarten teacher in the

90s. You've got to say everything, guys, stay on the message, baby. Yeah. Don't go off the message, stay on the message. Uh-huh, get your hair cut every three weeks. Yeah, by the time we get to the big stage, we are hundreds of thousands of dollars into the fight and much ink has been spilled as the media gobbles up what James characterizes as a gay David versus Goliath story. Ooh. Hot.

Yeah, I was gonna say. Big man, little man, I fuck with that. Um. Um, according to James, this is the first time the Supreme Court of Canada who can choose the cases that they see. Okay. Yeah. Ops to try anything to do with LGBTQ rights in public education.

Oh, what's not called when it's like a, thank you. Len Mark. President. Len Mark. President. Landmark. Iconic. Unforgettable.

And as part of the plaintiff's case, lawyer, Jorvey, opts to read all of the justices, one dad, two dads, red dad, blue dads, just as I. Just as I read it to you all. I've written, the acronym here is OD2D, RADBD. It's a very, very, very simple. Rolls off the tongue. I love that Star Wars vibe.

So you're getting, you've gotten like, what they got in C2 in your time. Do your time. You got, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, see the doubts? Yeah, yeah, yeah. On December 20th, 2002, the court's decision finally comes back. Whoa. The 7-2 majority opinion, authored by Chief Justice Beverly McLaughlin. She's from BC, you know. Hey! Dictates that while the school board was reasonable in its concerns about the,

okay, it used different words. Okay. It acted in violation of its obligation to secularism and non-sectarianism. the gay act they'd use different words. It acted in violation of its obligation to secularism and non-sectarianism, while the decision is authored by, just, yeah, get, dance it out, baby. Let's get some shoulder shakes on that. Well, the decision is authored by Justice McLaughlin

is in my opinion quite conservative in the language it uses in terms of the moral implications of being gay. Is it right or wrong to be gay? Who among us can say? Right. They say that, I said that. It's right. That's the point. It's very right. Yeah. It ultimately holds that students are increasingly likely to encounter same-sex parents or have same-sex parents themselves.

Or be. They don't acknowledge that back then. This is still a grown-up aberration. I asked James about that actually. Oh really? Yeah, because I was like, I noticed that at no point, does it ever kind of acknowledge that the kids themselves could be gay in the way that like- Especially because, as you say, like, baby to their best always, one of those.

Baby James Shiverl. Yeah, yeah, yeah, push cross-alps also in the story time rug. We didn't want it because then you open the spectra of why are the kids gay because you read them the book. So, they didn't want to fuck with that at all. So they really focused their messaging on like, students deserve safe spaces. This is an issue that affects everybody,

not just queer students or students with queer parents, sorry. And the secularism, it seems, that's not a component. Yeah. Just as McLaughlin adds, the only additional message of the materials appears to be the message of tolerance. Tolerance is always age appropriate.

That's a good clip. That is good. I mean, we can do more than tolerance. But it is. James had said the same. He was like I'm not that fond of that word, but we were happy with it at the time. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Two seven, you know, majority, I'll take it. It was December 20th, 2002. I did not sleep for about a week in advance. I was super nervous. When the ruling came out 7-2, that was like shocking because normally the Supreme Court

of Canada at that time was not politically divided the way they are now to some degree. And so the rulings, they were often like 5 to 4 on all sorts of different issues. So to get a 7 to 2 ruling was surprising on any topic. And on this topic, because it had never gone through anything to do with LGBTQ issues and public education had never gone to the Supreme Court of Canada. In the history of the Supreme Court of Canada, it was a pretty anxiety provoking time for when that ruling came down. I was pretty politically astute with the media though, and so when I saw the ruling, we had a press conference lined up for that day.

I had permission from my school district to be at press conference, and it was in the morning, and I went back and I taught that afternoon. I was in my classroom that afternoon. When I saw the ruling that we had won, then sound bite I knew the media would pick up was that this is the best Christmas present ever for children and families in Surrey and all across the Canada. And it absolutely was because it set the legal precedent for the future for public education in Canada on this topic.

Being a teacher is hard. Maybe. Being an elementary school teacher. Very hard. Very kindergarten. Any kind of teacher, yeah. Extremely hard. And then to take on this as well.

You're gay, you're in a religious school district, you're having to justify yourself repeatedly against bigots. Yeah. And not take that to heart because you need to appear professional. Right. You're doing a series of escalating cases that all seem to have quite different results from one another.

And you're thinking of like all the baby Taylor Bassos who you are educating. Yeah. Like that is such a huge, someone's got to think of the babies. He did. And that's the thing is that like I really respect. That's like he was really unwavering to me in his thing that like this wasn't to any kind of personal quest on his own behalf.

He was really fashionable. He's like, I feel that ethically I need to prepare kids to be tolerant, empathetic kind. Accepting. Accepting members of community, right? We need to leave things better than we found them. And that's like that's sort of where I don't get like the sort of conservative, hyper conservative educational thing of like we need to make sure kids

are always learning the exact same information that we did fucking 100 years ago when we didn't know. Yeah. Fucking how to wipe our ass. Really? Like I don't get it. I don't get it. I don't get it not wanting your kids to know absolutely

everything that could give them an advantage or make them a better person. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Why in the world would you ban a book? So while the victory is exciting, James notes that it takes a while before the changes play out meaningfully in the school culture. The board is able to contrive new reasons to get the three books banned.

They're expensive. They're not waterproof. Yes, they are. They're very much so tested and proven. No, but guess they are. They're very much so. They're very, very waterproof. No, it's just testing. We just do series. So Asha's mom gets banned for typos.

One dad, two dad, brown dad, blue dads. We're making fun of dads of different colors. And then, I had a bit of a weird vibe there. I don't think it'd fly now, but you know what? You know, I don't care. You know, what's wrong with brown dads, Josie? You know, like brown dads? I love a brown dad.

Love all the dads. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? We were just talking about, would you date a dad? We were just talking about when you date a dad. Answer? Yeah. Um.

So, and then, uh, Belinda's bouquet because it mentions dieting and we can't, you know, but a new committee is assembled to approve potential replacement books that include same sex families and on that committee is James Chamberlain who notes that it's very ironic that they suddenly want his input on reading materials. Well, the three books have been symbolically slain. The superintendent doesn't want any more smoke on the subject and the replacement books are quietly approved. Oh, what happens next? Heather still well keeps on keeping on wheeling and dealing and winning re-election to the Surrey School Board. Among her latter era

triumphs is making it so that if you show Al Gore's an inconvenient truth in series schools, you have to show a documentary with alternative viewpoints on climate change. I remember that alternative viewpoint, that I, yeah. Yeah, that was around the time that I was like middle school high school, too. It's like, well, if you're gonna say that climate change is true, you also have to say that it's false.

You need to show the convenient truth, James. We gotta have bounds on both sides. These inconvenient truths. Don't show what has to do with the truth, too. We gotta have balance on both sides. These inconvenient truths. Don't you have to do with the Bible either. That just feels like a culture warring thing, right? Oh, no, no. Well, there's this is another thing, but the book of Revelation is all about

like explosion, gloom and doom, right? And the world ends. So in like a very traditional Christian understanding of environmentalism, it's all gonna burn down anywhere so who cares So maybe that's coming in I don't know in 2008 Heather still a resigns from the school board after being diagnosed with breast cancer She dies in 2010 and receives many effusive Obituaries from the far-right conservative community whose values she had championed

Yeah, which was a really interesting moment I guess of cognitive dissonance for me reading that because I don't deny anybody the right to afforting obituary. I think that's nice. Everyone deserves one. Everyone deserves kind words to be said upon them, upon their passing. Yeah.

But it was, I guess, so it odds to read, she always had kindness for everybody and she always said, when I'm able to try to reconcile that. I read an article or it was like a thesis, it was somebody's thesis about how Christian Heritage party members of Canada perceive themselves and perceive their own doctrine.

And like, to a one, even though they all felt similar things to what I've described in this story already, they all said they weren't homophobic, they all said they had no problem with gay people. And so it's one of those things of like, what do I believe? Like, you speak of this kindness, you speak of this, like love this inner, not the sin.

But I see the things that you're doing and I see how they made my life worse as a child who directly affected you. Yeah, as a child in your charge, as a child whose education you were supposed to be, because of your own personal values, Yeah, as a child in your charge, as a child whose education you were supposed to be like, because of your own personal values, I got a worse education and so did the people around me.

So that's tough. Yeah, that's really tough. Her protege, Mary Polak, climbs to even greater heights. She serves as a provincial MLA for the riding of Langley for 15 years. Too long. Most recently in 2017, she was named Minister of Health by Premier Christy Clark.

Remember her? Well, Crunchy Clark, I think Mary Polak is since no longer an MLA. She might be listening to this right now. James Chamberlain ends up teaching here and everywhere. Universities, teachers, organizations, he moves to the Vancouver School District and becomes a vice principal and then a principal. Oh, he's approving the reading lists now. He's my pal.

Yeah, I didn't mean that. No, I got it. Okay. Listen, he's heard all the pal jokes. It's right, guys. And I'm sure you would also identify as your pal. He uses his profile as a public figure to influence school districts in a positive direction for LGBTQ plus students. And he receives an honorary doctorate from his good works

from the University of Fraser Valley in 2021. Although he is now retired, he still gets recognized by old students from time to time. He currently lives in Nino on Vancouver Island with his husband, Jean Marie, who he married on the family farm. They've been, that was beautiful. I bet they have been together 35 years. James says the secret is communication.

Now that I retired the first couple years, I was kind of stuck in COVID land, so I couldn't be an activist, and it felt like I was not contributing anymore, and I didn't want to feel like a non-contributing person. So I joined a board of an organization called Roar, which stands for Reaching Out Assisting Refugees and we bring LGBTQ plus people in to Nanaimo here from Africa and other countries in the Middle East. We just brought a couple in from Uganda via Kenya. They've been here for three months and they're absolutely thriving. They're a young gay couple, 22 and 26 years old. They lived in a refugee camp for four

years in Kenya. They were persecuted and expelled by their families and actually Uganda for their lives. They are doing really really well here. I also started a philanthropic organization one year ago. It's called Island Queers and Allides Who Care Society and we support 2SLGB2QIA plus groups, organizations, projects to start, grow, or thrive on Vancouver Island and the smaller Gulf Islands. And we did that partially because the people on that board, some of them are my dear friends that started with me in Gailas, Ben Educators in 1990. What? We're all retired. We all have time on our hands and energy and we have given away $15,000 in our first year with five different groups.

Anybody in British Columbia can join that organization, our website is islandqueers.ca. And we mentioned allies in our name and in what we do on purpose because allies helped us in public education. Over those three decades without allies society would not have changed. Allies are super important to us and they always will be. I recently joined a kickball team, but not as a player. I'm a gay cheerleader. I thought I always wanted to be a cheerleader in school, but it wasn't an option. So I go to their games and I cheer from the side and I take pom-poms and they're super excited to have me there.

The other teams are like, who's he? And I'm like, here I am, the gay cheerleader. Right now in a lot of places in the world, shit is getting pretty scary, for LGBT-cubeless people. Not that far away. Not that far away. Not that far away. Trans people especially are being targeted

left, right, and center. Just for trying to exist. Drag queen story hours are being protested by fully fucking grown adults so I guess I've never seen Mrs. Doubtfire. Yes. I forget that I write jokes in and then I tell them and people laugh.

I'm like, oh yeah, that was a joke. In Waterloo, I do just stab three people at a university gender studies class. Oh. In BC right now, the hot button issue is Soji123. Sands for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity123. It's a teaching resource, quoting the ARC Foundation who developed the resource. Soji123 is a set of tools and resources

to help create safer and more inclusive schools for students with all sexual orientations and gender identities. They include policies and procedures, inclusive learning environments, age appropriate teaching resources that are aligned to BC's K to 12 curriculum to help educators create a school environment

where students feel safe, accepted respect and welcome. Is that available and accessible to the public? I think it's like four teachers. I think it's like a behind-the-scenes. Specifically, but it's being misconstrued as this like, you gotta go to the obligatory transgender pro now class now. So this resource has become a lightning rod and nearby conservative school districts like Chilowac

where board candidates have misconstrued it in the usual ways to create moral panics. Yeah. Very reflective of kind of the story I just told you. Yeah, yeah. This is being forced on people rather than like, no, it's a tool for the world. It's a tool for teachers who are like,

my student wants to be called they now. What do I do, right? Yeah, yeah. Or my student asked me, why do some people want to be called they and I want to give them a response? Or I use the pronouns they, and I'm not my student, so understand that.

Exactly. The difficult part of this sort of activism is that to some degree, we undertake it with the knowledge that the equal society we seek may not be achieved in our lifetimes. Even your friend with the language project, it was the same thing. You got really, really, really far, but his children kind of picked up the ball and ran it to the end, right? Yeah. But at the very least, you can take your flowers as people give them to you. So thank you James Chamberlain for being such a giving interview subject and thank you for having my back in the late 90s, really 2000s.

What motivated me to become a teacher was to make school better for kids. To make it better than it was for me, I became a teacher in an unconventional way because I hated school. And when I graduated from grade 12, I thought that's the last place I ever wanna be is in a school again. When I was a faculty associate teaching student teachers, I had to travel around between five different school

districts and I had to watch them teach in their classrooms. So I would go into high schools and I would watch these teachers teach and I was terrified because I was tortured so much in high school. I was terrified to walk down the hall as an adult in my 40s, right? But I couldn't show it on my face. And I gained confidence again personally to see that kids and teens are generally inherently good. Just because I had a bad experience in school doesn't mean that those are horrible places. It just means that they are places where education is needed. Just recently, I was invited to a school in Surrey, L.A. Matheson Secondary,

and they were having a Pride Week. And their whole school, the absolute whole school was covered with pride stuff. They had a queer artist display outside the art room. They had a display of trans and non-binary people from around the world from another classroom. I was asked to speak in their law 12 and social justice classes with one of our Ugandan newcomers and the students were mesmerized, particularly by Paul's story, but also a little bit by mine and then an old guy, he's a young guy. And that school is just light years ahead of anything I ever could have imagined. There's queer kids there that are feeling good,

there are openly queer teachers there. There's a number of them on staff. They had a huge banner in the entrance of this school that said queer rights are human rights. A massive banner. So change is absolutely possible. We are making great strides and it is so joyful to see these kind of changes.

is so joyful to see these kind of changes. What is it like to be the main character of a story like this? It's kind of like being in a classroom storybook. It's kind of like being in a fractured fairy tale. It's like a fairy tale with a very unexpected and non-traditional ending. I kind of felt like my life was traversing that kind of a path in real life and some people said to me, oh my god James, you need to write a children's book about this and I actually did draft it many years ago. I still have it. I was thinking maybe on the 25th anniversary of the corp case if I have time on my hands,

I might work with an author to produce the book. I want it to be children's book for kindergarten degree three. Thanks for listening. If you want more infamy, we've got plenty more episodes at bittersweetinthony.com. Or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you want to support the podcast, shoot us a few bucks via our coffee account. And KO-FIN-F-I-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D- would dig it. Stay sweet. Before we go any further, I know you were all at home giving a standing ovation of the legendary James Chamberlain. If you can do nothing else to support this fucking angel on earth who fought for us all, you should check out the websites for his incredibly worthy causes, roar reaching out assisting refugees.

That is at roarrefugees.com. And you can also check out Islandqueers and allies who care at islandqueers.ca. If you're interested in hearing the full version of my interview with James, you can find that for free at our coffee account. That's KO-FIN-FI.com slash better suite in for me. You'll also find for free me doing two readings of the book Ashes Mums by Rosmindellen and Michelle Paul's.

One of them will be nice and clean for your kids. If you want to put your kids to bed with a little lesbian positive literature from the 90s, I've got you covered. And if you want to hear me just ripin' the shit out of the kids in this book, I've got you covered, and if you want to hear me just rip in the shit out of the kids in this book, I got you covered too. Donations are always welcome, but never required, better sweetened for me is free. If you're thinking about moving some money, maybe consider donating to Roar or Island Queers and Allies who care instead. The sources that I used for this week's mint mess were the Roussanech Screwboard website. I looked at BCNollegs.ca

episode 149 typewriter from their series 150 Stories that shaped BC and I looked at a YouTube series called Finding Our Talks in Chowthon published April 10, 2019, posted by the Russanic Leadership Council. My sources for this episode were the 2002 Supreme Court of Canada decision for Chamberlain versus Surrey School of the Strict No. 36. The silence on sex candidate by David Beers for the Thai Youth September 10th, 2004. Book, Banting and Surrey, what happened

by James Chamberlain for EGAL and the history of the Surrey School Board for EGAL. Those are written in 2005 and 2009 respectively, I believe. UFV Honorary Degree 2021 Chamberlain honored for advocacy for LGBTQ plus rights and school system by Ann Russell for UFV today June 6, 2001. Belia AD McNeese 2015 Vises for Wilford Morrie University Canadian Christian Nationalism The Religiosity and Politics of the Christian heritage party of Canada. Heather Stillwell, former Surrey School Board Chair, dies of cancer by Douglas Todd for the Vancouver Senate December 6, 2010.

Heather Stillwell from ProLife, Pioneer and Leader to Public School Trustee, the Intermin 2006, and Heather Stillwell Culture Warrior and pro-life hero in the internment 2010. Christians, censorship and society by M. Randeveld and the former perspective in 1996 access via the Christian library and I met multiple iterations of the charter of the Christian heritage party Canada. My information on SOG123 came from what really is the SOG123 Resource in British Columbia Schools in the Cholect Progress by Paul Henderson in November 22nd, 2022, and I read One Dad, Two Dads, Brown Dad, Blue Dads by Johnny Balant, with those stations my melody is Syracchi. My stats on BC came from Welcome BC and Tripvisor. Clips from the intro came from videos hosted on YouTube by Neil Parsec, Andre Tartath,

Global News, Hall, 1185, Brainwave Entertainment HQ,, and relaxing day, as well as the documentary The Five Cent More Written, directed by Philip Daniels, and the First Nations Language Resource First Voice System. The audio recording in this episode was done by Alexey Johnson, a 604 podcast network, huge thanks to the network of which we are, as always, a proud part. Thank you to Jonathan Mountain for your three delicious dollars that make all of this possible. The music in the background, James Chamberlain, interview segments is inspiring, cinematic, ambient, biorelexic, histone, and k-lexic music on Pixivec.

Our interstitial music is by Mitchell Collins, the sign you're currently listening to is Teescape by Brian Steel. We'll see you next Sunday from the road with more excellent PC stories on BetterSweetsX04. RIP, Shuha D'Satokat, aka Shenato Connor, devastating. I dedicate my cussing of the Catholic Church in this episode to you. Rest well, Queen. Stay sweet to all you peeps who are listening out there.

Keep listening to every episode. Even better than I had hoped. Thank you, James. Hahaha.