Four trustees of a controversy-mired western Manitoba school board met on Monday and voted to ban all but the Canadian, Manitoban and school flags, right after butting heads with a panel the province appointed to help guide them in their roles.
The Mountain View School Division board has nine seats on its board, so the four trustees present at Monday’s meeting weren’t enough to achieve the quorum required under the Public Schools Act — but they went ahead with a school boarding meeting anyway.
The province ordered a governance review of the school board in April, after trustee Paul Coffey gave a board meeting presentation in which he said residential schools started as a good thing, questioned the extent of abuse at the schools and called the term “white privilege” racist.
There are some linked articles that provided more information. The superintendent was fired days before a pride parade that was promoted by the division and the MMF. There are a number of conflicting claims surrounding his dismissal, which will probably get ironed out in court. The usual reason for banning flags is the suppress the promotion of something you don’t like, otherwise taste and relevance would be sufficient. Someone needs to start finding perfectly legitimate flags to be flown that don’t meet their criteria, such as city flags, sister city flags, flags for Saskatchewan in towns near the border, etc., until the rule is made to look completely absurd or they say out loud exactly what they are bigoted against. If nothing else, it will tie them up dealing with inane topics so they don’t have as much time to do more harmful things.
My guess, based on the related articles, is that they want to ban the MMF and/or pride flags.