On Monday, June 2, Surrey BC United MLA Elenore Sturko announced her defection to the rival BC Conservative party, shortly after BC United MLA and caucus chair Lorne Doerkson made a similar transition. With the BC Conservatives currently outpolling BC United—the previously dominant ‘right-wing’ party in the province, and the party of former BC Premier Christy Clark—and merger discussions now abandoned, speculation about further defections within the party has intensified.
BC Conservatives education policies
However, what does this newly prominent BC Conservative party, previously unheard of before this election season, actually advocate for? They recently unveiled their “Common Sense Plan for BC,” echoing the rhetoric of their federal counterpart, Pierre Poilievre, who similarly touts a “common sense” approach. This strategy is a clear example of the appeal to nature fallacy, as easily recognized by anyone trained in critical thinking.
The illogical nature of many of the BC Conservative’s proposals is evident throughout their platform. The most glaring contradiction in their platform lies in their prospective educational policies. In a single paragraph, they advocate for both the “removal of ideology from the classroom” and the “protection of free speech on campus.” These aims are fundamentally incompatible, as enforcing an ideology-free environment inherently limits the breadth of discourse necessary for genuine free speech. This contradictory stance reveals a profound misunderstanding of the principles underlying both educational freedom and ideological neutrality.
The most explicitly dangerous of these education policies is the BC Tories’ “post-secondary funding re-allocation” plan. As a PhD scholar in the social sciences, currently studying out of province but having completed my undergraduate degree at the University of Victoria, this proposal is particularly concerning. The BC Conservatives state that “government funding within post-secondary institutions will be re-allocated to promote and incentivize training in essential fields.” Although the policy’s phraseology appears expansionary, claiming to promote job growth in essential fields, it is fundamentally austerity-driven. By redirecting limited funds—which would already be further constrained by their austerity-marked fiscal policies—this approach necessarily strips funding from disciplines deemed non-essential. This reallocation undermines the broader educational landscape, sacrificing the richness and diversity of academic inquiry for a narrowly defined set of priorities.
Defunding of humanities and social sciences
The consequences of this proposed scholasticide—the defunding of humanities and social sciences—are not merely an unfortunate byproduct of these policies. Rather, as with all education-suppressing political projects in history, it is a deliberate attempt to stifle political criticism. The humanities and social sciences educate individuals on parliamentary structures, how to critically question the state, and how to think critically in ways distinct from STEM disciplines. To diminish or eliminate these fields is a deliberate epistemological power grab, creating an educational environment where the BC Tories can utilise rhetorical appeals to notions like “commonsensicality” without critique from those trained to be critical.
To counter the BC Conservative’s messaging, perhaps the best argument arises directly from Karl Marx—whom John Rustad—the current BC Conservative leader—and his allies seek to further censor, not through engagement, but by uncritically making his name taboo and restricting funding to his fields of prominence. In his famous Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx invites us to consider what makes us human—what he calls our ‘species being.’ He compares humans to other labouring animals, such as beavers and bees, who also shape the world around them. However, unlike us, every beaver dam and every bee hive is comparable, built in accordance with millions of years of natural selection to maximise survival. In contrast, every house on a street looks different because we have the capacity to transcend biological aptness, to labour according to our rationality and creativity.
A BC Conservative victory, would mean prioritizing certain academic vocations over others based on the logic of profitability. It would allow our labour to be dictated by something external to us, much like beavers and bees, rather than by our rationality. It concedes that our own destinies, including what is feasible for us to study—assuming we lack the funds to privately finance studies in the humanities—should be dictated by John Rustad and his team of cronies.
Education not scholasticide
This is not to disparage STEM in any capacity; rather, it is to assert that our vocations should be guided by ourselves and by the principle of freedom—positive freedom, which is the freedom to act and to pursue our talents. This stands in contrast to the ‘negative freedom’ purportedly valued by the BC Tories. Positive freedom entails the ability to follow our passions and talents free from fiscal coercion dictated by the colonial logics of capital—colonial in the sense that they relegate Indigenous ‘non-profitable’ knowledges to the realm of ‘folklore’ and semantically bind Western knowledges to ideas of ’empiricism.’ It means being free from the fiscal coercion imposed by an administration that seeks to keep us uneducated in any field that could meaningfully critique their policies.
Indeed, knowledge is power, but some forms of knowledge wield more power than others, not because they are inherently more ‘truthful,’ but because they are simply more profitable. The structural devaluation of the humanities and social sciences has been driven by this principle of profitability, and now the BC Conservatives are seeking to put the final nail in the coffin through their blatant pursuit of scholasticide with the dangers of which cannot be overstated.
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