Institutional Harm
When harm is built into policy and procedure—not an accident, but an outcome.
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Counting crisis: data, distrust, and the false choice between safety and inclusion
Across British Columbia, the launch of Surrey DPAC’s Room Clear Tracker has ignited a storm of debate among parents, educators, and disability advocates. Some view it as a necessary step toward transparency; others fear it will reinforce stigma or justify segregation. Beneath the surface of this argument runs a deeper fracture—between those who seek safety…
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The longest deployment: sending my son to school
A reflection on maternal vigilance in a system that demands composure while inflicting harm. This essay follows a mother’s daily act of sending her autistic son into an environment that equates obedience with virtue and endurance with progress. It traces the quiet moral injury of cooperating with institutions that repeatedly harm the children they claim…
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Too afraid to see: why the BC government doesn’t track exclusion
Data is the scaffolding of democratic accountability. Without shared facts, policy becomes theatre and suffering becomes rumour. That is why regimes that fear transparency always tamper with the census, and why bureaucracies that fear criticism cling to privacy as a shield rather than as a right. When governments decline to track exclusion, they are not…
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Controversy over Room Clear Tracker
When we first shared the launch of Surrey’s Room Clear Tracker, we saw it as a potential step toward long-overdue transparency. For many families, including my own, the absence of data about classroom evacuations has preserved the illusion of safety while concealing the scale of harm. The idea that someone, finally, was counting felt like…
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A war on joy: discipline, obedience, and the disabled body
An examination of how education absorbs military and capitalist values—discipline, endurance, and efficiency—until joy becomes a threat to order. This piece argues that the rationing of joy for disabled students is both an ethical and structural failure, transforming learning into control and endurance into a false measure of worth.
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The false economies of war and schooling
A critique of austerity as a governing principle. This essay argues that Canada’s education and defence systems share a moral and strategic collapse: both confuse restraint with wisdom and endurance with strength. It exposes how underfunding education produces economic waste, social decay, and moral injury across generations.
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Record. Transcribe. Protect.
The Canary Collective’s Record. Transcribe. Protect. reminds us that advocacy depends on memory, and memory depends on record-keeping. Their piece describes how recording school meetings transforms fleeting conversation into an accountable record. Parents often leave IEP meetings with blurred recollections and verbal promises that never appear in writing, and the simple act of recording and transcribing…
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What they say when you leave the meeting
Canary Collective’s piece The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far from the Tree: What’s Said About Parents After They Leave the Room tells what often happens after parents leave a school meeting. The talk shifts away from the child and turns toward the parents. People start guessing what is “wrong” at home instead of asking what the…
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In genocide and the classroom: the routinising of distress
A meditation on how institutions train people to ignore suffering—how desensitisation, scarcity, and forced optimism erode empathy and make harm seem ordinary.
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Surrey parents launch classroom crisis tracking tool
In Surrey, British Columbia, a new parent-led initiative is bringing long-needed visibility to a silent crisis in public education: classroom evacuations when a student experiences distress. The Surrey District Parents Advisory Council (DPAC), in partnership with the Surrey Teachers’ Association and CUPE 728, has launched a tool to track these classroom clearings, documenting how often…
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The architecture of harm, the anatomy of healing
Each year when the light thins and the trees surrender their leaves, we are reminded that systems rot slowly, from the inside out, while pretending to stand tall. The fluorescent hum of classrooms carries through the shorter days, and the rhythm of school life resumes its weary repetition—meetings, promises, half-measures. Parents sit again in plastic…
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They wanted it to be our quiet shame
Lily Allen says, “No one fucks with me and gets away with it.” The line lands like a gavel. Twenty years ago, that kind of declaration would have drawn eye-rolling about bitterness or oversharing. Now it reads as equilibrium, a woman reclaiming authorship after a decade of being translated by everyone but herself.
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The Deetken problem: $335,400 to review programs they have no expertise evaluating
The Ministry paid Deetken Enterprises Inc. $335,400 across four contracts to conduct reviews of: See Ministry of Education and Child Care – Contracts over $10,000 CAD Deetken Insight (the company’s consulting arm) is a Vancouver-based management consulting firm specializing in economic modelling, business transformation, complex procurement, and labour market analysis—areas entirely unrelated to education, adolescent psychology, neurodevelopmental…
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Systemic grooming and the illusion of care
The Canary Collective has written Systemic grooming and the illusion of care, a piece that captures, with devastating precision, what many educators and parents have felt but could rarely name: the way institutional systems cultivate obedience through the slow corrosion of self-trust. It describes how loyalty becomes a leash, how “teamwork” becomes surveillance, and how…
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The cost of partial inclusion in schools
I have returned to writing after a long silence—one imposed less by choice than by survival. The move was necessary, a matter of financial gravity after years of lost income entwined with the harm my children endured within an ableist school system. Leaving our home felt like surrendering a life I had fought to sustain,…
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A primer on truth for youth
If you’d told me last year that a man would feel emboldened to stand up in the UN and call the UN special rapporteur a witch and accuse her of trying to ‘curse Israel with lies and hatred’ I would have Googled to see if it was fake news! But then with the second presidency…
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When righteousness and safety diverge
Every parent who becomes an advocate stands at the threshold between justice and protection. We enter the arena to make things better, yet the fight itself can wound the very children whose pain brought us here. There is always a moment—quiet, terrible—when the pursuit of systemic change begins to scrape against the body of a…
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Raised inside the broken home of public education
Every society tells itself that public schools are good homes for children. We picture safety, fairness, and care distributed through the hallways like sunlight. Yet affection without protection becomes a kind of gaslight, and the insistence that everyone inside means well becomes a substitute for justice. We praise the intention instead of confronting the injury.…
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Protecting the ledger over the learner: operationalising scarcity in BC School Districts
British Columbia’s public schools are mandated to provide inclusive education for all students, but they do so in a context of chronic resource scarcity. Scarcity in education means there are not enough funds, staff, skills, or services to fully meet all student needs. School districts have had to develop strategies to manage and ration what they do…
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Starving the future: how underfunding and poor education policy are functionally eugenics
From the safety of our northern vantage, it is easy to feel heartbroken and a little superior when we watch the dismantling of the American social welfare state—when we see libraries defunded, schools privatised, and healthcare withdrawn with brutal efficiency. We shake our heads at the cruelty of it, believing ourselves buffered by decency or…