LETTER

“Outraged school board” should read the law 

The Bulletin d’Aylmer report on the school boards’ reactions to Bill 21, on secularizing the pubic service, contained a serious error, April 10, page 19. Your reporter wrote, in effect, that the government is invoking the Notwithstanding Clause right at the start because it IS violating Charter Rights. My understanding is that it invokes this Clause to avoid unending challenges to the law, often made to delay a law’s imposition.  It is a way to side-step these challenges, not to permit actual violation of rights.  There’s a big difference here, and people who claim the Bill will “deprive them of their right to hold religious beliefs” will use anything to distort the very specific applications of the proposed law.  This fudging of the wording is not what we expect of good religious people, is it?

I am also surprised that the chairman of a school board seems not to have read the law at all.  The law is not to help or hinder the learning process, as he said to your reporter, but to avoid  evangelical advertising in the classroom or government places.  Why all this drama?  

Richard Majors, 

Aylmer