opinion

Stephen Axworthy is a social studies teacher and has been a municipal councillor for six years in rural Manitoba.

Recent revelations of extremist infiltration within Western militaries – including terrorism charges laid against individuals with links to the Canadian Armed Forces – should disturb every citizen. But they should not surprise us. These developments point to a deeper failure: we are training people to defend democracy without first ensuring they understand it.

Civic education in Canada has been slowly eroded. Our students are graduating without a basic grasp of their rights and freedoms, or of the historical forces – fascism, colonialism, genocide – that make those rights necessary in the first place. They often don’t know that slavery existed in Canada. Many can

See Full Page