Angry Albertans confront Education Minister David Eggen and accuse the NDP of anti-Christian bigotry

By Jonathon Van Maren

The Alberta NDP may come to rue the day they decided to target religious Albertans, as the rumblings of discontent grow louder and social conservatives begin to organize–in many religious communities, for the very first time. Education Minister David Eggen, who is loathed like no other politician in recent memory by many Albertans, was confronted personally recently concerning his attacks on religious schools and his demands that they conform to legislation he initiated to force religious Albertans into accepting his ideology. From the CBC:

NDP policies were slammed as attacks on Christian faith by political leaders from rural Alberta attending a fall convention in Edmonton Thursday.

At a Rural Municipalities of Alberta association forum with provincial ministers, Josh Knelson, reeve of Mackenzie County, told Education Minister David Eggen he takes the threat of withholding funding from private faith-based schools “very personally.”

“I feel that it’s an attack on Christianity and all faith-based believers,” Knelson said. “And to be quite frank, you scare me.”

Eggen has given all schools until the end of the school year to develop a policy allowing gay-straight alliance groups, or risk losing government funding.

Eggen responded over groans and murmurs in the large crowd at the Shaw Conference Centre that it wasn’t his intention to create fear.

All public, Catholic, Francophone, charter and most private schools already comply with the policy and it falls to a handful of outliers to get onboard, the minister said.

“At the end of the day,” Eggen said, “if a school is taking public money, which is private schools, then they have to follow the law just like everybody else.”

A second Mackenzie Country council member then chastised Indigenous Relations Minister Richard Feehan for arguing a year ago that using the Bible to oppose Bill 24, an Act to Support Gay-Straight Alliances, was absurd.

Ernie Peters called Feehan’s speech an attack on Opposition Leader Jason Kenney’s faith and also criticized Feehan for holding the Bible while making the argument.

“You mocked parts of the Old Testament, laughing about it for about four minutes,” Peters said. “Is that your mandate for all faiths or just for Christianity in particular?”

There is no doubt that the NDP will pay dearly come election time for the arrogance and anti-Christian bigotry of Notley, Eggen, and other contemptible members of the cabinet—and that voters will be fully expecting Jason Kenney and the United Conservative Party to step up and address their concerns. The attacks on Christian communities by the NDP must not only be stopped, but reversed—and that will take the sort of political will that Canadian conservatives have been loathe to show lately.

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