“The only objective of this project is to unseat woke trustees,” said the website’s anonymous founder, who goes by the name Matt, in an email to The Epoch Times.
“Any trustee that can be reasonably established as non-woke is listed on the site as a recommend for voters.”
VoteAgainstWoke offers site visitors three steps to follow. First, they can select between the English Catholic or English Public school system before being directed to a list of all Ontario boards in either category. Voters can then choose a district to see which candidates running therein are considered non-woke.
“We don’t determine who is non-woke,” said Matt. “Crowdsourcing does.”
The founder collects feedback from both Twitter and forums on VoteAgainstWoke.ca that show what constituents think about trustee candidates and their policy positions.
“We do not dictate or suggest policies to the non-woke trustees we recommend. Their platform and policies are not scrutinized by the site,” Matt wrote.
‘Cancel Climate’
Matt said he remains anonymous in his role because of the “current cancel climate.”“In my industry, which is outside of education, I would certainly run into many problems by being associated with this,” he said.
So far, Matt says the website has identified at least one non-woke candidate in about 30 percent of Ontario’s school board wards and districts.
Shortly after, the board voted in a closed meeting to suspend Mike Ramsay, a trustee of over 30 years, for allegedly violating the code of conduct. Ramsay recently posted documents online showing that his suspension, which he is challenging in court, was allegedly related to his public criticism of the WRDSB’s actions.
Matt says he started VoteAgainstWoke.ca after hearing the same question repeatedly from many of his neighbours: “Which school trustee candidates are not woke?”
“No one had a good answer,” he said. “Many candidates don’t even have websites because these are small elections (but have long-term influence).”
While some boards have a large number of non-woke candidates running, others have none, he said.
“Our discussion revolves around the frustration of living in a country with high taxes with the supposed benefit of well-funded schools but then facing the reality that political infiltration of schools was getting to the point where we could not put our children in them,” Matt said.
“It is incredibly important to get politics out of schools and become the best education system in the world.”
