Courting Disaster

It seems fitting that I began writing this review — concerning judges, politicians, and policy — in a courtroom hearing about just that. With my forbidden laptop out of judicial sight, I typed away at Toronto’s Osgoode Hall, where the Ontario Divisional Court was hearing two days of arguments about the challenge by my employer, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, to the Ontario Ministry of Education’s decision to change the sex-­education curriculum taught in the province’s schools. In our view, the decision to replace a 2015 curriculum with a 1998 version violated several provincial statutes, as well as the rights to equality and security in the Charter of Rights of Freedoms. The 1998 version was only about heterosexual education, whereas the 2015 one discussed same-sex relationships, sexual orientation, and gender identity.

The government’s response to our challenge was basically that the courts should mind their own business, arguing in its written...