Catholic school board's regressive flag policy sets back reconciliation in a post-Papal visit Canada

Canada Standard

19-06-2025

Following the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's 94 Calls to Action in 2015, some Catholic school boards have made commitments to reconciliation in education. These boards include the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board (DPCDSB).
However, the DPCDSB - located in the Greater Toronto area - has also introduced a flag policy that raises serious questions about a commitment to the wider progress being made in welcoming all students and promoting reconciliation.
On Jan. 28, 2025 - following advocacy in different parts of Ontario and the country against the presence of the Pride flag - the board's trustees voted in nine to one to add more restrictions to its flag policies. These restrictions stipulated that only flags representing Canada, the provinces, territories and the school board can be be displayed inside schools or other DPCDSB facilities.
The developments in Peel Region follow earlier policy changes to restrict the presence of the Pride flag and other flags at schools.
Advocates from the board defending flag restrictions have said that in Catholic schools, the icon of the cross is the only symbol that should be promoted and that this represents inclusion and acceptance of all.
However, members of the 2SLGBTQI+ community and opponents of restrictive flag policies argue that the Pride flag is needed to signal a welcoming environment. They say its removal is an act of erasure and that it calls into question how the board affirms the rights, dignity and visibility of 2SLGBTQI+ people and how it fosters their safety. The board says, and believes, its practices and policies comply with the Ontario human rights code, adding that supports are available for students who identify as 2SLGBTQI.
The erasure of the Pride flag has the simultaneous effect of banning other important flags, such as Every Child Matters flags, Indigenous Nation flags and MMIWG2S flags (drawing attention to ending violence, disappearance and murder of First Nations women, girls and two-spirit people).
In our analysis, this restrictive flag policy expresses colonial violence. We rely on the work of Sandra Styres, researcher of Iethi'nihstenha Ohwentsia'kekha (Land), Resurgence, Reconciliation and the Politics of Education, who examines how colonial violence is expressed in academic settings through "micro-aggressions, purposeful ignorance, structural racism, lateral violence, isolation" and also in "representations and spaces."
Our concern is informed by our combined research and personal engagement focused around reconciliatory education in elementary Catholic schools (Erenna) and Anishinaabe Catholic expressions of self-determination in the Church (Noah). Erenna is a settler and Noah is a member of Michipicoten First Nation.
We are married writing partners who travelled to Quebec City in July 2022 to witness the long-awaited penitential pilgrimage of the late Pope Francis. We left with an awareness that this is a critical time for the righting of relationships that have been severely fractured by a Church complicit in genocide.
The DPCDSB flag policy speaks to an unwillingness of many to sever emotional attachments to the white imperialism that preserves a western way of thinking, doing and being, in the name of faith.
When a major Catholic entity like the DPCDSB introduces policies that may cause harm, concerned people, regardless of creed, must pay attention to such injustices.
Delegate Melanie Cormier, representing the DPCSB's Indigenous Education Network, shared a statement relaying that the board's restrictive flag policy fails to acknowledge the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation whose traditional and treaty territory where the board resides. She states: "Your flag policy is in violation of our jurisdiction. To say that any of our flags can not be flown in our own territories is unacceptable."
Brea Corbet, the only trustee with voting power who did not vote to restrict the Pride flag, told an earlier bylaw policies meeting: "When we remove rainbow flags and heritage flags, we are not protecting our Catholic identity; we are revealing institutional fragility. The Pride flag does not threaten Catholic education, policies of exclusion do."
Three student trustees also opposed the restrictive policy, but their votes unfortunately aren't counted. We argue this too speaks to the suppression of student voice within the board.
This fragility disproportionately threatens the safety of Indigenous, 2SLGBTQI+ and marginalized students and staff as they are overlooked and dismissed by the flag policy.
Read more: New Brunswick's LGBTQ+ safe schools debate makes false opponents of parents and teachers
Kanienkeha:ka (Mohawk) education professor Frank Deer speaks of educational programming "that is congruent with the identity of the local community." This programming, he writes, must go beyond curricula to address the school environment as well. Student safety, inclusion and identity affirmation must be prioritized in all aspects of school life.
Jennifer Brant, a Kanienkeh:ka interdisciplinary scholar, speaks in depth about how silence during times like these equates to complicity in accepting injustices that are taking place within "the communities in which we live, the broader society and global communities."
Inaction in response to this policy is negligent.
Detrimental ramifications may also extend to reconciliation efforts in religious spaces more generally. This regressive policy poses lingering questions about the longevity of Catholic schools if they fail to protect and nurture all students.
The primary target of the DPCDSB's sweeping flag policy is the 2SLGBTQI+ community. In addition, the flag ban attacks Indigenous sovereignty and Anishinaabek nationhood, perpetuating attitudes tied to the Doctrine of Discovery still present in the Catholic ethos.
Read more: The Vatican just renounced a 500-year-old doctrine that justified colonial land theft ... Now what? - Podcast
Flying the flags of First Nations (at their request) is not only a matter of inclusion, it is a matter of respect - respect for the land, the people and the treaties that connect us.
In denying this step towards relationality, this governing body of a Catholic school board sets back the Church's reconciliation efforts riding on the momentum of the papal visit.
Read more: Pope Francis showed in deeds and words he wanted to face the truth in Canada
The board's ignorance of how this policy risks damaging relationships with students, families and staff at the board, as well as the broader public, partly reflects an indifference that Pope Francis warned Catholics about during his visit:
"I trust and pray that Christians and civil society in this land may grow in the ability to accept and respect the identity and the experience of the Indigenous Peoples. It is my hope that concrete ways can be found to make those peoples better known and esteemed, so that all may learn to walk together."
As we write this piece, we can see through the window a local Toronto Catholic Distric School Board elementary school, where an Every Child Matters flag is flown alongside a Pride and Canadian flag.
Catholic education, despite its sordid history and contested perspectives about interpreting and practising Church doctrine, can be a tool to drive reconciliation.
Catholics cannot let a narrow vision overshadow Pope Francis's pilgrimage and the global Church movement he, the Church's bishops and Catholic lay people have participated in - via a global synod - to respond to the call to walk together in solidarity with Indigenous, 2SLGBTQI+ and other marginalized people.
We wish to continue to hear counter-narratives of hope and possibility for Catholic education. We wish to see active changes that move the DPCDSB, as scholar Sheila Cote-Meek of the Teme-Augama Anishinabai, writes, "to a drastically different way of being, doing and working."
As other Catholic boards in Ontario initiate flag debates of their own, we are left with the lingering question. What is the future of Catholic education if it's not intended to support the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being of all those entrusted to its care?