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Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne stressed her former adviser had no role in formulating the sex-education curriculum.
Still reeling over the child pornography charges against Benjamin Levin, Premier Kathleen Wynne stressed her former adviser had no role in formulating the sex-education curriculum.
“Ministers and deputy ministers do not write curriculum,” said Wynne, a former education minister whose revamp of sex education was kiboshed by ex-premier Dalton McGuinty in 2010 after some religious groups complained it was too risque.
“Curriculum is written by subject experts in conversation and in consultation with a wide array of people — and curriculum is reviewed and written on an ongoing basis,” she said Monday.
Levin, a 61-year-old former deputy minister of education from 2004 to 2009, faces seven counts of child exploitation, including charges of possessing and accessing child pornography after a raid last week in his Toronto home.
The tenured professor at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education is now freed on $100,000 bail. He next appears in court Aug. 8.
Wynne shot down reports claiming that Levin had somehow played a key role in crafting the sex-education curriculum.
“So you know, any suggestion that there was that kind of interference, it just demonstrates a lack of understanding of how curriculum actually is written,” the premier said.
“But as I say, they’re shocking allegations. I’m not minimizing that at all, but ministers and deputy ministers don’t write curriculum,” she told reporters at Queen’s Park.
“I worked with Ben Levin, I knew Ben Levin, and that makes it doubly shocking to me that these allegations and charges have been made. So the criminal justice system has to do its work.”
Wynne defended her appointment of Levin to her transition team when she took over from McGuinty five months ago.
“Ben Levin was asked to be on my transition team because I had worked with him and because he was involved in transition in Manitoba and he knew the workings of that process. So I am shocked. Any crime of this nature is a crime against all children and if these allegations are true, then it’s a real tragedy.”
Levin was arrested after an international police investigation spanning from New Zealand to England to London, Ont.
In New Zealand, an undercover officer was allegedly provided with “child abuse materials” from a suspect believed to be in Toronto.
