I decided to become a public-school teacher in part for job security, which is ironic in light of my recent dismissal for saying the wrong thing in class about Indian residential schools. My career spanned four decades and included a stint as a college instructor and another as principal of a little Canadian school at the foot of the Jura Mountain in Switzerland called Neuchâtel Junior College.
Four years ago, I moved school districts, heading from Surrey down the TransCanada Highway to Abbotsford, the “City in the Country.” My wife had been told she had cancer and we thought we needed to deeper into the Fraser Valley of British Columbia and downsize. I realized that I was also moving into a Bible Belt full of Mennonites, who had slowly moved this far west over centuries—beginning in the 16th century to avoid religious persecution and military conscription in the Kingdom of Poland. I often reminded myself to be sensitive to the Christians in the classroom, but the Christian kids were never the problem.
My teaching load in the Abbotsford School District was a dog’s breakfast, as is typical for newcomers to a school. Within a month of teaching at WJ Mouat Secondary, mostly in French Immersion, I had a Letter of Expectation put in my file after a mother complained about my teaching. She was upset by her daughter’s mark on an assignment and by jokes I had made, including one about the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) being the University of “No Better Choice.” She claimed the joke triggered her whole family because that’s where a member of the family had graduated. When I told her I had also praised UNBC at length because my son was currently enrolled there and was loving it, she brought up other sophomoric or “Dad jokes” of mine. Of note: teachers are supposed to tell students ahead of time that they are about to hear something that might “trigger” them, in case they want to remove themselves from the classroom. Of course, people could also object to the word trigger and its association to gun violence.
Because I had challenged the Letter of Expectation, my principal at WJ Mouat upped his game and gave me a Letter of Investigation over inconsequential allegations relating to teaching outside of the box, one of which is that I showed a clip from a BBC video on the French Revolution to Grade 12 history students in which someone was guillotined. Another allegation was that I played the trailer for Sasha Baron Cohen’s film, The Dictator, which I felt was contextually appropriate as we were studying dictatorship. It was also alleged that I used the French endearment ma chère one day in class. As an experienced teacher, I knew students could claim offense or harm from a teacher’s words or learning resources, even from cartoons after the massacre in 2015 of cartoonists at the office of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine in Paris. Indeed, a history teacher (Samuel Paty) in the French capital was beheaded in 2020 for showing cartoons that ridiculed the Prophet Muhammad.
In March, 2020, I was slapped with a Letter of Suspension after discussing the Paul Bernardo case with students in Grades 10 and 12, as Bernardo was all over the news during his parole application. I had overheard students talking about the notorious serial killer and later told them how he was caught (by comparing lists of persons of interest with a cold case in Scarborough). The next day I was walked out of school mid class in front of my students. I learned by this “beat-learn” method that I had to go easy on news of violence, unless it was violence that reinforced my district’s message on racism a case in point being the news clip of Derek Chauvin choking George Floyd to death with his knee; this was fine because students needed to learn about white-on-black police violence.
For my brief discussion on Bernardo, I was docked two days’ pay, sent over spring break for re-education at the B.C. Justice Institute, and given an indefinite suspension, which lasted seven months. During this time, my principal was interviewing many of my students and produced more allegations, the most egregious being that I’d told one class I hoped my cancer-stricken wife died so I could have a better wife. (What I did tell the class was that I would be away from school for a period of time to support my wife during a risky, month-long, stem-cell transplant.) It was also alleged that I called parents stupid. My union took my side and grieved my punishment, eventually forcing my employer to settle with me.
For the 2020–21 school year I was back at school and enjoying a happy and successful academic year, but a storm cloud appeared in May when my principal insisted on placing a girl from my investigation the year before in my 4th-quarter world history class. Within the first week she went to the principal with six allegations, prompting him to open a second investigation on my teaching. One allegation was I wasn’t wearing my face shield properly, another that I made a “sexist inference.” To protect myself, I followed my union’s advice by immediately leaving WJ Mouat and becoming a wandering Teacher on Call (TOC).
Weeks later, on May 31, I was teaching Calculus 12 at a high school named after the painter Robert Bateman where news was feverishly spread about the discovery of the remains of 215 children in a mass grave at the site of the long-shuttered Kamloops Indian Residential School. The principal used the PA system to ask teachers to navigate the upsetting news with students. In this context, I answered a girl – who described the school’s teachers (from the Catholic order the Sisters of St. Ann as well as Oblate priests and brothers) as “murderers who tortured students to death by leaving them out in the snow” – by saying the children who died tragically while enrolled in residential schools did so mostly from disease. The girl complained to a counsellor, who told the principal, who told the district, and before class was over that day I had a visit from two male administrators who asked me to gather my things and leave.
The next day I received a Letter of Suspension announcing an indefinite suspension. The letter contained two allegations, the first that I had described Venus in teaching the etymology of the word vendredi as a “Greek/Roman god who favoured girls,” when what I had written on the board was “Roman goddess of love and beauty.” This allegation was quickly dropped, but the second (about the children in residential schools dying from disease) has stuck to this day. My suspension ended after eight months when the district released its investigator’s report, to which senior management appended a charge of professional misconduct, as the following shows:
- “While acting as a TOC for a Calculus 12 class, Mr. McMurtry…inferring [sic] that many of the deaths were due to disease was in opinion inflammatory, inappropriate, insensitive, and contrary to the district’s message of condolences and reconciliation [pp. 10-11 of the district’s investigation report].”
- “He left students with the impression some or all of the deaths could be contributed to ‘natural causes’ and that the deaths could not be called murder [p. 13].”
- “Both Mr. McMurtry and student accounts had some students passionately saying the deaths were murder, [and] the graves were mass graves” [p. 15].
- “I consider this to be extremely serious professional misconduct” [p. 13].
While on suspension I dug into the grave story of murdered children and found I was right. Indeed, there was no discovery at all in Kamloops. No graves. No bodies. No police investigation. Although our country had lowered its flag for five months and all federal MPs had passed a motion to recognize residential schools as a scene of genocide, all that researcher Sarah Beaulieu likely found were sewage tiles or trenches from 1924.
My judgment day was February 21, 2023. The Abbotsford School District trustees had to pronounce on a recommendation for termination from management. That very day I saw that the National Post featured my story on Page 1! I was getting great press from many media platforms, especially Rebel News who sent a reporter to cover the disciplinary hearing. I told supporters that my case was strong and the tide in Canada was turning against cancel culture, but I was wrong. I was fired and likely will never teach again.
By Dr. Jim McMurtry
To read a longer version of Jim’s story, please visit the Dorchester Review.
