It’s pretty easy to be sympathetic toward volunteer-run literacy charities; their unpaid staff and un- or underpaid co-ordinators have the relatively thankless task of helping the workers businesses bring into this country to fill our cheap, exploitable labour deficit learn how to read and speak flat, slurred English well enough that bulging middle-aged people don’t berate them for not learning how to speak “our” “language.”
So here is an organization dedicated to torpedoing that sympathy in any way they possibly can:
A literacy lesson plan from a group partly funded by the Government of Canada uses a partisan example to teach people how to conjugate the verb “to vote.”
The lesson plan, written by Saskatchewan charity Read Saskatoon, is meant to teach people with low literacy skills about different verb tenses.
One of the examples uses the federal Conservatives in a question where students are meant to conjugate “to vote” and “to elect,” the CBC’s Hannah Thibedeau reported.
“The majority of voters [blank] conservative and as a result they [blank] a Harper government,” the example says.
And it’s not just that this is a case of better literacy through the glories of The Party; as the CBC points out, the question itself is factually inaccurate, as Prime Minister Harper (pictured above in one of the only Google results for “Stephen Harper with a book” that actually shows him holding a book) rode into his current majority government on less than 40 percent of the national vote.
Read Saskatoon’s chair claims that the group was “worrying less about political sensitivities and more about grammatical concepts,” which is of course code language for “‘politically correct types’ caught us trying to brainwash immigrants by teaching them how to speak Tory.” On the other hand, “The majority of voters did not [vote] conservative and as a result they [elected] a Harper government,” while factually accurate, is a deeply confusing statement, so maybe some sympathy is due after all - in this case, a bald-faced, politically-charged lie makes a lot more sense than the truth.
via:CBC News image: Prime Minister’s Office
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