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The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto is hosting its 13th annual decolonizing conference from March 12 to 14, 2026. The title tells you plenty: Colonial Ruptures: Unmasking Ongoing Coloniality and Fostering Counter Insurgency, Resistance and Liberatory Possibilities. The event materials describe a gathering of scholars, activists, educators, artists, Elders, and community leaders committed to critical reflection, collective action, and “decolonial futures.” They speak of resisting “global capital extractivism and supremacist thinking,” rejecting “colonial binaries,” and advancing liberatory possibilities. This is not an outside caricature. It is the institution describing itself.

That matters because OISE is not a fringe collective borrowing university space for a weekend. It is one of the country’s most influential faculties of education, and CIARS is one of its public-facing centres. A conference like this does not define every part of OISE, but it does reveal a real moral and intellectual current inside one of Canada’s most important teacher-forming institutions. When an institution like that adopts the language of rupture, insurgency, resistance, and decolonial struggle, critics are entitled to ask a basic question: is this education in the ordinary civic sense, or ideological formation dressed in educational language?

To be fair, proponents would say the purpose is not social fragmentation but repair. They would say decolonizing education means confronting historical blind spots, taking Indigenous and anti-racist perspectives seriously, and widening the moral vocabulary of the classroom. Fine. That case should be acknowledged. But public language still matters. When a flagship faculty of education foregrounds coloniality, rupture, counter-insurgency, and resistance, it signals something more than curricular broadening. It signals an adversarial posture, even when softened by the language of care, solidarity, and reimagined futures.

That is the real concern. The problem is not that Canada’s injustices are being taught. A serious country should teach its history honestly. The problem is that teacher formation may be drifting toward a framework in which critique stops being a tool of civic improvement and becomes the default grammar through which the society itself is read. In theory, decolonial approaches and core educational goals can coexist. In practice, the public-facing language here suggests a hierarchy of concerns in which ideological critique increasingly outranks institutional competence, shared citizenship, and academic pluralism.

“What the public sees is not repair but drift: a professional class fluent in rupture and resistance while the country struggles to do ordinary things well.”

People notice that shift because they are already living inside a country under strain. Canada has struggled with weak productivity for years. The OECD’s 2025 survey says the outlook was worsened by trade uncertainty and tariffs, projects a decline in GDP from the second quarter of 2025 because of falling exports to the United States, and devotes sustained attention to the problem of raising business-sector productivity. Housing is worse. CMHC said in 2025 that restoring affordability to 2019 levels would require roughly 430,000 to 480,000 new housing units per year until 2035, about double the recent pace. That is not ideological spin. It is the national housing agency saying the country is not building nearly enough homes.

So people look around and see weak productivity, punishing housing costs, trade pressure, strained public capacity, and thinning civic confidence. Then they watch elite educational institutions pour moral energy into conferences on colonial rupture and liberatory counter-insurgency. The disconnect is hard to miss. Citizens who want functional schools, affordable homes, competent government, and some residue of common national identity are told, again and again, that the deeper task is deconstruction. Not reform. Not competence. Deconstruction.

That is one reason disillusionment has grown. The problem is not honest history. It is not the inclusion of neglected perspectives. The problem is that “decolonizing” has become, in practice, a legitimating language for ideological sorting. It shifts attention away from what institutions are for and toward the moral drama of permanent critique. In education, that is a serious danger. A teacher should be equipped to help students read, write, reason, deliberate, and live with others in a shared society. If the training environment increasingly teaches that the shared society itself is morally suspect at the root, the civic consequences are unlikely to be good.

Canada does not need amnesia. It does not need self-flattery either. But it also does not need a professional class trained to interpret the country chiefly through the grammar of oppression, rupture, and resistance. A society held together by trust, inheritance, and common rules cannot sustain indefinite elite suspicion toward its own foundations. If public institutions want to recover legitimacy, they will have to rediscover a language of citizenship, competence, pluralism, and shared belonging. Until then, more Canadians will keep feeling that the country they were told to love is being taught to despise itself.

References

OISE / CIARS conference page
https://www.oise.utoronto.ca/ciars/ciars-2026-xiii-decolonizing-conference-1

OISE / SJE newsletter page on the conference
https://www.oise.utoronto.ca/sje/newsletter/march-2026/CIARS-newsletter-conference

OISE February 2026 conference notice
https://www.oise.utoronto.ca/home/sje/newsletter/february-2026/CIARS-conference

CIARS centre page
https://www.oise.utoronto.ca/ciars

CMHC housing supply report page
https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/professionals/housing-markets-data-and-research/housing-research/research-reports/accelerate-supply/canadas-housing-supply-shortages-a-new-framework

CMHC housing supply gap explainer
https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/observer/2025/updating-canada-housing-supply-shortages-new-housing-supply-gap-estimates

CMHC news release on housing supply gaps
https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/media-newsroom/news-releases/2025/cmhc-releases-latest-housing-supply-gaps-report

OECD Economic Survey of Canada 2025
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/05/oecd-economic-surveys-canada-2025_ee18a269.html

OECD full report
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/05/oecd-economic-surveys-canada-2025_ee18a269/full-report.html

OECD chapter on raising business-sector productivity
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/05/oecd-economic-surveys-canada-2025_ee18a269/full-report/raising-business-sector-productivity_443bcd88.html

Glossary

Decolonizing
A broad academic and political term for efforts to challenge ideas, institutions, and practices seen as shaped by colonial power.

Coloniality
The claim that power structures formed under colonial rule can persist long after formal colonial administration ends.

Counter-insurgency
Traditionally, efforts to resist or suppress insurgent movements. In academic settings it is often used metaphorically, which is part of why it sounds so militant.

Colonial binaries
Simple oppositions said to come out of colonial thinking, such as colonizer/colonized or civilized/uncivilized.

Liberatory
A term used to describe ideas or practices aimed at freeing people from oppression or domination.

Extractivism
An economic model focused on intensive resource extraction, usually criticized for environmental damage or unequal power.

Academic pluralism
The principle that higher education should make room for genuine intellectual diversity rather than one dominant ideological framework.

Civic order
The shared rules, institutions, and habits that allow people with real differences to live together in one political community.