Charles McVety is not getting his university. Martin Regg Cohn writes:
Canada Christian College will not be granted coveted university status, as it hoped and prayed, despite the premier’s best efforts to lay the groundwork. Praise the Lord, not Ford.
Thanks to a panel of outside experts, CCC president “Dr.” Charles McVety has just been denied the political payoff that would have perverted our post-secondary schools. Yet the stench that still wafts over the premier and the preacher cannot so easily be waved off.
Ford tried hard to give McVety his university:
Last October, with the province preoccupied by life and death questions over COVID-19, Ford’s Tories snuck in little-noticed legislation to upgrade McVety’s fledgling bible college into a full-fledged university. But accrediting it to confer B.A. and BSc. degrees would only have discredited, devalued and downgraded our entire post-secondary system.
Nothing could dissuade Ford’s Tories from using their majority to pass the legislation, except for the independent Post-secondary Education Quality Assessment Board. Its expert panel rarely steps in, but it saw through the mirage of McVety’s posturing — pedagogical and theological, ideological and political — and put its foot down last week.
Its full report has not been released, but enough is now known about McVety and his Canada Christian College to render the rejection inevitable: his personal notoriety (public homophobia and Islamophobia); questionable propriety (six-figure seemingly unsecured loans to McVety and his son); and dubious academic credibility (its degrees challenged by a provincial regulator).
Much has been written about Ford seeing the light last year when COVID-19 struck, rising from the political dead and rallying his government to do its best, for better or for worse. But its cynical manoeuvres on CCC last October brought out the worst in the premier, who would sell his soul — and sell out the province — to make good on a bad debt.
Ford owes much of his political success to McVety. McVety's evangelical fold followed him into Ford's tent. But things are not yet finished:
Now that the application has finally been rejected, it must be rescinded from the law books — and not allowed to live on lest it be enacted by cabinet fiat in future. If the government refuses, if it does nothing to correct this legislative limbo, it will be an accomplice to McVety’s future plotting.
And McVety is threatening repercussions:
His public reaction to the rejection was to threaten a lawsuit, demonizing PEQAB’s experts for doing the devil’s work and accusing them of “political corruptness.” Now, the preacher speaks darkly of litigation in lieu of transfiguration — religious and academic.
“I will defend myself now, over time, because I love gay people and I love Muslims,” he protested to the Star’s Kristin Rushowy last week.
In fact, this personal friend of the premier has publicly claimed that, “according to Jesus Christ, we have to love Muslims, but we don’t have to love Islam;” he warns that “Islam is not just a religion, it’s a … mandate for a hostile takeover;” he describes same-sex marriage as “a dagger in the heart of man;” he decries sex education as a “militant homosexual agenda;” and he preaches that “homosexuals prey on children.”
The story continues. . .
Image: Press Progress
