Cancelled teacher Jim McMurtry to appear before the BC Teachers Regulation Branch

In quoting from the Franz Kafka novel The Trial, “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.” It was the morning of his 30th birthday.

On the morning of my 61st birthday I was walked out of my classroom at WJ Mouat Secondary School in Abbotsford and suspended for seven months for talking about the serial killer Paul Bernardo, who was in the news at the time as he had applied for parole.

I didn’t think I had done anything truly wrong in describing Bernardo’s capture, which came about when a Toronto cop came up with the idea of comparing lists of persons-of-interest in a cold case of a rapist in Scarborough in the late 80s with a case of a child murderer in Burlington, Ontario in the early 90s.

The following year I was walked out of another school in Abbotsford, this time permanently, for saying that students who died while enrolled in residential schools did so mostly from disease and not murder. The Commissioner of the Teachers’ Regulation Branch (TRB) wrote to my union ten days later to express “concern about Mr. McMurtry’s broader pattern of behaviour and [that] he would like Mr. McMurtry to consider his future in the teaching profession, particularly now that he has been suspended again as of June 1, 2021.”