Christian high-school student joins Chilliwack public school board byelection
That makes two out of three candidates with no connection to public education
(*Edited Jan. 27, 2025 - Clarified that Bartel is not the ongoing executive director of Chilliwack Pride. She quit after the event in 2024 - PJH)
Unity Christian high-school student Shane Kooyman makes it a three-way race joining former DPAC chair Katie Bartel and former MLA Laurie Throness for the empty seat on the Chilliwack school board.
The handful of people paying attention to who will replace outgoing trustee Heather Maahs have known for a few weeks it will be a contest between clear choices for progressives and conservatives, Bartel and Throness respectively.
Bartel was the first to announce she would run. She's a three-time DPAC chair and inaugural Chilliwack Pride executive director who is a parent and an advocate for special needs students. Throness was MLA for Chilliwack-Hope/Chilliwack-Kent from 2013 to 2020 as a BC Liberal before being ejected from the party. For years before that, he worked as a Conservative policy advisor for several party leaders in Ottawa.
But when the candidate list was officially declared on Friday (Jan. 24, 2025), there was a third name: Shane Kooyman.
Who is he? Kooyman's a high-school student at a Christian independent school that is not in the Chilliwack School District. Unity Christian School's mission statement is: “Nurturing students' God-given potential as they humbly serve God's world.” The tagline on the school's website is: “Learning and Living in Christ.”
As of Sunday afternoon, the 'Elect Shane Kooyman' Facebook page had five followers, four likes, three educational elements he is focused on, two were good, one was spelled wrong.
His page description: “candidate for SD-33, focused on bringing back reading, writing and arithmetics [sic] with impartiality.”
To be accurate, “arithmetics” is not a word. “Arithmetic” is the basic number operations of mathematics, and is a word that cannot be pluralized.
In addition to his purported desire to bring back educational basics with “impartiality,” he states on the page that he wants to “depoliticize” the school board, which sounds similar to my facetious trustee election slogan, “Make Chilliwack School Board boring again.” I suspect, however, young Christian Kooyman is using the term in the more common right-wing dog whistle way, in opposition to the so-called “woke mob” who are apparently grooming children to be queer by interjecting sexual identity and gender identity politics into the classroom.
Knowing very little about the young man, it's worth noting that he does have a last name that, unfortunately, also has a lot of baggage attached to it. Third generation dairy farmers, the Kooymans own Chilliwack Cattle Sales, the company tied up in a high-profile animal abuse case after a group of Hollywood vegans surreptitiously recorded employees viciously beating and torturing animals at their farm on Prairie Central Road in 2014.
In addition to seven employees who did the abuse, company directors John Kooyman, Kenneth Kooyman, Wesley Kooyman, Jeffery Kooyman and Bradley Kooyman were each charged with causing or permitting animals to be, or to continue to be, in distress in violation of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act. Some of the employees were sentence to jail in 2016, no Kooyman did. Wesley Kooyman was sentenced to pay $75,000 plus a victim surcharge of $11,250, while Chilliwack Cattle Sales Ltd., in the person of Kenneth Kooyman, were assessed fines totalling $300,000 and $45,000 in victim fine surcharges.
The official election campaign runs Feb. 1, 2025 to election day on March 1, 2025.
Campaigning may prove to be extremely important because while municipal elections have notoriously low voter turnouts, byelections are exponentially worse. In 2013 a byelection was held to replace retiring trustee Louise Piper.
Out of the roughly 64,000 eligible voters in Chilliwack that year, voter turnout was 2.3 per cent. Dan Coulter won the byelection with 520 votes to Harold Schmidt's 339.
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Paul J. Henderson
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