In his spanning career attempting to influence public policy, Peter Stock has advocated against sex education, tried to turn back 2SLGBTQ+ rights, and end common law marriage benefits for heterosexual couples.
Canadian Anti-Hate Network
Source: YouTube
Peter Stock has sat on various boards and lobby groups, given testimony in front of the House of Commons, and penned op-eds over the last twenty years.
Stock’s long history of advocacy and body of work includes railing against restrictions on corporal punishment of children, basic legal equality for 2SLGBTQ+ people, and benefits for common law heterosexual couples. He has made multiple attempts to run for political office.
Stock now heads the Canadian branch of an international organization offering legal help and support for homeschooled children and their families.
“From Victoria, BC to St. John’s, NL, we represent your rights to influencers and lawmakers across Canada, “ reads the group’s website.
The Homeschool Legal Defence Alliance claims to be “Canada’s most trusted homeschool organization.” Boasting over 15,000 “families protected,” HSLDA is just one of the latest family-focused organizations Stock has signed his name to in over two decades of advocacy work.
The Globe and Mail once called him “one of Canada's most outspoken opponents of expanding gay rights.” Stock has, however, taken a much more demure approach to public life in recent years – a change from a very active and vocal past in roles like National Affairs Director of the anti-2SLGBTQ+ and far-right organization Canada Family Action. His recent public statements primarily focus on the challenges faced by many parents who choose to homeschool their children.
In addition to his presidency of the HSLDA, Stock is also the Executive Director of the Canadian Centre for Home Education. The organization appears to have attempted to hold a leadership conference in Halifax for parents in 2020 – though cancelled due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic – as well as publishing a number of research documents and materials for home educators.
“Home education freedoms may also face a serious threat in British Columbia where the ‘SOGI’ sexual education agenda could be imposed on thousands of homeschooling families,” reads the 2019 CCHE annual report.
Stock wrote in an opening section titled “From Peter’s Perspective,” that “ home-educating families saw many of their homeschool-facilitating institutions threatened with closure by the Minister of Education simply because they do not subscribe to his views about faith and sexuality.”
He added that “our efforts are not limited to Canada,” and boasted of travelling to attend a conference of similarly minded organizations and home educators.
CCHE is a membership-funded organization, charging a small annual fee, according to its website. Additionally, they ask for donations to help finance travel to the annual Global Home Education Exchange, where Stock also is listed as a board member – along with a number of other far-right educators including Alexey Komov.
Komov is a Russian homeschooling advocate that runs the Classical Conversations curriculum, a learning model allegedly rooted in ancient methods of biblical teachings. Well connected with a variety of wealthy figures, this network of educators pushes a staunchly anti-LGBTQ+ agenda.
“The old split between right and left is not relevant anymore,” Komov said during an interview in 2019, according to Right Wing Watch. “It’s really whether you are in favour of this globalist financial bankster type of arrangement, with LGBT and all those gender fantasies, or you are for sovereignty, independence, and the true power of people.”
The Homeschool Legal Defence Alliance is modeled after a US organization of the same name. Coming to Canada in 1991, it owes its origins to American Evangelical preacher Mike Farris. Founded, among other things, to defend a parent’s right to corporal punishment.
A cause Stock is familiar with.
In 2000, speaking for the Coalition for Family Autonomy, the CBC reported Stock asserting that without the option of corporal punishment parents may become so enraged with their children, that it could lead to violence.
"Sweden did away with corporal punishment 20 years ago, and it resulted in a large increase in child abuse," he reportedly said. (HSLDA continues to list “corporal punishment” as one of the subjects the organization offers its members ”preventative legal guidance.”)
Among the litany of organizations he has represented, Stock was also the director of the Canadian Family Action Coalition, a “lobby group that promotes a rigid definition of family” and opposed “gay marriage” on that basis, according to the Globe and Mail. Records show he was registered as a lobbyist with the CFAC during the early 2000s and spoke to the Standing Committee On Justice and Human Rights.
It was around this time when Stock was his most outspoken, categorizing the appointment of a gay man to Ontario’s Human Rights Commission as putting “the fox in charge of the henhouse” and claiming that “homosexual ‘rights’ trump all other rights that citizens have.”
He ran in at least three elections, all for separate parties, including for the Conservative Party of Canada and the Reform Party. He did not obtain office each time, but did finish second behind Liberal candidate Paul DeVillers multiple times when running as a candidate with the Alliance Party and the Tories.
Once a firebrand and outspoken advocate against legal recognition of marginalized people and the erasure of his reading of biblical values from Canadian society, Stock has never openly recanted any of his previous statements and continues to work alongside Canadian and international figures within the far-right.
“The child victims of these perverse ‘family’ situations will certainly display greater social pathologies than we can foresee,” he wrote in Catholic Insight in 1999. “Today’s STD rates, teen suicides, drug abuse, gang activity and school shootings will seem like a walk in the park compared to the anarchy that will result from the disintegration of the natural family.”
The Canadian Anti-Hate Network attempted to reach Peter Stock through the Homeschool Legal Defence Alliance for comment on his current views. We will update accordingly.
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