By Sarah Smith
This fall, as students return to classrooms and campuses, Doug Ford’s Conservative government is poised to pass troubling legislation that will affect all levels of education across Ontario.
Introduced last spring and set to resume its second reading when parliament reconvenes later this month, Bill 33 the Supporting Children and Students Act includes amendments that sideline academic autonomy and undercut democratic processes by centralizing the governance of public schools and post-secondary institutions within the purview of the province. These amendments contain ideological elements that pander to Ford’s conservative base and pave the way for increased privatization while failing to address the main issue facing education in Ontario: chronic underfunding.
A 2024 report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives revealed that Ontario’s core education funding has declined by $1,500 per student since 2018. This underfunding is evidenced in overcrowded classes, crumbling schools and multi-year waitlists for children in need of classroom supports.
Likewise, the post-secondary sector in Ontario receives the lowest funding in Canada as it struggles under the pressure of previous Ford policies which simultaneously froze funding and cut domestic tuition fees. This, coupled with the federal government’s cap on international students, has led to layoffs, program cuts and even some campus closures.
Bill 33 centralizes power by amending the Education Act to allow explicit Ministerial oversight of school boards, including the power to investigate boards, run internal audits, and easily execute takeovers. With a nod to conservative “values” this bill also mandates the reinstatement of School Resource Officers (police), even in districts where boards had voted to eliminate them.
In a similarly symbolic and anti-democratic gesture, the bill requires Ministerial approval for any changes to school names, retroactive to January 2025. This nullifies the Toronto District School Board’s February decision to rename three Toronto schools, namely Ryerson Community School, Dundas Junior Public School and Sir John A. Macdonald Collegiate Institute.
In a preview of what Bill 33 could deliver, Ontario’s Minister of Education Paul Calandra cited fiscal mismanagement as the cause when announcing the takeover of the Thames Valley District School Board (TVDSB) last April. Then, on the last day of the school year, elected trustees from the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), the Toronto Catholic District School Board (TCDSB), the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board (OCDSB) and the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board (DPCDSB) received formal notice that they, too, had been relieved of their duties, blocked from emails, and that supervisors had been appointed in their stead.
One of the first orders of business post-takeover was to cancel the planned renaming of schools. Calandra has since signaled that he is looking at eliminating elected trustees from boards across the English public school system in Ontario. It is also worth noting that with the takeover of the TDSB in particular, the province also gained control of the Toronto Lands Corporation (TLC), one of the city’s largest landowners with a portfolio of approximately $20 billion worth of land.
Bill 33 also contains amendments to the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities Act affecting Ontario’s post-secondary institutions. As a sequel to the Ford government’s failed 2019 “Student Choice Initiative” which briefly gave students the option to opt-out of ancillary fees before being struck down by the courts, this bill assigns complete Ministerial control over the regulation of student fees. It also requires institutions to develop plans to protect research to “safeguard and mitigate the risk of harm to or interference with its research activities” and grants the province the power to intervene in student admissions processes, mandating that applicants be considered solely “on the merit of the individual.”
These symbolic gestures were not lost on Ford’s base. A National Post opinion piece triumphantly announced that “Ontario is finally forcing out DEI from schools and universities.” The article goes on to praise the focus on “merit” at post-secondary institutions and the reversal on the renaming of schools, asserting that this bill is, “aimed squarely at shifting power away from the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) crowd and weakening their control over education.”
But these policies are more than symbolic, they are reversals of hard-fought changes that took shape over months, and in some cases years of research and consultation.
Significantly, by consolidating decision-making, Bill 33 paves the way for ever more privatization of the education sector. The shift towards privatization is no more evident than in the current moment where support staff at colleges across Ontario have been out on strike since September11 fighting for a fair contract in the face of years of provincial underfunding, while the Ford government has diverted $2.5 billion dollars to private sector skills training via the Skills Development Fund (SDF) since 2021.
At the beginning of October, the province’s Auditor General released a scathing report highlighting irregularities in how SDF funds were distributed and questioning why projects that scored ‘low’ and ‘medium’ during the evaluation process were routinely chosen in lieu of projects ranked “high”. The report also outlined a correlation between lobbying efforts and the projects selected, underscoring the lack of transparency in the way these public funds are distributed across the private sector.
Underfunding public education, while centralizing control and dismantling democratic governance, paves the way for further privatization. Bill 33 must be challenged as it represents a dangerous turning point for Ontario’s public education system.
[Photo: OFL]
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