What are school boards for? It’s a question that Ontario periodically asks itself, sometimes because of scandal or waste by some education administrator somewhere, or sometimes because of some more general dysfunction between elected trustees and the staff they’re supposed to oversee. Yet, it’s manifestly not a question the current government is asking in public, even as it seeks to substantially increase the power of Queen’s Park over school boards and their real estate.
Last month Education Minister Paul Calandra introduced Bill 33, the Supporting Children and Students Act. If passed by the legislature, the bill would substantially expand the minister’s ability to investigate a board’s conduct and give directions — and assume a board’s powers if those directions aren’t followed. For extra measure, the bill would also let the government veto the renaming of any schools; so, plans to take the names of John A. Macdonald or Egerton Ryerson off the signage at Toronto-area schools are dead for now.
On top of Bill 33, the government also posted a proposed regulation last week that would invoke powers over school board real estate, a mechanism the PC majority voted for in 2023. The regulation would, if enacted in the proposed form, give the government the power to force school boards to sell property they don’t need for actually educating students but have otherwise been loath to part with. The minister could direct the school board to sell directly to another party or simply to sell it on the open market.
Some of these proposals are aimed more or less directly at Toronto’s school boards; others are a response to scandals that we’ve seen in London and Brant-Haldimand-Norfolk. All of them have something in common: Queen’s Park giving up the pretense that school boards are democratically elected bodies in their own right — able to make mistakes and scandals, yes, but also able to be disciplined by voters when that happens. Instead, Queen’s Park is closing in on the end point of a decades long process of turning boards of education (the first democratically elected bodies in Ontario) into mere subalterns for provincial education policy.
This process has gone faster or slower depending on the government, but it’s only ever gone in one direction since the massive expansion of public education after the Second World War. As education has grown to become a bigger part of the provincial budget — and as strikes in the education system carried the potential to cause massive political harm to the premier of the day — Queen’s Park has taken an ever-firmer hand on schools and the boards that nominally operate them.
At the point where cabinet is asserting the power to micro-manage the real estate portfolios of boards (and even pick and choose when schools can be renamed) it’s time to ask whether school boards actually serve a purpose anymore, or whether we’d be better off governing public education with more direct and clear lines of accountability to the premier and his cabinet.
This idea, too, has been around for a while now. Nova Scotia eliminated its school boards in 2018, and Quebec has proposed to eliminate its school boards, but parts of that plan are on hold while the anglophone school boards in that province challenge the constitutionality of the bill. This week the Quebec government announced it would seek leave to appeal the case to the Supreme Court of Canada, having been told by two lower courts that the bill as currently constituted impermissibly violates the educational rights of English-speaking Quebeckers.
The Quebec case might end quickly, if the Supreme Court simply decides not to hear the province’s appeal and leave the most recent verdict as the final word. That would be relevant for Ontario, as it would mean that any major reforms of Ontario’s school boards would need to preserve the rights of francophone Ontarians. Or the Supreme Court could decide to hear the case, and Ontario will undoubtedly pay close attention to its eventual decision.
But the province’s current plan is something else entirely: retaining all the forms and structures of school boards even as the legislature and cabinet at Queen’s Park hollow them out of any actual substance and meaning. In one sense, this gives the province what it wants without the messy constitutional fight that Quebec is currently embroiled in. But it leaves Ontario voters (including parents of school-age students) in a muddle. When something goes wrong at your kid’s school, who is responsible? The school board, or the minister? How are parents supposed to hold decision-makers accountable when the government inserts itself into nearly every decision made by every school board — but only on its own terms?