TORONTO – Schools open for business next week. Their business is an important aspect of any society – if you agree that education is an important factor in personal and collective growth. The state has a responsibility to its own people to ensure that the “next generation of citizens” is well-equipped to meet the challenges life’s experience may through our way.
Minister Calandra (Ontario’s Minister of Education) has been sensitizing parents and students for months that the “system” needs change: the governance model has become dysfunctional, application of fiscal resources not always directed to student well-being, student performance is spotty, and teachers’ competency continually called into question. In brief, transparency and accountability are bygone standards of measurement… going the way of the dodo bird and ability of local authorities (School Trustees) to structure a vision statement or to stick to the plan.
Investigators commissioned by none other than Minister Calandra and the government of Ontario said as much in their Reports of findings on four school boards (including three in the GTA) last Spring. They recommended supervision – dissolve them and vest their authorities in the Minister. Subsequently, Minister Calandra sought, and obtained, legislative and Crown authority to do so.
Trustees for both boards in Toronto “lost their jobs” because they provided insufficient oversight or ignored the advice of their administrators when making decisions. The administrators who provide reports and data “to inform” trustees still have their own jobs. Why?
Both school boards register declining enrolment (fewer students = less revenue) but rising costs and underutilized spaces. Press reporting of the education milieu is rife with examples violence in the public schools (isolated pockets in the main, but regular enough to concern the public) and downright financial mismanagement.
The accounting firms mandated to conduct the investigations restricted themselves to examining the latter, which incidentally, are within the sole purview of the people responsible for “operations” – the administrative staff. Their “indictment” of the operations branch of the school boards leaves those bodies and their leadership prone to suspicions of gross incompetence or downright fraud (emphasis added).
The Toronto Catholic District School Board (TCDSB) for example declared a $100 million asset in 2023 and, by the beginning of December, turned that into a $ 48 million deficit – subsequently revised in 2024 and early 2025 to $ 58 million. Last fiscal year it based its operations on revenues of approximately $1.3 billion. The Toronto Public District School Board (TDSB) has a revenue stream of three times that amount, circa $3 billion.
Both boards launched a class action lawsuit against the high-tech digital companies for a total of $4.5 billion (and growing as they loop in other school boards) claiming that those hi-tech companies had embedded toxic, habit-forming information in their programs detrimental to students’ mental health and ability to learn. That sum is equal to what Minister Calandra’s Ministry approves annually to them to do their job properly.
So, he is right to say the governance model is outdated (“broken”, for those with a less genteel command of the language). He is, nonetheless, still circumspect about what to do with His Majesty’s Catholic subjects who hold particular rights in the Constitution (1867, 1982, and the Charter of Rights. They have what are defined as “denominational rights” which the Ministry cannot/does not oversee. Qualified Trustees duly elected by Catholic ratepayers do so on behalf of the Magisterium; in this case, the Cardinal.
We have a week to see what model of administrative behaviour and governance Minister Calandra is preparing to enforce.
