03) TORONTO’S CAMPAIGN FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION FIGHTS BACK

By Stephen Seaborn, Public Sector Workers Club

            Finance ministers are up to their fiscal trickery in Ontario: cooking the numbers to balance their books while our Toronto schools crumble.

            After slashing provincial education and health transfer payments back in the mid-80s, the feds further reduced revenues in their April 2015 budget by delivering $5 billion in tax cuts (mostly benefiting the country’s wealthiest 15%). They also snipped $36 billion from healthcare over the coming ten years.

            This is what they call neoliberal economics. Essentially we are the ones paying for it and our consolation prize (as one journalist put it) is to “watch all our social programs built over the past 60 years wash away with the winter snow”. Neoliberal thinking (dating back, btw, to the NDP education projections of early ‘90s) is obviously quite firmly entrenched not just in Ottawa, but over at Queens Park.

            Here in Ontario, where funding of public education has never recovered from the deep Harris cuts, the province is dealing with its $10.9 billion deficit by selling off public infrastructure, cost-cutting on the backs of public servants and “consolidating” schools. The impact of 20 years of tax cuts in Ontario is that we are missing out on $19 billion in revenue. No surprise that Ontario’s corporate tax rate remains one of the lowest in North America.

            No surprise either that the province is playing hardball in contract negotiations with teachers.

            No surprise that there’s still no job strategy beyond crappy jobs for kids leaving school. 

            In the coming years, spending just won’t keep up either with inflation or with population growth. This despite public services needing people to deliver the services, and education needing education workers in schools and communities.

            The CCPA, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, reports that after Ontario’s May 7 budget, education will suffer even more than healthcare from under-funding.

            Again, no surprise that Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, who’s looking more like Mike Harris by the day, told Toronto’s Campaign for Public Education nine years ago: “There’ll be no more money for education”.

            Meanwhile, in Toronto, to implement its cost-cutting plans, the province jumped on an apparent crisis in school board governance just two months following the election of eleven brand new school Trustees, cunningly feeding a public and media perception of serious dysfunction and “infighting” at the TDSB.

            Spring brought Torontonians simulated government consultations on both school board governance, and reconfiguring schools as hubs

            Toronto residents now face a three-pronged attack by the provincial Liberals on Canada’s largest school board:

1. The Education Minister’s winter “directives” which dramatically reduced Trustee democracy;

2. The forced sale of publicly-purchased school board infrastructure;

3. A consultative panel aimed at sub-dividing the TDSB into four smaller boards, possibly elected at large, not by ward constituents.

            On the plus side, community and parent groups in Toronto are not known for taking government attacks on community school facilities lightly. As they begin to pay attention, public awareness, concern and rage is gradually growing across the city. And after 13 years of activism, Toronto’s Campaign for Public Education is still together, effective and busy with a coordinated fightback.

            Is it enough? No. Not by a long shot.

            But as spring morphs into summer, the CPE, an assembly of community and school based organizations representing a membership including families of over 100,000, has set its sights on Ontario’s MPPs.

            For more info, check out CPE’s new flyer to help combat school closures, which is seeing widespread school-community use through elementary teacher networks. Look over the CPE’s paper promoting sample answers for public input to the Hall Governance panel, and its equity/access critique of these consultations. The CPE continues to be guided by its 10 Point Program for Public Education in Toronto. These and other materials are online at campaignforpubliceducation.ca.

(The above article is from the May 16-31, 2015, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading socialist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)