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By Sid Ryan
What on earth is the Liberal brain thrust thinking?
With a scant two months to go before the election writ is dropped, more than 60% of the province’s school boards are laying off staff. So far, without all boards reporting, 575 support staff will be receiving pink slips.
This figure does not include the 500 staff at the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) threatened with layoff or the 125 layoffs at Upper Canada District School Board. Educational assistants are bearing the brunt of the cuts even though they provide direct assistance to the province’s most needy school children those with learning, physical and mental disabilities.
Nearly half of the province’s school boards plan to make cuts to special education, according to Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) research analyst Paul O’Donnell. A smaller number are cutting adult education, literacy and early reading programs.
Last year, school boards had a shortfall of over $300 million that resulted in the elimination of 500 support staff jobs. The cuts would have been deeper had some boards not raided and depleted their reserve funds. This year the shortfall is closer to $200 million with one-third of boards saying they had to dip into or exhaust their reserve funds.
It is difficult to understand how a political leader who has fashioned himself as the education premier could have screwed up so badly this close to an election. Mind you, the Liberals have used every trick and sleight of hand in the book to try to dampen the political fallout of the devastating cuts.
Normally, the school board budget announcements are made at the end of August. This year (an election year), the school boards were given instructions to announce their budgets by the end of June. This cynical ploy has not gone unnoticed by CUPE’s 50,000 support staff workers across the province. Rest assured they will be active in the provincial election.
Likewise, it has not gone unnoticed that Education Minister Kathleen Wynne who is in a tough battle with Conservative leader John Tory can bend the rules and allow the TDSB (which operates most of the schools in her riding) to run a 1% budget deficit. But yet, the Near North board in North Bay just voted to lay off 50 support staff because the Liberals insisted on a balanced budget. What’s good for the goose should be good for the gander.
Speaking of a goose, Monique Smith, the Liberal member for the riding that includes North Bay, will certainly have her goose cooked with this latest rounds of cuts in her community. She is already in scalding hot water over her failure to speak out and stop her Liberal government policies from eliminating good paying hospital laundry jobs and manufacturing jobs in North Bay. Now she stands idly by while vulnerable school children lose their support staff.
Meanwhile, her colleague at Queen’s Park has two sets of rules: one for those who speak up to defend jobs and one for those who meekly and timidly accept job losses. We know which set applies to Ms Smith.
What surely must win the Oscar for sleight of hand has got to be the announcements around potential school closures. In 2005, the Liberals placed a moratorium on school closures until such time as they issued new guidelines for community consultations. That happened last October with timetables attached to ensure no school would close before this fall’s provincial election. Expect scores of school closings across the province following the election.
The provincial election will be a real opportunity to demonstrate that Dalton McGuinty and John Tory are really just two sides of the same coin. The Conservatives rammed the flawed funding formula down the throats of school boards in 1997. Ten years later in 2007, the Liberals are adamantly defending a formula they campaigned to eliminate if elected.
Ironically, the Liberal election campaign strategy will be to paint John Tory as the second coming of Mike Harris. However, the truth is he arrived four years ago masquerading as the education premier.
