Last week, I was in the audience for an all-candidates meeting at Empire Public School in Waterloo. Given that it was likely to be the only time during the current election campaign that Elizabeth Witmer, Ontario’s Minister of Education, would agree to debate education I thought it was important to hear what she had to say about her government’s woeful record in this area. Along with her Conservative colleagues in the area (including Witmer’s Parliamentary Secretary, Ted Arnott), she had already declined invitations to meetings organized by local teachers, citing fears that the meetings would be “hostile.” It appears to have been part of a province-wide strategy by the Eves government to hide from the electorate.

At the meeting, Witmer spent most of her time telling the audience that their personal experience with the education system wasn’t valid. Voter after voter went to the microphone to talk about ballooning class sizes, missing text books, and special needs services that are impossible to access. Before they sat down, voter after voter had received a lecture from Witmer, her favourite catch-phrase being, “The reality isâe¦”. She repeatedly talked about how much new money her government had committed to education; in fact, she said, the Tories were spending more on education — over $15 billion a year — than any other government in Ontario’s history. In other words, in her view, the experience of the educators, students, parents and grandparents in the room was trumped by government statistics.

Of course, the statistics employed by Elizabeth Witmer were not complete, and they don’t begin to tell the whole story about the crisis that her government has invented in education. Let’s take a look at what “the reality is.”

  • Witmer trumpeted the number of new schools that had been built since 1995 (in one of her newspaper ads, she even lists those built in this area). What she doesn’t want to talk about is the number of schools closed under their watch. People for Education reports that, between 1999 and 2002, 192 schools were closed in Ontario and a further 122 were threatened with closure. In Waterloo Region, we’ve already lost St. Patrick’s, St. Michael’s, St. Thomas, Cecil Cornwall, Dickie Settlement, Little’s Corners, Heidelberg, Winterbourne, Brighton, and Harold Wagner. Southwood is scheduled to close next year. All of these closures were made inevitable by a funding formula that treats students as a part of a mathematical equation, systematically punishes small schools, and ignores community concerns.
  • Witmer claimed that the government was “halfway” toward implementing the recommendations of the Rozanski report. She ignores the fact that the report specifically says that each of its recommendations is “concomitant,” meaning that they are not to be viewed or implemented in isolation. This government has chosen to implement only the recommendations that it likes and ignore other areas entirely (while often falling short of the funding recommended in the areas that it has taken action). The additional funding was to have been over and above the cost of inflation, for example, but the government has ignored inflation in calculating what school boards receive. It has also ignored Rozanski’s call for $674 million in catch-up funding for salaries and benefits, the single greatest expense borne by school boards.
  • Despite the numbers quoted by Witmer, a more careful analysis shows that — after enrollment and inflation is taken into account — education funding has actually been going down. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has calculated that, using constant 1994 dollars, education has been shortchanged by $1.8 billion a year. By 2005 (when the government says it will have implemented the funding increases recommended by Rozanski), CCPA notes that “the cumulative loss in funding for elementary and secondary education over the ten-year period will be $15.5 billion. In other words, in ten years under Harris and Eves, elementary and secondary students have been short-changed to the tune of a full year.”

    • There are literally dozens of other topics that could have been raised at the meeting. People could have talked about the fact that Ontario parents have had to raise a total of $35 million a year for their children’s schools, with 67 per cent of schools reporting fundraising for basics (such as textbooks, classroom supplies and computers). They could have talked about the dramatic increase in the number of schools operating without full-time principals, librarians, music teachers, gym teachers and guidance counsellors. They could have talked about the fact that 33 per cent of schools surveyed by People for Education reported that “general upgrades for roofs, furnaces, paint, and carpets were required but not approved.” They could have complained about the fact that school boards have been forced to raise fees for community use, making it harder for small community groups to operate.

    Then again, I’m sure that Elizabeth Witmer would have summarily dismissed their concerns as well. That’s the reality.

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Scott Piatkowski

Scott Piatkowski is a former columnist for rabble.ca. He wrote a weekly column for 13 years that appeared in the Waterloo Chronicle, the Woolwich Observer and ECHO Weekly. He has also written for Straight...