Snap Election in Ontario Elicits Non-Sequitur Response from Teachers’ Unions

Having been captured by the same ideology as Ford, they fall back on perennial issues like funding and class sizes

Ontario Premier Doug Ford dons a "Canada is not for sale" toque following a news conference at Queen's Park in Toronto, Jan. 28, 2025. Photo by Chris Young/The Canadian Press

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By Igor Stravinsky (Teacher, commentator)

With a conservative government firmly in control for the last two and a half years, you would think the Teachers’ Unions, who always lean left when it comes to education issues, would have plenty to target as Ontario moves towards election day (February 27th 2025). Anyone in the system will tell you that student academic achievement is down and disorderly and violent behaviour is up. Logically, the unions should be all over that, castigating Ford for incompetence and underfunding. There are two problems with that, though.

Firstly, while per student funding is down somewhat, that trend was well established long before Ford took office (see below), whereas achievement and behaviour in the schools started to deteriorate precipitously just before and during Ford’s tenure. So it is pretty hard to make the case that funding is the primary reason for the problems.

from the Ontario Public School Boards Association

Then there is that fact that, when it comes to education policy, Ford has been anything but conservative. In fact, he has been using the exact same DEI playbook as the unions.

Who would have expected a conservative government to allow far left activists, bent on “decolonization”, and “Diversity”, “Equity”, and “Inclusion” (DEI) to take over the school boards? But that is exactly what Ford did. On the heels of The George Floyd incident, skillfully played by Black Lives Matter to convince people that “systemic racism” was a thing, and ever-escalating and credulously accepted bogus claims of indigenous “genocide” here in Canada, handing over control of education to the activists was just the politically easiest (if most cowardly) path to take. Ford will go down in infamy as the guy who discredited the PC party in an ultimately futile attempt to save his own fat ass. The upshot has been,

Decolonization: Purging curriculum and pedagogy of anything deemed to be of European or “white” origin. Diversity: Hire as many non-white school staff as possible as quickly as possible without much concern for ability to do the job well. Equity: take whatever measures necessary to ensure equal identity-group academic and behavioural outcomes (or at least to mask or hide any inequities). Inclusion: Excluding white or “white adjacent” people (such as Asians) in order to attain those aims. None of this makes any sense if your goal is to improve education.

Decolonization, for example, entails accepting as equally valid non-western “knowledge systems”. If an Indigenous elder “has a knowing”, we are not to demand evidence. The scientific method cannot be applied in such cases. The thing is, activists are really not interested in facts. They are interested in seizing and holding power. They have been very successful under Ford.

The unions, captured by the same activists as Ford, have cheerfully gone along with all of this. They spend vast amounts of their members’ money promoting it. So they have to play dumb and pretend that other things, underfunding and class sizes come up most often, are what have caused the system to spiral into disarray recently, not a lack of academic rigour or a lack of discipline. A great example, which I have written about before, is de-streaming (putting same-aged kids working at the grade 6 level in the same classes with those working at the grade 10 level). The union leaders know it is a terrible idea, and in fact used to have policies against it. But when it came time to face down the activists, they immediately caved. Who wants to be called “racist”?

The activists like de-streaming because it hides the fact that black and indigenous kids are working well below Asians kids.

That leaves the general public, who depend on a quality public education system for their future economic and social well-being, in a tough spot. No one, not the government, College of Teachers, School Boards, or Teachers’ Unions, is advocating for a high caliber, merit-based system characterized by high expectations of staff and students, in which students are expected to make a strong effort, teachers’ marks accurately and honestly reflect student achievement, and unruly or violent behaviour is not tolerated.

And what about the opposition political parties? The Liberals and NDP would almost certainly double or triple (NDP) down on DEI if elected. I predict that during the election campaign, they will blame the problems on not enough DEI funding and will vow to throw money at it, to the cheers of the activists and unions.

Whatever you may think of those DEI activists, they have been very effective in taking control of the system. It will take an equally determined and clever counter movement to wrest power back and bring sanity and integrity to education in Ontario.

Politicians and Unions certainly won’t lead the way. But when they see the writing on the wall, they will jump on the bandwagon and tell you they were really against DEI all along.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read “Hymns to Freedom” Show Presents Conflicting Narratives

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