It's Bealtaine time – May Day has come
and gone – tulips are opening – apple trees are in blossom – the winter-spring
drought is showing signs of abating, with rain falling, and foliage beginning to unfurl.
Are there any signs that the drought of official action on the PCVS front may come to an end as well?
A few weeks ago, a widespread group of concerned citizens
were driven by this drought to put up $200,000
of their own cash reserves to seek a court injunction to halt the closure of
PCVS in its tracks. A second action, seeking a full judicial review which might
nullify the KPR decision, was also in the works.
As reported on the Peterborough
Needs PCVS website last week, both sides have agreed to skip the injunction process and put the matter straight to judicial review. The case will likely be heard before
the end of the school year.
The question remains, however, as to why the case is being
allowed to go even this far.
You’d think that school board officials, when faced with
public outrage and legal action, would take
the hint. You’d think they’d step back, realize that closing PCVS is
a bad idea, and start a new
brainstorming session to figure out another way forward.
The Simcoe board
changed course on Barrie Central. The Waterloo board
changed course on Kitchener Collegiate. The Grand Erie board changed course on Brantford Collegiate.
But KPR? Admit
that something’s wrong? Preposterous! Why would they, when they can use our tax dollars to defend their decision in court?
That’s right – members of the public get to pay the legal costs of both sides, while the administrators who made the bad decision continue
to take home their six-figure salaries, also at our expense, regardless of the outcome.
Moreover, the judicial review case is essentially one of technicalities. The greater legal question
is left untouched. How is it that, in
Ontario, unaccountable school board administrators and out-of-town trustees can
take it upon themselves to deprive an entire city ward of 15,000
education-tax paying citizens of all regular
school services – plainly in contempt of common
sense, municipal plans, and provincial policy – while the mayor,
city council, our MPP, the Minister of Education, the Minister of Municipal
Affairs, and the Premier tell the public that they’re powerless to stop them?
To put the matter more bluntly, why are a group of private citizens forced to spend their
own money to protect the public interest?
We’re already
paying the salaries and expenses of all those public officials who claim to be
powerless to intervene. We’re already
paying the salaries of the oblivious school board administrators who started us
down this road to nowhere. We’re already paying for the school system
itself. Now we have to pay lawyers and court fees in an effort to simply get
the school board to recognize the law
and the basic rights of the people
they serve.
In practice, the OMB is a flawed institution which has
become a tool used by deep-pocketed developers to override the public interest.
But in principle at least, it exists to ensure that everyone is playing by the rules.
But if a school board
makes a decision that flies in the face of municipal and provincial legislation
– then what?
Can you file a case with the OMB? Negative. They don’t
hear challenges to school board decisions.
Can you call the provincial Ombudsman? Negative. They’re prohibited from responding to
complaints about school boards. The NDP caucus has repeatedly tried to change this,
but were overruled by McGuinty.
Can you call the Ministry
of Municipal Affairs? Negative. Even though schools are obviously the
primary anchors of residential
communities, the territorial power-games in the bureaucracy have resulted in a schizophrenic public service whereby schools are entirely the responsibility of
the Ministry of Education.
And the Ministry of
Education? They send you back to the “locally-elected” trustees. And here’s
the crux of the issue.
The Harris government set up our current boards of trustees
as “human shields” to deflect
criticism from the autocratic, backroom deals at Queen’s Park that actually
determine educational policy and practice. McGuinty’s Liberals have only made
matters worse, taking full advantage of the Machiavellian system created by Harris to maintain centralized
control of our schools behind closed doors.
McGuinty has the authority to change the purview of the
Ombudsman’s office. But that would mean opening up his mishandling of public
education to independent scrutiny.
Why would he want that?
 | ||
| Former PC MPP Elizabeth Witmer |
Instead of facing the music, last week McGuinty managed to
convince Kitchener-Waterloo MPP Elizabeth
Witmer, the education critic for
the PC party, to resign the seat she had held for 22 years and take a job as head of the Workplace Safety Insurance
Board, as reported by the Toronto Star.
A by-election will be held in the next six months. If
the Liberal candidate is elected instead of Witmer’s PC replacement, McGuinty will regain a de facto majority in the
legislature. He won’t need to make a
deal with NDP leader Andrea Horwath
to get next year’s budget passed. We'll be back in the hands of the unaccountable majority government which has seen billions of dollars change hands in backroom deals in the Ministries of Energy and Health over the past
eight years - usually with dubious results. Read Martin Regg Cohn's commentary on McGuinty’s power games here.
Witmer was one of the few PC caucus members to command
respect from all sides. She was also the only
voice at Queen’s Park capable of intelligently criticizing the Liberals on the education file. NDP education
critic Peter Tabuns, an energy-and-environment
man, doesn’t seem to know the file, and greeted PCVS demonstrators at Queen’s
Park in December with rhetorical clichés.
Witmer claims that her departure was purely a career move
and wasn’t politically motivated. McGuinty made a complementary claim in offering her the
civil service job, which pays 50% more than her MPP salary. But it’s easy to
see why Witmer might be tired of working under unimaginative PC leader Tim Hudak, and discouraged at finding
her own caucus members unwilling to support certain sexuality-oriented aspects
of the anti-bullying bill she put forth in the legislature last fall.
With Witmer gone, there’s no one left at Queen’s Park to seriously challenge the McGuinty
government’s mishandling of Ontario’s
school system.
And that’s just they way they want it.
When elected officials completely ignore the demands from the public they are supposed to serve and when, in this case over 100 thousand dollars is raised by the public to fight against this hidden agenda which is counter to the basic, and well known principals that foster positive development and growth of cities (so well known, in fact, that they are written into the Places to Grow Act)then the simple answer is: we smell a rat. Something really stinks and whatever this agenda is, they sure wanted to push it through here in Peterborough with the closure of PCVS, quite possibly the best public high school in Canada. This decision was so blatantly against the common good which must have been embarrassingly obvious to all who were even remotely paying attention. (Embarassing as we have allowed our public institutions to sink to this level of fighting us rather than representing us) I would go a step further in a description of this agenda as originating or working through the highest level of the Ontario government, who use the school boards as "human shields" as noted. We could also suspect that, with the reorganization of school boards that occurred with the Harris government that this agenda has either been one that has been planned for quite some time, or is being piggy backed into the system now that central control has been achieved. For this agenda to be so against the common good and blatantly opposed to the healthy development of communities, we can suspect that there is substantial personal gain for the politicians that allow this agenda to be promoted, and that there is a flow of money coming through private business interests to grease the wheels of the political machine. There must be incredible profit to be gained by private interests which, no doubt are chomping at the bit to get a more direct hold of education budgets to funnel into their own hands. The push of this agenda, which results in closure of successful schools, like PCVS, and for it to be so coordinated, deceptive, and against the public good demonstrates we have a real battle on our hands. Finally, we just need to look at the U.S.A. to get a glimpse of what is driving this agenda, as so often, as the U.S goes, so goes Canada. Diane Ravitch's blog is a great starting point for a glimpse of what may be coming our way. http://dianeravitch.net/
ReplyDeleteThanks B. Wood for your astute analysis throughout the PCVS closure fiasco.