EDITORIAL: Education protesters ignore financial reality

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The reason for the protests in the education sector against Ontario Premier Doug Ford and the Progressive Conservatives is easy to understand.

It’s because they’re trying to fix problems former Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne and her government failed to address.

Specifically, that costs in the education sector have been rising while enrolment and academic quality have been falling, with more than half of Grade 6 students, for example, failing to meet the provincial standard in math.

The myth that education in Ontario has been grossly underfunded over the years, created and sustained by the teacher unions, is simply inaccurate.

In 2017, the Fraser Institute, a conservative think tank, examined per student spending in Ontario public elementary and secondary schools over the previous decade.

Accounting for inflation, spending rose by 23.4% from $10,762 to $13,276 per student in constant dollars, while enrolment dropped by 110,000 students, or by 5.2%.

Despite that, the number of teachers in the system increased by 14,000, to 126,000.

Given that education is the second-largest expense in the provincial budget ($29.1 billion, or 18.3% of all spending last year, excluding the teacher pension plan) after health care ($61.3 billion or 38.7%), the status quo is unsustainable.

Especially with 15 years of wanton Liberal spending having left Ontario as one of the world’s most indebted, non-national governments.

Ontario’s teacher unions have fought against every provincial government of every political stripe, and disrupted the education of students in order to protest, for decades.

This includes during the NDP government of 1990-1995 led by Bob Rae; the Progressive Conservative governments from 1995-2003 led by Mike Harris and Ernie Eves and the Liberal governments from 2003-2018 led by Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne.

Predictably, the protests against Ford’s government have already started, after just 10 months in power.

The problem in education is that the status quo is not an option, lest government policy ends up fitting the definition of insanity, which is to keep doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.

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The usual suspects aligned against the Ford government want the Progressive Conservatives to keep throwing good money after bad into what is clearly a broken and inefficient template for funding education.

To help address this, the government intends to reduce the total number of teaching positions in Ontario schools by 3,475 over four years through attrition, not layoffs, saving taxpayers $851 million.

It’s true this means fewer teachers will have to work harder to improve dismal academic results in critical subjects like math, with the caveat they will need proper academic training to do so, which has been lacking for years.

Fixing the fiscal and academic problems plaguing public education that the Ford government inherited from the Liberals isn’t going to be easy.

But it has to be done and it must start now.