There is a growing problem for the Ontario conservative government at Queen’s Park. Occasionally, the government realizes it made a boo-boo. Frankly, it has had a lot of opportunity for this in the last year but, only occasionally, the cabinet will have what might be referred to as a “Come to Jesus event” when it realizes it did not do the job properly. It has to back track.
This would like that guy with the bad hair cut in the United Kingdom’s parliament finally admitting that Brexit was a really stupid idea.
Mind you, the funny farm at Queen’s park is not supposed to do anything as dumb.
Yet, Dougie and the gang do make the odd boo-boo. Take the ‘class-size’ instructions to school boards. The school boards were told that they should start increasing average class sizes (above grade 4) from the present 22 students to 28 over the next four years. It was up to the boards how they would accomplish this but the net result in the first year was to save the province $250 million.
As you can imagine there were the loud screams and incantations directed at Dougie and the gang but they were immune to that. The school boards did not like it but they moved things around, fired excess teachers and support staff and assured Queen’s Park that their will would be done.
What we expect happened was that the new education minister who was told to fix the mess noted that there were new contracts to be negotiated this fall with the province’s teachers. It seems he had paid attention in school and had an understanding of cause and effect. He realized that he was going to be faced by some really pissed off teachers this fall.
And that might just be why the school boards are currently trying to figure out how to unfire a lot of teachers!
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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry
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