STANDING COMMITTEE ON COMITÉ PERMANENT DE
ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE L'ADMINISTRATION DE LA JUSTICE
EDUCATION QUALITY IMPROVEMENT ACT, 1997 LOI DE 1997 SUR L'AMÉLIORATION DE LA QUALITÉ DE L'ÉDUCATION
ONTARIO SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS' ASSOCIATION
ONTARIO PUBLIC SCHOOL BOARDS' ASSOCIATION
YORK REGION ROMAN CATHOLIC SEPARATE SCHOOL BOARD
ONTARIO ASSOCIATION FOR COUNSELLING AND ATTENDANCE SERVICES
BOARD OF TRADE OF METROPOLITAN TORONTO
ONTARIO PUBLIC SUPERVISORY OFFICIALS' ASSOCIATION
CONTENTS
Tuesday 21 October 1997
Education Quality Improvement Act, Bill 160, Mr Snobelen /
Loi de 1997 sur l'amélioration de la qualité de l'éducation,
projet de loi 160, M. Snobelen
Dominion Institute
Mr Rudyard Griffiths
Ontario Secondary School Students' Association
Ms Erin McCloskey
Ms Rebecca Hartley
Ontario Public School Boards' Association
Mrs Lynn Peterson
Ms Sandra Anstey
York Region Roman Catholic Separate School Board
Ms Tina Molinari
Toronto Teachers' Federation
Ms Frances Gladstone
Ontario Parent Council
Mr Bill Robson
Ms Mary Margaret Laing
Mr Jordan Lannan
Mr Richard Luft
Ontario Association for Counselling and Attendance Services
Mr Steve McCann
Ms Jill Elliott-Brennan
Ontario Federation of Labour
Ms Ethel LaValley
Ms Janet Koecher
Board of Trade of Metropolitan Toronto
Ms Louise Verity
Mr Paul Fisher
Mr John Bech-Hansen
Ontario Public Supervisory Officials' Association
Mr Terry Lynch
Mr Ron Sudds
Mr Grant Yeo
Ms Patti Haskell
STANDING COMMITTEE ON ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE
Chair / Président
Mr Gerry Martiniuk (Cambridge PC)
Vice-Chair / Vice-Président
Mr E.J. Douglas Rollins (Quinte PC)
Mr Dave Boushy (Sarnia PC)
Mr Bruce Crozier (Essex South / -Sud L)
Mr Jim Flaherty (Durham Centre / -Centre PC)
Mr Garry J. Guzzo (Ottawa-Rideau PC)
Mr Peter Kormos (Welland-Thorold ND)
Mr Gerry Martiniuk (Cambridge PC)
Mr David Ramsay (Timiskaming L)
Mr E.J. Douglas Rollins (Quinte PC)
Mr Bob Wood (London South / -Sud PC)
Substitutions / Membres remplaçants
Mr Jim Brown (Scarborough West / -Ouest PC)
Mr Tom Froese (St Catharines-Brock PC)
Mrs Lyn McLeod (Fort William L)
Mr Dan Newman (Scarborough Centre / -Centre PC)
Mr Gerry Phillips (Scarborough-Agincourt L)
Mr Mario Sergio (Yorkview L)
Mr Bruce Smith (Middlesex PC)
Mr Bud Wildman (Algoma ND)
Also taking part / Autres participants et participantes
Ms Frances Lankin (Beaches-Woodbine ND)
Clerk / Greffier
Mr Douglas Arnott
Staff / Personnel
Mr Andrew McNaught, research officer, Legislative Research Service
STANDING COMMITTEE ON COMITÉ PERMANENT DE
ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE L'ADMINISTRATION DE LA JUSTICE
TUESDAY 21 OCTOBER 1997 MARDI 21 OCTOBRE 1997
Report continued from volume A.
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EDUCATION QUALITY IMPROVEMENT ACT, 1997 LOI DE 1997 SUR L'AMÉLIORATION DE LA QUALITÉ DE L'ÉDUCATION
Consideration of Bill 160, An Act to reform the education system, protect classroom funding, and enhance accountability, and make other improvements consistent with the Government's education quality agenda, including improved student achievement and regulated class size / Projet de loi 160, Loi visant à réformer le système scolaire, à protéger le financement des classes, à accroître l'obligation de rendre compte et à apporter d'autres améliorations compatibles avec la politique du gouvernement en matière de qualité de l'éducation, y compris l'amélioration du rendement des élèves et la réglementation de l'effectif des classes.
DOMINION INSTITUTE
The Chair: Our next presentation will be the Dominion Institute. Please proceed.
Mr Rudyard Griffiths: I'd like to thank everyone for the opportunity to address you today. For those of you who do not know me, I'm appearing today as director of the Dominion Institute. To provide my remarks with some context, I'll begin by saying a few words about the institute, its mission and interest in Bill 160.
The institute was founded in February of this year by a group of young Canadians concerned about our growing sense of civic disillusionment and its effect on informed public debate and the existence of a strong and inclusive national identity.
The Dominion Institute's mission is to encourage civic responsibility and informed public debate by educating the general public, opinion makers and especially young Canadians about Canada's history and civic traditions.
The practical work of the institute consists of conducting original research into Canadians' knowledge of the country's past and building programs that assist Canadians in rediscovering links between their history and common identity today. The institute is currently supported by a generous grant from the Toronto-based Donner Canadian Foundation.
The institute obviously has a special interest in education and its connection to the basic goals of fostering national belonging, informed debate and active citizenship. Considering the institute's mandate, my remarks today will be contained to the impact of Bill 160 on education in the classroom, and not on the much-discussed effects of the bill surrounding educational finance and labour issues. These are not my areas of expertise.
The debate that has raged around Bill 160 has been nothing less than cacophonous, some might say to the point of incoherence. Yet I would argue that beneath the all armchair punditry and public mudslinging there is a consensus that the status quo is not enough. We at the institute agree. We also think anyone would be hard pressed to claim that our education system is a ringing success.
We have all heard about Ontario students' middling performance on national math and science tests. Let me share with the committee some the institute's research into young Ontarians' knowledge of history and social studies, an area of inquiry that has been woefully neglected.
Last Canada Day, the institute released a national survey that examined what 18- to 25-year-olds know about their nation's past. The results were carried on front pages of the Southam chain of newspapers and on television and radio across the country. The comments of your colleague John Hastings in connection to the survey graced the pages of the Washington Post and the Christian Science Monitor.
The findings of the survey were alarming and embarrassing, to say the least. The average score of youth on 30 basic questions covering political, cultural and economic and military history was a dismal 34%. Of a series of questions that touched on national unity, only 6% of Ontario youth were familiar with the Quiet Revolution. More young Ontarians thought Neil Armstrong, not Marc Garneau, was the first Canadian in space. When asked to give the date of Confederation, only 38% could name 1867; another third could not even give the century in which Confederation occurred. A disappointing 38% knew that battle of Vimy Ridge occurred in the First World War, an event that many have argued was crucible of the modern Canadian identity. Lastly, more Ontarian youth thought Norman Rockwell, rather than Robert Service, was Canadian.
Considering these results, I feel that it's not a stretch to argue that Ontario's school systems have failed to impart to our youth a basic understanding of the country's past. More worrying still, it seems that much of Ontario's youth lacks the knowledge to participate in society as informed citizens, the basic goal of any education system.
If you don't know about the Quiet Revolution, if you don't know how long the country has existed, if you're unfamiliar with seminal events like Vimy Ridge, it becomes next to impossible to understand the facts and issues at stake in important national debates like unity.
In sum, the institute's survey shows that our education system is creating a knowledge gap in the minds of youth today that may ultimately imperil the practice of consensual participatory democracy in Canada.
Against the backdrop of the kinds of results I've just cited and those provided by national math and science studies, let me provide the committee now with our analysis of Bill 160. We think the litmus test for Bill 160 should be the following: Does the act hinder or assist the implementation of the kind of goal-oriented and content-specific curriculum that Ontario's students desperately require and deserve?
We believe that Bill 160 does further the development of a learning environment sympathetic to the much-needed curriculum reforms that have been implemented and those that are still to come. Let me back up this assertion by making reference to a few of the bill's provisions, first the much-discussed and disputed issue of class size.
By giving the government power to set the size of classes, the bill provides Ontario's elected representatives with an important tool to create a better learning environment in the province's classrooms. Smaller classes are something that parents have demanded and many teachers have championed, but it is a reform that has failed to happen. Smaller classes will undoubtedly be an important strategic asset when it comes to implementing the needed curriculum reforms, and institutional entropy is something Ontario's students should not have to suffer.
Turning to the equally discussed issue of preparation time for teachers, it is my understanding that cuts in preparation time are being undertaken to allow teachers to spend more time in the classroom. This bill, if enacted, would see teachers spend seven out of eight periods rather than six out of eight per day, again, as many people have commented, putting Ontario in line with national averages. I have a concern, though, that cutting prep time before introducing curriculum reform may slow the transition from the Common Curriculum to the much-needed new guidelines.
I would recommend that the government consider phasing in the reduction of prep time over a stated period. Once the curriculum reforms are introduced, though, their focus on providing teachers with concrete content guidelines should reduce the need for the current surplus of preparation time.
Concerning the total time students spend in school over the course of the educational year, I believe the government should be commended for its intention to extend the school year by two weeks in the primary system and by three weeks in the secondary system. These changes can but increase the performance of Ontario youth on national tests and surveys like the one we commissioned. I do not think it's a coincidence that Alberta youth scored the highest on our survey, considering that they receive almost 1,000 hours of instruction per year versus the 800 in Ontario.
Why should Ontarians care about the interconnections between Bill 160 and implementation of new curriculum guidelines in the classroom? I believe it's because we desperately need an effective curriculum in the classroom and not just on the desks of officials of the Ministry of Education and Training, the fate all too often of new curriculum reforms proposed in this province.
Let me provide the committee with two obvious but often ignored reasons for creating an environment favourable for the implementation of rigorous curricula, an environment that I believe Bill 160 takes a large step towards making a reality.
First, rigorous curriculum that sets out specific content guidelines make for a fairer and more just society. The fact is that disadvantaged students have high school mobility rates. According to some surveys, up to 40% a year of disadvantaged students migrate from one school board to another. When their parents are forced to move in search of work, disadvantaged students find themselves in classrooms where they're confronted with a entirely new interpretation of the curriculum that forces them to either redo work they've already completed or start a program of study they're entirely unfamiliar with. The lack of a content-specific curriculum in the classrooms creates a knowledge gap between disadvantaged and privileged students that directly affects their life prospects through no fault of their own. As a matter of social justice, the government needs every tool at its disposal to successfully implement content-specific curriculum. These tools necessarily include more class time, a longer school year and smaller class sizes.
The second reason for endorsing the proposed changes contained in Bill 160 has do with the desperate need for more cultural capital in Ontario's classrooms, a need clearly identified by our study. What do I mean by cultural capital? To read a newspaper or understand a political issue, students require the factual knowledge shared by the rest of society. Numerous studies have shown that the single greatest factor in a student's performance at school is his or her learning environment at home.
If our schools fail to live up to their responsibility of imparting factual knowledge to students, we all run the risk of becoming passive accomplices in perpetuating social differences and impeding the concepts and reality of active and articulate citizenship. Again, smaller classes, more teaching time and a longer school year will enhance our education system's ability to foster cultural capital in the schools.
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Let me make a warning, though, to proponents of Bill 160. This bill's effect on the education system in terms of generating higher test scores, which seems to be an all-encompassing obsession today, will be next to nothing if the government does not introduce rigorous, content-specific curriculums.
The curriculum framework for grades 1 to 9 was a step in the right direction. We thought there should have been more content guidelines in that document, and we look forward to working with the ministry to ensure this happens in the upcoming secondary school curriculum framework.
For the reasons I've just mentioned above and a host of others, Ontario will benefit from Bill 160. Its potential to have a positive effect on class size, in-class instruction time and total hours of instruction ultimately furthers our collective ability to create a socially just and content-rich education system.
Let me conclude by quoting the Prime Minister of Canada's September 24 reply to the speech from the throne, where he made extensive reference to our survey. The Prime Minister stated: "I was very troubled to read a survey this summer that suggested that young Canadians knew too little about each other and what we have done together. Too often we forget, or do not know, what we have accomplished. We must find ways for young Canadians to learn what they share, to know what we have done, and to gain pride in the nation's past."
I want to thank the committee for the opportunity to share the institute's views with you, and I hope my remarks have been helpful in some small way. Thank you. If there are any questions, I'd be happy to take them.
The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr Griffiths. We have approximately five minutes per caucus, and we start with Ms McLeod.
Mrs McLeod: Thank you very much. I do have an understanding of how you made it to the coveted minister's list. I want to ask you, particularly given the institute's focus on society's declining sense of civic responsibility, how you feel about what I consider to be a subversion of the normal process of having citizen representation in the public hearing process, in the sense of the minister having presented a rather exclusive list, with some thousand people who had called and asked to present to this committee effectively being shut out of the process as a result of that.
Mr Griffiths: That's what they call a loaded question, but I'll --
Mrs McLeod: It is. I think it's fair, though.
Mr Griffiths: Indeed it is fair. Our interest in civic responsibility is really its interconnections with history, not government procedure. I'm not an expert in government procedure, nor am I particularly familiar with the minutiae of the details that were made around the organization of these hearings, so I don't really feel confident in answering that question. I'm going to disappoint you. Sorry.
Mrs McLeod: That's also fair, but some of us are so concerned about what we see as being an erosion of the democratic process as well as the opportunities for civic involvement that an institute that professes to be concerned about declining civic responsibility might want to begin to address it from -- I'm not suggesting a partisan political aspect. I think you might serve a very useful purpose in commenting on it from a non-partisan perspective.
I'm not sure if this stretches the institute's interests too far. It certainly has some historical interest. In commenting on a previous piece of education legislation, Bill 104, Justice Archie Campbell referred to one of the clauses in that particular bill as being the Henry VIII clause, because it gave power to cabinet to override through regulation its own act. He said this is called the Henry VIII clause in legal jurisdictions because it's the kind of power that only absolute monarchs used to hold.
Bill 160 has shocked some of us in terms of the sheer responsibility given not to the elected majority of government but to cabinet. There are some 186 areas in which the Lieutenant Governor can act by regulation, including at least one area in which there is power to override not only the act itself but any other act of the Legislature through regulation.
Is that an area of concern, in terms of the erosion of democracy, that the institute will address?
Mr Griffiths: No, I think our interest and focus right now is primarily on the individual's relationship or responsibility to the renewal of Canada's democratic traditions. If you could find a funder who would be willing to underwrite the cost of study for us into the more procedural matters you outlined, I'd be happy to undertake that.
Mrs McLeod: Let me push it a little further, since we have the luxury of five minutes, which is very rare. Again I want to push you on the civic responsibility, which you say the institute is interested in addressing. We have school boards which are about to be elected within the next couple of weeks in what has been a normal process, except that the school boards will no longer hold any real accountability for the expenditure of funds, for the levying of funds. They will have no taxation power. The government will hold that, take the taxation power exclusively. In fact, because that kind of power is being held largely in the hands of cabinet, those members who are elected provincially are essentially being disfranchised. Does this not disfranchise and discourage the average citizen from becoming involved in the process of government?
Mr Griffiths: I think some of the debate around this bill is healthy in so far as the people are picking up their papers and reading about the history of education reform in this province. Indeed there are maybe particular issues of concern in terms of Canada's democratic traditions, but again, I'm not an expert in that area. My particular interest is in curriculum and the role of curriculum in fostering informed citizenship.
Mrs McLeod: Which of course is not addressed in Bill 160, the role of curriculum.
Mr Griffiths: It's not addressed, but I think there are the tools in 160, a toolkit there that does provide an environment or schemata for the implementation of important curriculum reform. I'll reiterate for the proponents of Bill 160 that if they think they're going to get higher test scores just because of procedural changes, they're not going to get them. They have to introduce the right kind of curriculum.
We participated partially in consultations about the curriculum framework from 1 to 9. We were happy with the direction of it. I don't think we were overjoyed about what was finally in there. We look forward to working on the next round of curriculum revisions, and we'll be speaking our mind quite frankly about what appears at the end of that process.
I'm not hearing this in the realm of public commentary, where people are drawing connections between this bill, curriculum and higher test scores. This bill alone will not get you higher test scores.
Ms Lankin: Thank you for your presentation. I'd like to continue in that vein and ask you to begin by explaining to me the tools that you see are available here that are going to help us implement a better curriculum.
Mr Griffiths: Implementing a better curriculum is a real challenge. When we had the Common Curriculum that was suggested, it really didn't trickle down into the individual school boards. It was a resource document that I think pretty much stayed on the desks of bureaucrats in the Ministry of Education. We have to think in terms of, what is the right kind of environment for enacting these curriculum changes? I would be hard pressed to make an argument that less in-class time is something that would have a positive effect on an implementation process.
Ms Lankin: Can I ask you a question about specifically that issue and the class-size issue? You referred to both of them in your presentation. You said on class size that for years people have been talking about getting smaller class sizes and it hasn't happened. In fact, historically there has been over the years a substantial reduction in class size through the processes of discussions between boards and teachers. The increase in class sizes that we've seen of late, through the previous two governments and this government, has been as a result of restraint on funding.
In that context, we now have a bill which says in the long title that it's something to limit class sizes. Yet there is no maximum class size set out in the bill. There is no number set out in the bill. It doesn't indicate whether it's going to limit or increase, and that surely will become a function of the funding in place to support class sizes, the number of teachers who are there.
We have today documentation that in the next budget year the government intends to cut $667 million. They've been keeping it a secret from us, but now we have that information. How do you see this bill providing a tool to limit class size and improve the delivery of a new curriculum in that context? I fail to see how that's possible.
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Mr Griffiths: My hope is that the government will see those interconnections between smaller class size, better quality of education and higher test scores. That may be a leap of faith on my part, but I feel our institute's discussions with the ministry have been in good faith up until this point. We'll continue to operate within that framework until something changes.
Ms Lankin: That's interesting, because that comes back to the whole concept of civic responsibility. As an organization that is very involved and focused on that, it seems to me that it shouldn't have to be a leap of faith on some key critical areas where people are engaged and involved actively in commenting on and contributing to reform of a system as important as our education system. In fact, these discussions about quality education should be debating what an appropriate class size is with expert testimony on that, as opposed to setting up a framework in which civic participation becomes a thing of the past and in which three cabinet ministers sign a document, an order in council, and it can be changed based on political priorities or funding priorities -- and not just by this government, in which you may have some faith, but by other governments that you may not have faith in.
That's the thrust of those who have criticisms about the bill, beyond the concern that it is to mask further cuts in funding. Increased civic responsibility must provide a role for participation by the public, and we have seen in so many bills from this government a direction in the exact opposite way, that takes power into executive council. That's not even the elected assembly debating it; it's into the back rooms. Does that not raise a general concern outside the specifics of the bill?
Mr Griffiths: Again, I'm not an expert in governance-related issues, but as I understand it, the new councils will have a representative function, so there will be different conduits for participation and input by parents into the educational processes their children experience in the classrooms. They're lofty issues we're talking about here, parliamentary supremacy versus --
Ms Lankin: Actually, they're not. That's the problem. They're kind of right down to the classroom: how many kids are going to be there, who's going to be teaching them, whether they're a teacher or not, whether they have the ability in outside-classroom time to have one-on-one contact with teachers. That's what it's really all about, when looming behind it is taking out $677 million.
While I appreciate your general concern around the quality of curriculum -- I appreciate your report on the study you did, and I'd love to get a copy of that. I think those are really important issues and I'm glad you're looking at them, but in terms of the context of commenting on this specific bill, we've got to get down to what it's going to mean in the classroom over the course of the next year. It's not, in any way that I can see, going to contribute to improving the quality, which I think is your goal and which we should all agree on. It's the specifics of the bill that have me really concerned.
Mr Froese: Thank you very much for coming.
Just as an aside, I know your expertise isn't in the school trustee formulation. Mrs McLeod said that because of the trustee role, a lot of people didn't want to get involved in running as trustees. To set the record straight, of the 627 positions available, there are only four trustee positions where there are no candidates running. We do have a lot of people who are interested and concerned and want to put their names forward and be involved.
I appreciate your comments with respect to curriculum. As you know, historically -- you put it well -- there has been a lot of debate about changes that have to be made in curriculum. As you correctly said, we've done some of that already in math and language. I appreciate your comments with respect to history, where our results are less than satisfactory in testing.
You talked about preparation time. I'd like to get a little more input from you. You're probably one of the few who are really giving us positive suggestions on what changes we need to make in Bill 160 or any of our education reform.
In the curriculum area you talked about the preparation and more teaching time, and you felt -- I may have it wrong, and you can correct me -- that if we're going to change any part of that, you would like that in conjunction with the new curriculum rather than before or after.
Mr Griffiths: I think there is a case to be made that introducing new curriculum puts additional burdens on teachers in terms of the implementation of that curriculum. There may be -- this is simply an idea -- an approach of phasing in reductions in preparation time to correspond with the introduction of the new curriculum, so that at the beginning of that new curriculum you're keeping preparation time levels at about what they are now and then coming to some mutually agreeable reduction in that time over a stated period.
But once the new curriculum is in place, if it is indeed content-specific -- and that means setting out grade by grade what students are required to learn, and ideally, what kind of different text they should learn from -- that will take some of the burden away from teachers, because it will give them a powerful resource to find out what they're responsible for teaching in the class. It will, in as fair a way as possible, reduce some of the current surplus, if indeed it is a surplus.
Mr E.J. Douglas Rollins (Quinte): Thanks for your presentation. One of the other things that I would like to ask you about that you didn't touch on very much is the taxation. With a great differential between the have-not boards and the have boards in the moneys being spent -- I happen to come from one of the areas in the province where our board is spending about $5,400 per student. Do you feel that the new taxation method we're involved in, with about half being from the province, as far as the tax base is concerned, and roughly half from the property tax base, is an improvement in the right direction? Have you got some thoughts on that?
Mr Griffiths: Again, I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to help you there. I'm not an expert in tax issues. It was hard enough for me to get through the legalese of the bill on the sections that are pertinent to our mandate, so I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to help you on that point.
The Chair: Our time is up. Mr Griffiths, thank you very much for a most learned dissertation on the subject.
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ONTARIO SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS' ASSOCIATION
The Chair: Our next presenters are the Ontario Secondary School Students' Association, represented by Erin McCloskey and Rebecca Hartley. Good afternoon. Please go right ahead.
Ms Erin McCloskey: I'm Erin McCloskey and I'm the student premier of Ontario.
Ms Rebecca Hartley: I'm Rebecca Hartley. I'm the minister of provincial affairs.
Ms McCloskey: Today we're here to represent an outline of the report that will be released later this week, entitled Ontario Students' Response to Bill 160. It's to give everyone here an idea of the specific concerns students have in this province, as well as the recommendations that we feel should be made. That's what we intend to accomplish here today.
I'd like to give everyone some background information about our organization, to put into context how we received this information and to ensure that everyone is aware that we were trying to be accountable to the students of this province while we went about doing this.
We represent over 700,000 students, all the secondary school students of the province. We have four objectives: to act on matters and issues of concern to the secondary school students of the province; to determine student opinion and present and represent that opinion to the Minister of Education and Training, as well as all other appropriate parties; to provide resources and leadership training, where available, to the students of this province to help them achieve their own objectives; to promote communication and cooperation among the secondary school students of Ontario.
While trying to achieve these objectives, we have come up with this report. It is a detailed, point-by-point position on the major issues in the bill and how students feel about these issues and what their specific opinion is.
We would first like to express the disappointment and anger of our constituents that we weren't consulted and there was a real lack of information made available to the secondary school students of this province. As a result, the students remained either misinformed or completely uninformed. The information that was made available to them was scarce and lacked specificity. We would request that in future, when there are major changes being made to the education system, the OSSSA be made aware of these changes so we can effectively act as a conduit to transmit this information to the students of this province.
The method we went about to achieve our objectives, as well as to determine student opinion, was as follows:
Across the province, regional information sessions and forums were held. Questionnaires and surveys were distributed to determine student opinion across the province on specific points of the bill.
Ministry of Education representatives, as well as teachers' union representatives, were invited to all these forums so that in addition to the facts we had available to us, the students could be informed of the different viewpoints concerning this bill. If one of these representatives was not able to attend, material from their organization was presented in an effort to achieve equality and equal representation from all the parties involved.
After receiving all the available information that we could provide to them, the students were asked specific questions on the major points of the bill. From that, regional reports were compiled based on these concerns and opinions. The outline of the report that's to follow, which the minister of provincial affairs will be speaking of, is a specific outline of how the students of this province responded to this bill and what their opinions, concerns and recommendations were.
Thank you in advance for your consideration of student opinion. We would like to remind everyone that this is the opinion we have, the students of Ontario. We did this in the most accountable and time-efficient way we felt we could. I now hand the floor over to Rebecca Hartley.
Ms Hartley: Hi, there. I think everybody has a copy of our report in front of you. You can follow along with me as I discuss the issues here.
The first issue we looked into was limiting class sizes. Overall, the students do agree with class sizes being capped, although there is a concern that there isn't a specific number mentioned in the bill, which is a big issue for the students of our province. We are extremely concerned about the fact that there is no number, because it might actually increase the number in our already overcrowded classrooms. Of course students want to learn, and we feel that more students would be a hindrance to our learning process.
There are a number of specific questions and concerns that we have heard across the province on different occasions. The main one is, of course, what will the standard class size be? That's the main one in this point here. We don't know that, and we'd like to. Will it be an increase or a decrease in student-teacher ratio? This is an extremely important point as well.
There are a number of specific concerns now. For instance, let's say a student needs a specific course for graduation. It's the second semester of their final year. What happens when that class is full? Are you going to put another class in, or are you going to take this number and adhere to it so strictly that that student cannot graduate or cannot go into the program of their choice because they don't have the prerequisites? That's a very strong concern of the students of this province.
We're wondering whether these limits will depend on subject and grade or whether there's going to be a blanket number. We feel very strongly that there should be subject- and grade-specific limits, that there shouldn't be one overall number for every class in every school in this province. The current average class size, outlined in the backgrounder the Ontario Ministry of Education and Training has put out on Bill 160, is 25. Our recommendation is to not exceed that number of students per class.
The next recommendation we have is the point we just talked about, that the number of students should be grade- and subject-specific. As well, resources should be made available to ensure that every student's course requirements for graduation are fulfilled, which is the point we were talking about earlier.
Continuing to teacher preparation time, students recognize the fact that this is extremely important for their education. For a well-rounded education, we see the need for extensive preparation time for the teachers so they can help the students learn in as varied a way as possible. It's not going to benefit our students for teachers who have been teaching the same way for 10 or 20 years to teach them again in their class situation.
Teacher preparation time is a big concern to students, as it will directly affect their extracurricular activities that happen at school, for instance, student government and sports, band, music, drama, that kind of thing. If teachers have less time to prepare for their classes, how many of you feel that teachers are going to want to spend even more time working with extracurricular activities when they have less time to prepare on their own time? I think that's a big issue as well.
Extracurricular activities cannot suffer because of this bill. We feel it is an integral part of a well-rounded education that we as students are receiving in this province.
We feel that a reduction in teacher preparation time will negatively impact the classroom learning we have in this province. We feel a reduction will increase student-teacher ratios, and we're concerned about that.
There are, however, a few students in this province -- a minority, yet they did voice this concern -- who feel that many professions do not get extra preparation time in addition to their normal working day, so they don't feel teachers should differ from any other profession. We're working on our mandate to represent all students in Ontario, and that's what some of the students feel.
We have specific questions and concerns. Our main concern is, how will the government help ensure that the extracurriculars are not slashed, are not cut, are not lost? Those are integral to our education. Will the amount of preparation time allowed correspond to different subjects? For instance, will a gym teacher get the same amount of preparation time as a science teacher? These are questions we have.
Will the reduction of teacher preparation time result in layoffs? If it will, we are concerned about that, because as stated in the report we sent out last month -- that was actually on the secondary school reform, but something major that has happened across the province is that we've heard, "We don't want to lose our young teachers." That's extremely important to us as well.
We have our recommendations. Since the advisers or coaches are needed for extracurricular activities, we suggest an increase in parent-community involvement to off-balance that. We feel that preparation time should be allotted based on subject and grade-level demands. Those are our recommendations on that point.
Continuing to the lengthening of the school year, overall, the students are extremely opposed to this position. There are two major concerns.
The first one is the lessening of exam days. When we see 15 exam days being crunched to 10, we as students are scared. We're very nervous and apprehensive about this, because that gives us less time to prepare for our exams and it gives more chance that we're going to have to write two or more exams during one day, and that's a scary proposition. These exams means a lot. In some classes, they're worth 40% of the overall mark. We feel that it's uncalled-for to write more than one in a day, and it's extremely hard to try to compact 15 examination days into 10.
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The next concern with the lengthening of the school year is the reduction of professional development days from nine to five. We feel that these are of great value, both to our mental health and to the teachers' mental health. We feel that the teachers learn a lot of new materials, they learn new techniques, that kind of thing, and it really does benefit us as students in the classroom, overall.
We would also like to make sure that everybody realizes that the students of this province feel that improving the curriculum and improving the resources and facilities is as valuable to students as the amount of time they actually spend in the classroom. That's another thing to keep in mind.
We have specific questions and concerns. How will this measure save money? We realize that the government has to take $1 billion out of the budget, but how is this going to save money?
Mr Wildman: It's only $667 million.
Ms Hartley: Oh, it's only $667 million. Wow. Super.
Mrs McLeod: The next $667 million.
Ms Hartley: We have to take a large chunk of money. Is that okay, "a large chunk of money"? How is this going to save us money if we're increasing the number of school days? The length of time one spends in a classroom does not necessarily determine the level of quality one receives there, and that's something to keep in mind as well. It's a big issue that we have heard province-wide, that the time spent in a classroom does not equate with quality education.
We have recommendations. The recommendations include: Resources and facilities that are available to the students should be improved. As well, the school year should not be lengthened on either end, the summer or the fall end. This is extremely important to students who have summer jobs, that kind of thing, because it is part of our summer. It's part of the whole idea of having a summer job and making money. We all realize the economic times, that students are working. We all realize that, so that is a big concern across the province.
The next point is access to specialists. We've received a lot of information from the students of the province about this point in the bill. Students across the province believe that access to specialists will be beneficial to their education, yet they have a number of different concerns about the logistics.
They feel a specialist would facilitate hands-on training which might not be available by the classroom teacher and this could be beneficial. They feel that specialists might have greater knowledge in a specific subject area than a teacher and this could be beneficial. Yet do these people have the techniques required to teach effectively? The teachers of Ontario schools have the ability to relay information that they know so that the students may absorb it. Our biggest concern with this aspect of the bill is whether or not these specialists will be able to teach us. Yes, they may know about tool-and-die making, but will they be able to relay that knowledge to us as students? We're a very different group of individuals and I think that's an extremely important point.
We have questions, comments and concerns. Will these professionals be trained on current board policies, for example, board policy on racism, sexual harassment etc? Will these professionals be trained to teach effectively? That is the point that I just made about communication techniques, learning styles, that kind of thing. We feel that the teachers are trained in these matters.
Will these professionals be replacing certified teachers? That's another question that we heard province-wide. Will these professionals be brought in to do seminars and workshops or will they be given the entire course content for an entire semester? That's another question. How will these professionals be evaluated? How do we know that they are being good teachers? These are all questions we've heard in Ontario from the students.
We have our recommendations. We recommend that specialists must be trained to deliver quality education, which is the name of this bill. We feel that specialists should have a teacher's certificate of sorts and they should be instructed on instructional methods. They should have a background in instructional methods as well, through workshops, seminars etc. We also feel that professionals should be trained on exact board policy. That concludes that section.
The next one is school advisory councils. The students of Ontario fully support these school advisory councils. Students feel extremely empowered to make their own decisions and to help out with policy when they are sitting on these councils. We have a lot of energy and that kind of thing and we feel that this is an excellent channel for that.
We as students of this province feel that communication is the key here. We feel that this is a good spot for students to have their voices heard, and yet there only is one student mandated to be on the school advisory councils. We feel that this is an extremely important governing body in the schools and that students should be a part of these.
We have some concerns and questions, of course. Are these councils going to be elected? How will the students become part of these councils? The students are concerned that the decisions made will be based on short-term rather than long-term outcomes. How much influence will these councils have? If they have a lot, then the number of students recommended or mandated per council should also be quite high. How will students be included in these advisory councils? Are school councils not already mandated in this province? That's a question the students have come up with across the province.
We have our recommendation: That the students must be effectively and democratically represented on these councils, as they should be on every other issue that does revolve around them, which is the whole thing here, I guess.
The next issue is education property tax rates. Overall, students are against transferring the responsibility to the government and we have many reasons for this. We think that regionally the school boards realize what the needs are in their own region and we feel that one person overseeing the whole province won't see the minute details that a board would see.
Equality of this program is another widespread concern. The government has stated that taxes will remain in the region where they are raised, yet we feel that it's a very difficult statement to make, seeing as $5 raised in the Metro area is spent extremely differently than $5 raised in, for instance, Thunder Bay. It goes differently, it's spent differently, and it goes a lot further in one area of the province than in the other. That's a concern that we have as students of our province.
We have questions and concerns. Although funding may be more equally distributed across the province in terms of numerical value, we feel that funding does achieve more in certain areas of our province than it does in others.
We have another couple of questions here: Will every school receive the same amount of funding per student or will the funding be region-specific? Therefore, does the board have the power to take the money that they are given and then disburse it? Or does the government have all the power to just go boom, boom, boom with the money. Sorry, Hansard.
Will this funding system affect special programs, as we feel they are extremely important? How would the funding system be reviewed to gauge effectiveness? We think this kind of funding system does have to be reviewed because it is extremely important that we do that. How will the government go about doing that review?
We have a recommendation: That further study of regional needs should be conducted prior to making any sort of funding system in regard to that.
A couple more and then we'll continue with questions. Is that okay? Okay.
The Ontario education number: Students agree with this. We feel it's going to be beneficial when we're transferring from school to school. We agree.
We have a couple of questions: Will this number be retained in the event of a stoppage in one's education? For instance, if a student drops out in grade 12, will that number remain with them when they choose to come back as an adult learner? Who will have access to a student's files as a result of this number? Will it just be the people in my own board or will everybody have access to my file? That's a question that the students have concerns about across the province.
Our recommendations are that the files should not be accessible without written consent from the student or a legal guardian.
Number 8 is the recognition of growing communities. We feel that the construction of new facilities would reduce the incidence of overcrowded classrooms and we fully support the creation of these new school systems or facilities.
The last one is collective bargaining. Students believe that collective bargaining between school boards and teachers' unions is necessary to ensure quality education. And that came straight from the students' mouth.
Now I'm going to turn it back to the student premier and she's going to delivery a bit of a summation. Thanks for your time.
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Ms McCloskey: This is again an outline of what we have received back from the students of this province. We feel that the method we went about to collect this information was the most time-efficient and accountable way we could accomplish the feat we had before us, which was to determine student opinion and relay it to the appropriate organizations.
In conclusion, we'd like to thank you all for your time. I'm going to open up the floor to questions, if that's permissible.
The Chair: Yes.
Ms McCloskey: Just before I do that, though, I'd like to remind everyone that the students are the primary stakeholders in this education system and should remain the absolute priority through all these transitional periods. I would ask that the recommendations that are presented here today, which came from the mouths of informed students in this province, be taken into account when we look at the validity of this bill and look at what it's trying to accomplish and gauge that and measure it against what is in the best interests of the students of this province.
The Chair: We have two minutes per caucus and we'll start off with the third party.
Mr Wildman: I want to congratulate you very much on your presentation and the work that you obviously did across the province among students to come up with your recommendations. One of the criticisms that sometimes has been levelled by government members in particular about deputants is that they aren't positive enough to give specific recommendations. You've done exactly that, so I don't think anyone could be critical in that area.
You raise a lot of very important questions. I would like to deal specifically, though, with one and then I'll turn it over to my colleague. Right at the beginning, when you talked about limiting class size, on behalf of students you talked about the average number that is now used. The government uses 25. That doesn't mean the average number of actual classes; that just means how many students work out to the number of teachers, taking into account some very small classes for special ed and other types of situations, and also those teachers, like principals and vice-principals, who aren't in a classroom.
I understand from what you say that if that number is to be used, 25, or if it's a number of numbers, like smaller for primary grades and higher for more senior grades, that number be a maximum, not an average. Is that basically what you're asking? If they're going to limit class size and there are going to be specific numbers, they should be in the bill and they should be seen as maxima not as averages?
Ms McCloskey: That is the recommendation of the OSSSA.
Mr Wildman: Okay. Thank you very much. That is a positive recommendation.
Ms Lankin: I'll try and be very quick. Ms McCloskey, let me say congratulations on your election to premier. I've followed your career through cabinet over the last couple of years. The presentation is excellent. It's well thought through, as I would expect from your organization.
In your conclusion, you raise the point that students are the centre of this system and that the issues need to be resolved, but you think a strike is not the way to resolve it and you're concerned about what that means to your education. I understand that concern.
We have been trying to press the government to find a resolution because we don't want to see two million students without education, but so far they seem to refuse to move. Would you support a proposal which says put this bill aside and let's get the funding formula and the budget out in front of the public and discuss quality education in the context of all the information? Would that be a first-step resolution that the students would support?
Ms McCloskey: I believe that one of the main general concerns we received from students across the province is that there was a lack of specific numbers. Any effort made by the government or any other organization to clear up some of these issues and come to decisive standpoints -- I think this is answering your question -- on the specifics of the bill before it becomes law essentially, I think the students of this province would think is really beneficial.
Mr Smith: Likewise, I would echo the comments of my colleagues in terms of the content of your presentation. There are a number of very important questions that you have there and I'll certainly endeavour to respond to them directly. I suspect the committee would like to see the responses that I provide to you and I will endeavour to do that as well.
I was concerned when at the outset of your comments you relayed your observations about being uninformed or misinformed and that obligation in part lies here. Certainly we'll endeavour to remedy that problem because that's not correct. You should have a greater say and I agree with that contention.
I just happened to be reading the Sudbury Star here as you were presenting because one of your regional representatives from the Sudbury district was quoted in the Star. Although you didn't allude to it in your presentation, it says, "The OSSSA's position is that a teacher walkout is not in the best interests of students, that they may be making their points or they may be making their political statements, but the OSSSA believes the best job a teacher can do is to be in the classroom teaching students."
Is that an opinion of your organization or an opinion of the individual who was interviewed by the Sudbury Star?
Ms McCloskey: I believe that was Mat Kennealy. Am I correct in that?
Mr Smith: Yes.
Ms McCloskey: He's the regional president for the midnorthern region. That is the official standpoint of this organization on the possibility of a teachers' strike. Although we support and respect the issues for which the teachers are fighting -- and as you can observe from the recommendations and the overall opinions we've presented here, a lot of them coincide with what the teachers are saying -- we do not, however, support a teachers' strike, because if students of this province are not in the classroom, the educational system has failed them. The best interests of the students are in the classroom.
Mrs McLeod: Let me echo the congratulations and appreciation for your presentation. It was very thorough and I am glad to see students here because I think it is more than regrettable that with all of the changes that are introduced to education, and not just by this government, I'll acknowledge, students' voices tend not to be heard.
The questions you've asked are also legitimate. They all deserve answers. If Mr Smith could actually produce the answers, not only for you but for this committee, within the next 24 hours and the answers were found to be satisfactory, I think we would not have the crisis we're facing right now that has both students and teachers in the kind of dilemma that they're in.
One of my concerns is that the answers that are going to come are going to raise even more concerns. We should know, on the issue of the certification of teachers, whether these experts will be able to teach. The College of Teachers came yesterday and expressed very grave concerns about the control by cabinet as to who should be a teacher and who doesn't need to be a teacher and they've recommended that those areas be changed.
One of your questions was about preparation time and whether that means that teachers would be teaching more classes. That's clearly the government's intent, as stated, that teachers would have less preparation time, teachers would have basically more classes to teach and therefore more students.
The issue of class size I think is also extremely important to wrestle with because it's talking about limits on class sizes and saying what they're going to be. But if your recommendation, which is a very positive one, were to be accepted, it would mean considerably more teachers, as we've learned, and that means more dollars rather than fewer teachers and less dollars. With the evidence today that the government's intent is to take another $667 million out, I think that would probably raise concerns.
If those are the kind of answers that are given to you as students, does that increase the students' sense of concern about what's happening to education?
Ms McCloskey: It does indeed. We recommend that class size stay low and that teacher preparation time remain a big focus within our education system because we feel it's essential. Logically, we can see that might equate to keeping as many teachers as we have now, if not hiring more. A very valid point.
We recognize that the government intends to cut more out of education, so our question is, how can we ensure that the students are receiving the best-quality education that they can possibly receive in this province, how can we ensure that our recommendations are followed up on and how can we do this in the face of all these cuts to education? That's a very good question. I'm not sure there's a direct answer to that. I think that could come through consultation with the parties involved.
The Chair: Both of you, thank you very much for being excellent spokesmen.
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ONTARIO PUBLIC SCHOOL BOARDS' ASSOCIATION
The Chair: Our next presentation is the Ontario Public School Boards' Association, Lynn Peterson, president, and Liz Sandals, executive vice-president. Welcome. We have 30 minutes set aside for your presentation, and I would ask you to proceed.
Mrs Lynn Peterson: I certainly appreciate that. I believe you have a copy of our presentation. It does contain a number of very specific recommendations.
First, I'd like to say good afternoon. My name is Lynn Peterson, and I am president of the Ontario Public School Boards' Association. With me today is the executive vice-president, Elizabeth Sandals. We also have some resource people with us today in case you have questions that go into some details and you would like to go a little further than we can.
Let me begin by thanking the Chair and the members of the committee for the opportunity to speak to you today.
Our children are our most precious gifts, and I'm sure we all agree their wellbeing is our highest priority, one that transcends any bias or political preference we may hold. The Ontario Public School Boards' Association exists because of our children. We represent more than 90 public boards of education, serving more than 1.5 million students across this province. Our mission is to promote and enhance public education for the benefit of all of Ontario's citizens through equal access to educational opportunities.
Our new Minister of Education and Training, Mr Dave Johnson, has begun his tenure by allowing his reputation to precede him. If I am to believe what I hear, the minister's approach is tough but fair. Having not met the minister, I, like the teachers' unions, look forward to a fruitful and constructive dialogue before Bill 160 passes into law.
I would like to take the next five or 10 minutes to briefly outline certain elements of the bill as we see it, and then open the floor to your questions and comments. We will only be covering some of what we see in this bill. It is, as you know, 262 pages long, and we have addressed all the other issues in the bill.
First of all, I'd like to say that Bill 160 is an unprecedented piece of legislation that confers arbitrary and unregulated powers to the minister and to cabinet to direct and control every aspect of education in this province and is in the end not acceptable. Once this bill becomes law, every major decision will be done by cabinet through regulation, not legislation, behind closed doors, without consultation, and without the ability of anyone -- not parents, not members of the Legislature, not even the courts -- to stop them.
How sweeping is this legislation? Cabinet can now dictate their terms on the financial and operational affairs of each and every school board. Consider that the minister can issue directives impacting any school board asset, property or liability, including seizure or sale, without cause, and dismiss any officer, employee or trustee who fails to carry out any order, directive or decision made by the minister. This all can be done based upon completely subjective criteria, devoid of any objective evidence, and it ultimately leaves school boards and their communities at the mercy of the minister. That is not democracy; that is government by decree.
Bill 160 is about power -- extreme, excessive and centralized power. Like the War Measures Act, it offers one individual the ability to hijack a board of democratically elected trustees, offers no criteria to indicate when or how this power can be invoked and allows no one -- not the public or even the courts -- to challenge their actions. Should any one individual, organization or government, under any circumstance, now or in the future, have such unfettered power, regardless of the issue, in a democratic society? Clearly the answer is absolutely not.
Since the early 1840s, the local governance of education in Ontario has been based upon the ability of local ratepayers to contribute directly to education through a tax that is dedicated exclusively to the children in their local communities. Bill 160 will bring this long-standing relationship to an absolute end.
Over the last 20 years, this province's support of education has been reduced by more than 20%, this despite the realities of increased enrolment and inflation, and coupled with mandatory programs such as junior kindergarten, special education, building code adjustments, pay equity, the employer health tax, the extension of the Roman Catholic system etc has forced public school boards to increase their reliance on local revenues. School boards have transformed themselves into efficiently run businesses. In fact, public administration is now, on average, about 4% of a board's annual budget. We've been there and cut that.
This association urges the government to step away from its fundamental position on taxation, which robs local communities of any fiscal control. It is undemocratic, outside the government's mandate, and is, we believe, unconstitutional. Having said that, we ask that Bill 160 be amended to provide school boards with continued access to local resources to ensure sufficient funding for all government-mandated programs and for local programs.
For almost a decade, this association participated in consultations with the government of the day to develop a new funding model for education finance. We're still waiting. This concerns us greatly, as it is vital that the right funding model be developed right from the start. The matter of adequacy must be an integral part of the funding model, and it must be monitored continuously. The model must provide sufficient funds to provide programs and services to meet all the needs of all the students in the only system that serves every student who walks through the door. How can school boards continue to effectively run their businesses if they have no idea what their revenues will be?
I participated in weekend meetings with the ministry last month, and instead of seeing an indication of where this new model stands, I saw documentation stating that it was the government's objective to remove an additional $1 billion from the public school boards' budgets. As recently as last week, both Minister Johnson and Minister Eves suggested this figure was inaccurate, but neither gentleman has actually committed to what the amount will be. Let's be clear: The removal of any further funding is absolutely unacceptable. School boards are beyond doing more with less. We're already doing less with less. Even the EIC agrees on this point.
OPSBA does not oppose the restructuring of school boards. It does support the EIC's recommendation that any savings realized through the restructuring of school boards be reinvested in education systems. We hope this government will make the same commitment and move towards a stable and adequate funding model.
Unfortunately, our challenges don't stop there. As a result of the amalgamation from the Fewer School Boards Act and Bill 160, short-term costs will skyrocket as a result of the impacts the transition will bring. Consider the literally dozens of pay scales currently employed. Consider the harmonization of the varied benefit plans and different staffing formulae, and consider the harmonization of services. If board A today is providing junior kindergarten and its new partners do not, you are either going to have to provide or not provide that service. There is a cost that goes with that and with all of the amalgamation. As with the teachers and staff, parents will also expect the services and benefits their children currently enjoy will continue and will be protected as boards struggle through this transition.
What will this cost? Harmonization will add another $300 million to $500 million, coupled with what appears to be a $200-million shortfall in the stub year. I trust you understand by now that this is an impossible situation. Given that school boards cannot absorb these costs, will this government commit to adequate transitional funding? If it does not, the impact won't be felt in Queen's Park; the impact will be felt in the classroom.
As president of this association, as a concerned citizen in this province, as a mother and as a grandmother, I am appalled with this government's desire to circumvent and distort our democratic principles for the sake of a tax cut most of us will never really see.
If public education deteriorates as a result of this bill, and I believe it will, the government will tell you it was your local trustees -- create a scapegoat, blame the system -- but they will be wrong. It will be Bill 160. This is not an act to improve education; this is our very own education War Measures Act. Thank you.
Could I open the floor to questions?
The Chair: Yes. We have probably about six or seven minutes for each, and we will start this time with the government.
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Mr Dave Boushy (Sarnia): Minister Johnson has asked for an extension of time so that negotiations can continue. Are you in favour of that, or would you rather see the majority of teachers go on an illegal strike?
Mrs Peterson: Could you explain the negotiations to me? Are you talking about the discussions between the government and the teachers' unions today?
Mr Boushy: Yes.
Mrs Peterson: In terms of looking at Bill 160, I would welcome an opportunity to sit down with this government and take a look at all the issues we've described in this document, and there are many of them, and have the opportunity to talk about what the bill should or should not look like. One of the things we are absolutely certain about is that this piece of legislation is centralization, central control, that it has too much regulatory power. Those issues must be curbed. Is there time? Is there a willingness to talk about what should happen? Absolutely.
Mr Boushy: How do you feel about an illegal strike by the teachers? Would that hurt kids? How do you feel about it?
Mrs Peterson: I have four grandkids in the system. Public school boards do not condone illegal strikes or illegal walkouts, but we also understand that this protest is not against school boards; it is against the government. What will happen is that every community will have to deal with that. It's a reality. This is not a happy time for anybody.
Mr Newman: Thank you for appearing before the committee today.
Mrs Peterson: It's my pleasure.
Mr Newman: I was interested when you mentioned the tax cut. I just wanted to bring to your attention that there is an excellent article that appeared in the Globe and Mail this month -- I'm not sure of the exact date of it. It was written by someone by the name of Patrick Monahan, who used to work in Premier David Peterson's office. He obviously worked in the office when the Liberals increased taxes in this province 33 times. We've seen in the 10 years ending in 1995 that we had taxes hiked 65 times in this province.
He said in his article that when you cut taxes you actually get more revenue into the provincial coffers; in other words, more money to the taxpayers. It was quite interesting that he gave examples of this government cutting taxes and revenue increasing, while at the same time using examples of other governments that thought the way to get more revenue was to tax higher and tax more and tax deeper. In the examples he gave, revenues actually dropped. It's important to keep that in mind, that the revenue to the province has actually increased with the reduction of taxes.
You mentioned that few people will actually see the impact of the tax cut. They actually will because once fully implemented, lower-income Ontarians will see a tax cut, in some cases, of 40%, while those at the higher end of the income scale will only see an income tax reduction of 18%. Those are very real numbers that people don't talk about. It's very quick and easy to say the tax cut, but when you look at it -- perhaps your research people can tell me if I'm wrong or not -- at the actual dollars in terms of gross revenue to Ontario, and that means the taxpayers, it means more money to the people with less tax.
With more revenue comes more people working. We can't dispute, and I'm sure your research people as well will not dispute, the fact that there are more people working in the province today than there were in June 1995.
Mrs Peterson: That's all very interesting information. That does not justify taking another $1 billion away from the classrooms of this province.
Mr Newman: Can I ask where you got the $1-billion figure?
Mrs Peterson: I actually saw the $1-billion --
Mr Newman: What's interesting today --
Mrs Peterson: -- when I was in the discussions.
The Chair: One at a time.
Mrs Peterson: You asked where I saw the $1 billion.
Mr Newman: Yes.
Mrs Peterson: I saw the $1 billion in the discussions with the government over the course of the weekend in mid-September. I did see it. I was told by the government on more than one occasion that it was $1 billion, non-negotiable. I also saw the actual documentation, that was obviously given and taken back, where the new allocation funding model took $1 billion from the public system alone.
Mr Newman: I haven't seen any figures like that. People talk about this $1 billion.
Mr Wildman: They came from Snobelen first. He was the first one --
Mr Newman: I find it quite interesting today that many of the teacher unions that were in today didn't mention the $1 billion.
Mr Wildman: That's because they've seen the new number. It's $667 million now.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr Newman. We have one minute for Mr Smith.
Mr Smith: I'm going to ask you something about the bill. We've had a lot of input concerning the role of school councils, and I noticed just quickly that in your recommendations you have concerns about legislating school advisory councils. I realize your comments about volunteerism can't be legislated. How did you come to that conclusion, and why?
Mrs Peterson: The parents we talk to are concerned about the legislative aspect of it, and more importantly the regulatory piece. The ability to regulate gives the government -- not this government; any government from now and into the future -- the opportunity to dissolve boards, get rid of trustees and change the role of the school councils. The parents I talk to very clearly want to be involved, and bless them, because that's where they need to be, with the children.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr Smith, you have your answer.
Mrs McLeod: It wasn't very long ago that the Premier of the province said: "We cannot trust school boards and unions for quality education. That's why we need this unprecedented power grab in Bill 160." That's a direct quote, Mr Smith, and I've used the term "unions," not "teachers," just so you can't challenge the accuracy of the quote.
There's no question that's why this bill is in front of us. More recently the government is trying to cast this as a fight for control between the provincial government and teachers' unions, and clearly boards have been written right out of the piece, which disturbs me because it seems to me that there was an important balance of responsibility that included school boards. But Mr Harris has also said, "Where are the boards?" I think he should have asked the question before he wrote you out of the entire piece.
I want to give you a chance to respond to that but, Lynn, first of all I want to come back to the issue of the trust around the numbers, because this entire bill is saying, "Take us; trust us." We have evidence of record that questions whether that trust is merited. But now we have this constant denial of the government's intent, the refusal to present the funding formula and the denial of their intent to take even more money out of education. I don't know how many times the government has to be shown, told, hear their own ministers talk about $1 billion before they believe that's what this government intended to do, and may still intend to do in spite of the public concern.
You saw the $1 billion in document; you have had it stated very clearly that $1 billion was to be taken out. We now have a performance contract for the Deputy Ministry of Education which shows that may now have been renegotiated to $667 million.
I want to ask you about the two other figures you've presented today. One was in this period of time from January to September, that there are harmonization costs that boards will experience of, I think you said, $200 million to $300 million. You also spoke about a $200-million to $300-million shortfall. Is that shortfall the result of the $200 million to $300 million in harmonization, or is that on top of the harmonization costs?
Mrs Peterson: It's the stub year issue that we've recognized. We've done an analysis. We appreciate the fact that the school year and the funding year will now be the same, so there had to be a stub year, January to August of next year.
Unfortunately, when we start to analyse what that would look like in terms of funding, we believe at the first analysis that there is $200 million short of the stable funding we were promised. We are going to do a full analysis by the end of this week and we'll make an announcement around that, because $200 million in what was supposed to be a stable environment is something we cannot tolerate.
Also, in terms of the $300 million to $500 million, those are harmonization costs. That's the cost of all the amalgamations and transition that go with it.
Mrs McLeod: So those would be basically one time only costs in lost dollars in both respects?
Mrs Peterson: The harmonization are annual costs, not one time only. The stub year will be one time only, but harmonization will be ongoing, annual costs.
Mrs McLeod: So potentially that annual cost would be added, in terms of lost spending dollars for school boards, to the $667 million in the deputy minister's contract.
Mrs Peterson: Absolutely, and you have to add into all this the issue of enrolment and inflation, and the fact that we now have four systems, not two. I am fearful for the children of this province, regardless of what system they go to. They will all be equally poor.
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Mr Wildman: Thank you for your presentation. We meet here at a time of serious dislocation perhaps, and a situation that not only boards but students are going to be caught in the middle of. I was struck by words you used a number of times in your oral presentation. This bill is about power; it's about centralization that must be curbed. You used the terms "War Measures Act" and "undemocratic." I was struck by the fact that those same terms were used by another deputant earlier today, a deputant you might not necessarily agree with on many occasions; that was Earl Manners, the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation president. Was your presentation collaborative or have you been influenced by them or have you influenced them? How is it you would both use a similar analysis and compare Bill 160 to the War Measures Act?
Mrs Peterson: I would actually like to think I have that kind of influence, but in terms of the War Measures Act, that is the same term that was used by Justice Archie Campbell in the Bill 104 findings. In point of fact, if you take the time, and I don't know if we've even found them all, in the better part of nine or 10 areas, the War Measures Act is used in this bill; not once, not twice, not half a dozen times. It is there, an opportunity where when the regulation and the regulatory power is in conflict with this or any other act, the regulation takes precedence.
Mr Wildman: It's the Henry VIII clause. Can I ask one specific question about funding? You mentioned the $1-billion figure. Mr Eves said last week that the government may not have to take $1 billion. We know where the number comes from, although my Conservative colleagues don't like to admit it; it comes from Mr Snobelen, who was the first one to mention it. I was around when he did it. Now we have a document that is apparently the performance contract for the deputy minister, which mentions a specific number for 1998-99, which is $667 million. You've talked about the additional cost. Whether it's the provincial government or boards or a combination of the two, if you have to reach those kinds of savings, isn't it the case that you have to have fewer teachers because the majority, approximately 70%, of your budgets are teachers' and support staff salaries?
Mrs Peterson: I suggest that for $1 billion there is no list long enough of the things we could do to find that money. It would just devastate the entire system. Would part of that be fewer teachers? Unfortunately that may be one of the things we'd have to deal with. But that's not delivery of education to children. No one wants humongous class sizes. I have four little ones out there. They need that time with the people who can teach them.
Mr Wildman: Would a capped average class size stop that increase of class size?
Mrs Peterson: No one wants large sizes. The issue of capping of class sizes: You almost think, "Gee, that would be really nice," until you actually think about the fact that if you legislate it, it just makes things absolutely unmanageable. Nobody wants large class sizes. But if you have a board that is eight-and-a-half hours from one end to the other and now you've got darling Mary Jo about to enter a school in the north of Timiskaming and there's already the capped number there, what are you going to do with that little girl?
Mr Wildman: Send her to North Bay, I guess.
Mrs Peterson: Eight-and-a-half hours away? There is an opportunity here to talk about -- if you cap class sizes, if you can say that you cannot have more than X number of little people in a room, then that's the rule. There is and always has been responsible local decision-making on the part of boards. They make those decisions based on the needs of the kids. You cannot, from Queen's Park, tell me what's going to work in Ogden Street school in Thunder Bay -- you can't; you don't know where it is, you don't know what the community is -- any more than I could say what should be happening in the downtown schools of Metro Toronto. What is of value here is the ability of locally elected folks to make decisions that affect their kids.
Mr Wildman: Why would anyone want to be a trustee under this legislation and Bill 104? You're just going to get all the complaints. You don't have any power to make any decisions. You can't raise any revenue. Why are you into this? Why do you want to be a trustee?
Mrs Peterson: If I'm not here, what happens to the kids and what happens to Ontario in the future?
The Chair: Thank you for your presentation here today.
SANDRA ANSTEY
The Chair: Our next presenter is Sandra Anstey. Welcome.
Ms Sandra Anstey: Thank you very much. My name is Sandra Anstey, and I'm here today as a private citizen, as the mother of a daughter in her last year of high school and also as a former trustee with a Metro board of education.
I was elected in 1991. I served three years. During that time, we heard from many think tanks and many institutions, including the Conference Board of Canada, the Economic Council of Canada, the National Committee of Deans of Engineering and Applied Science, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research etc.
All research at that time, and remember this is 1991-92, pointed to the fact that while the skill level required to compete in an information society had increased dramatically over the past 10 years, there had not been a significant improvement in student achievement. Warnings about our ability to fill the jobs of the future were seen at that time as mere scare tactics. That was nearly 10 years ago.
Today the same institutions, and a few new ones, are issuing similar warnings, only this time there's a twist. Jobs for the knowledge-led economy have arrived, and they sit vacant or are filled offshore while youth unemployment soars. In July youth unemployment in Ontario was 18%. We have a problem and it continues to haunt us.
Last week the Conference Board of Canada reported once again, this time that jobs exist but students are not choosing technical career paths. I wonder whether that might be because they leave high school without the requisite courses. It would be very interesting to know how many students graduate from OACs with two sciences and two maths, because that's what you need to get beyond a BA entrance in university today; they've upped the ante.
I'm here to support the Education Quality Improvement Act, also known as Bill 160, not because I agree with every aspect of that bill but because we have to get started somewhere. If it doesn't work to our advantage or to the advantage of students and teachers, then let's work to amend it. Let's not sit idle for the next 10 years and have the same thing happening.
I'd like to address a couple of areas of the bill that I think are worth mentioning because they are the areas of the bill that actually deal with students and teachers.
Class size: I can't imagine that there is one parent in this province who would not want a smaller class size. If capping means, as the person before me said, "What happens to that child?" I suspect that even just at the very base level a thinking person would think, "We'll hire new teachers," because there is nothing to gain by turning out kids who can't compete. This government -- not exactly my government -- I'm sure is like every other government: It doesn't want to be having roaring youth unemployment; it doesn't need to have parents screaming at it because their kids have to travel 150 miles away. This is not even reasonable, to think those sorts of decisions would happen today.
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Focusing on teachers' expertise in the classroom: These are challenging times and it would seem to me that teachers and students alike would not only benefit from an extended period throughout the day with each other, but would welcome it.
More time for learning: We have one of the shortest days and shortest years in the world, and I don't think that's a big surprise for anybody. It's out there. We know it. It's a fact. Nobody's surmising about this. We used to have the second longest in the 1950s, only second to the United States. Now we have the second shortest next to the United States. How are we going to incorporate the new and different skills and knowledge for a high-tech economy in the curriculum if there's not more learning time for everybody?
Access to specialists: This really scares a lot of people. When I was at the Toronto board, I'm proud to say that I assisted in forging three very good partnerships with industry: one in advanced automotive, one in business entrepreneurial studies and one in biotechnology. The intelligence industry brought to these partnerships was needed and appreciated by teachers, administrators and students alike.
In today's knowledge economy, we cannot expect every teacher to be current on all topics. The appropriate use of outside expertise and intelligence will be of great value to teachers. After all, ladies and gentlemen, we are on a treadmill of change that's never going to stop.
Prep time: This is actually one area of the bill I have some difficulty with. With the pressures that are on teachers today to teach the extended basics and to deal with the complexities of the classroom, they probably need more prep time. For example, teachers in Japan spend more time in the school but less than in the classroom than teachers in North America because they're learning all the time. They're doing team teaching and they're supporting each other in terms of trying to figure out what's going on in the classroom and learn different ways in which to approach that.
I'm not sure how much of that's going on right now and the government, the unions and the teachers might want to have some real, meaningful discussion on what the prep time of today is. Are there some things that are being done that aren't necessary? Are there things we should be doing that we're not doing? Do we need more time? That kind of analysis instead of screaming about, "Oh, we're going to cut by 50%." "We can't take this, we need our prep time."
I spent a half-hour preparing for this. I'm never going to get paid for it. I spent a whole day on Friday preparing to pitch a new client. I'll never get paid for that. Hopefully, I'll get the new client. There are all kinds of things we all do in our everyday life to prepare ourselves for things. There are some things teachers deserve to have. They deserve to have the right resources to teach the things they are required to teach today.
Power and money grab: This is a really interesting one. It would seem to me that I would prefer, if there has to be a power grab, that it be with the duly elected government because in that situation we can at least have some powers on our own to oust that government when the time comes. Certainly teachers' unions are not new to those kinds of tactics. As a matter of fact, I was part of a government that they were very much involved with having ousted at the time. Unions have had the power for the past 25 years and today we have an 18% youth unemployment rate. We have got to start asking why and we've got to start doing something about it.
In conclusion, yes, there is a problem. This is not the perfect legislation and no legislation is. I'm a government relations consultant. I wouldn't be in business if there weren't problems with legislation. But we have opportunities to amend that legislation. We have opportunities to lobby. We have opportunities to vote. We have opportunities to discuss. We have a responsibility to our youth to help them, and to our teachers to give them the resources they need because I'm not quite sure there's been enough emphasis on giving teachers what they need to teach the things they need to teach.
The Chair: On behalf of the committee, I'd like to thank you very much for your presentation here.
YORK REGION ROMAN CATHOLIC SEPARATE SCHOOL BOARD
The Chair: Our next presentation is the York Region Roman Catholic Separate School Board, chairman, Tina Molinari.
Ms Tina Molinari: Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today on the subject of Bill 160, the Education Quality Improvement Act.
I am Tina Molinari, presently the chair of the York Region Roman Catholic Separate School Board. I have been serving in this capacity for the past three years. I have been a trustee for the past nine years. I am seeking re-election because I believe in the benefits of a quality education for all students and I am committed to doing my part to ensure that this is not jeopardized. I'm certainly not in it for the money.
With me this afternoon is the newly appointed director of education, Susan LaRosa, who will assist me in answering any questions the committee might have.
The York Region Roman Catholic Separate School Board educates 44,000 students in 73 schools, employs 3,300 staff and covers 664 square miles of geographic area, bounded by Metro on the south, Simcoe on the north, Durham on the east and Dufferin-Peel on the west.
Since our board is presently in the midst of teacher negotiations, most of my comments this afternoon will concentrate on the financial issues contained in Bill 160.
Putting children first and focusing our dollars on the classroom are principles brought forward from the ministry's Meeting Student Needs paper, along with principles of education quality, equity for students and taxpayers, affordability, accountability and responsiveness to local needs. We are strongly supportive of these principles, and it is with these principles in mind that I offer my comments and considerations about Bill 160.
The government has continued to demonstrate its commitment to constitutional protection for Roman Catholic separate school boards and for French-language governance, and for this our board thanks you. We also applaud this government for its commitment to repair the current inequitable and unfair funding model, to ensure a high quality of education which will ensure, for the first time, an equitable distribution of financial resources and guarantee that there are no second-class students in Ontario.
We all know that exhaustive studies have been done that confirm the need for change. Where past provincial governments have long recognized the need, they have been frozen in the legislative consultation process. This government has clearly demonstrated its will to move ahead with a fair and non-discriminatory funding model, and we are hopeful now that you will not delay this process.
In this regard, we understand Bill 160 provides for a three-year transition period to assist boards in moving from the current funding model to equity. This is a major concern for boards such as ours that have already suffered years of inequitable funding. We implore you to not make us wait for funding equity while richer boards, losing money under the new funding model, are granted time to adjust and transitional funds. We strongly oppose any delay that will jeopardize the movement towards equity. We ask you to correct this injustice immediately.
Our board has been impacted by a number of unique circumstances which have caused severe financial hardships. In the mid- to late 1980s, we were considered the fastest-growing board in North America. Extensive growth in York region resulted in the need for us to build a large number of schools in a relatively short period of time.
Since 1985 our board has completed 49 school construction projects, generating 2.8 million square feet and 31,000 new pupil spaces. The capital expenditure and debenture debts incurred during this high-growth period are still being felt today. We are now carrying an outstanding debenture debt of approximately $98 million, requiring repayment of $16.5 million annually.
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At the end of 1993, we faced an accumulated deficit of $32 million. To retire our debt, we developed, and the province approved, a five-year deficit elimination plan for our board. We are proud to say that we have since turned the ship around and we are well ahead of our original plan to eliminate the deficit by 1998 with now only $5 million left as of 1997 year-end projections.
Our debt combined with ongoing provincial grant reductions serve to increase the discrepancy between what our board can spend on its students and the amount spent by our public school counterparts. Over the past few years, we cut a number of programs and services, including over 25% of central office staff.
Historically, we have educated approximately 33% of the students in York region, while having access to only 23% of the local tax base. This is an inequity we have been forced to live with.
These inequities need to be corrected. Bill 160 is lengthy and complex, and despite the negative rhetoric that has been in the media over the last few months, it's important to stress that there are parts of Bill 160 which provide the groundwork for the essential changes needed to correct the historical inequities which have existed between assessment-poor and assessment-rich school boards.
We are anxiously awaiting the new funding model and we are hopeful that it will work effectively for the betterment and advancement of the children in our schools by providing them with the same educational dollars available to schools across Ontario. The fact remains that if our board had been funded at the same level as our public school counterparts, we would not have a deficit at all. In fact, because of our efficiencies, we would be operating today with a budget surplus which could have been redirected into our classrooms to enhance student learning.
We are pleased that the bill authorizes cabinet to appoint a committee to ensure that the standards governing fair education funding are being met. Rest assured that we too will be vigilant in ensuring that promises of equity are fulfilled.
We are already on record as supporting the removal of education funding from local taxation, and we believe this to be the only way to ensure equal resources per pupil throughout Ontario. We support getting trustees out of the taxation business and allowing them to concentrate on being guardians of education in their communities.
Bill 160 gives the responsibility to the province for setting education property tax rates. They will set a provincial mill rate so everyone will be paying the same. This has long been a goal within our region where our separate school supporters paid as much as 10% more in residential property taxes than public school supporters.
We know a number of expert panels will provide input to key sections of this bill and, as a board, we are pleased to have made available some of our staff as participants in this consultative process. Our teachers and staff have demonstrated time and again their commitment to our Catholic school system and to education throughout our province. We will continue to provide and commit staff resources for the betterment of education, and I too am prepared to continue to commit my efforts to this worthy cause. We are comforted as a school board with the government's approach which takes into account the values and expertise of those in the education sector.
In this regard, we encourage the government to work with those who have voiced their concerns about Bill 160. The looming illegal teachers' strike is of grave concern. However, we also caution the government to ensure that any subsequent changes to Bill 160 not jeopardize the bill's fundamental principle to provide fair and non-discriminatory educational opportunities to students throughout the province.
In closing, please allow me to reiterate: Putting children first and focusing our dollars on the classroom are key principles which are emphasized throughout Bill 160. We are supportive of these principles and we agree that changes must be made.
Exhaustive studies have already been done that have confirmed the need for change to our education funding model. Surely no one can disagree with a funding system that is equitable to all students in the province. You cannot allow the continued perpetuation of education systems for haves and have-nots. Change is needed and long overdue.
We congratulate this government for moving ahead in its commitment to repair the current inequitable and unfair funding model. Where past provincial governments have long recognized the need for change, they have been frozen in the legislative consultation process. Through Bill 160, this government is clearly demonstrating its will to move ahead and we are hopeful now that you will not delay this critical process.
Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak to you today.
The Chair: Thank you both for your presentation. Our time has elapsed.
TORONTO TEACHERS' FEDERATION
The Chair: Our next presenter will be the Toronto Teachers' Federation, Frances Gladstone. Please proceed.
Ms Frances Gladstone: I'm Frances Gladstone, president of the Toronto Teachers' Federation, and with me is Evalyn Sullivan, first vice-president of the Women Teachers' Association of Toronto.
Since the Conservative Party came to power, the message it has brought has been made abundantly clear to Ontario citizens: We will destroy whatever stands in the way of cutting taxes and reducing the deficit. You have kept your promise. You have increased poverty by reducing welfare. You have created a deterioration in health care by firing nurses and closing hospitals. Now you are prepared to destroy the educational system as well.
To finish paying your unnecessary tax cut, you have said, though you now retract this statement, that you will take a further $1 billion out of the educational system. Bill 160 is the vehicle through which you intend to do this. But Bill 160 is not only about taking money from the system; it is also about power and control. It makes a mockery of the democratic process. Teachers and school boards have had decision-making responsibility until now. This government is attempting to take it from them. You have already neutered the trustees with your Fewer School Boards Act. Your target is now the teachers. Once you have taken full control, it is our strong belief that you intend to privatize whatever you can in education, to create charter schools and to make education responsive to the needs of the corporate structure.
Bill 160 gives the cabinet sweeping powers. It removes from teachers the ability to negotiate their working conditions. Such critical matters as the length of the school year and school day, the number of instructional days, professional development days, examination days, class size, teaching and non-teaching time, will all be determined by the whim of the government.
The minister will also have unchecked regulatory powers in a wide variety of other areas. These include, but are not limited to, transferring schools from one board to another or taking over school boards if he feels that they have been mismanaged. There is nothing in the legislation to describe what "mismanaged" might imply. This government will be empowered to make whatever changes it chooses through orders in council. It will no longer have to pass legislation; all changes can be done by regulation, behind closed doors. This is not democracy.
Through this bill, you will have complete control of taxation, therefore complete control of funding. And there are no specifics in this bill. The way the legislation has been written makes it completely dictatorial: You need not consult, inform or discuss any provision you wish to include. There will be no public debate to determine the acceptability of your decisions. The balance of power that currently exists among school boards, teachers and parents will be destroyed. The educational system will be at the mercy of politics or, more specifically, of politicians, namely, those in this government.
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Apart from our absolute inability to accept the loss of the democratic process that this bill reflects, we have a great many concerns in regard to specific issues. These include, but are not limited to, all of our working conditions, among which are class size and prep time, also the hiring of non-certified personnel to instruct students, the loss of jobs and the removal of funds.
In regard to our working conditions, many of which I earlier enumerated, I believe it is accepted practice in a democratic society that employees have the right to negotiate these. We are of the definite opinion that we should continue to have this right. This legislation takes away from us the ability to negotiate all but salary and benefits. Needless to say, we will be greatly hampered in our attempt to negotiate even these as the boards will not likely be provided with adequate funds to cover all their expenses. They will be fully dependent on whatever amount you choose to return, and we here in Metro have no doubt that the amount will be inadequate to meet our needs.
In the matter of class size, that you lay the blame for its increase on teachers is another issue which greatly angers us. We believe we have been misrepresented as a profession. Your claim that teachers and school boards are responsible for class size increases is deliberate dissembling. We have never chosen to increase class size. We have always been the strongest advocates for a lower pupil-teacher ratio in every classroom. The economic situation which brought about the social contract and the cuts in funding to school boards has been responsible for this, as you are well aware. To pretend that you need to control funding to prevent its further increase in the future is a serious misrepresentation.
As teachers, we are fully aware of the numerous studies that show the very real benefits of low class size. It is enormously frustrating to us to watch as the number of students per class increases year by year. In Toronto most classes are now in the high twenties and low thirties, numbers that are well above even the highest recommended for older students. We are more than willing to agree to a reduction in the current numbers, but that requires adequate funding, which is not a course of action that this government has chosen to advocate.
The hiring of non-certified teachers is yet another issue to which we take strong exception. It's not that "specialists" do not have expertise in their fields of endeavour. Of course they do. But do they have the necessary knowledge to teach? By definition, a teacher is certified when he or she has gained the qualifications, pedagogical knowledge and skills needed. These include the ability to make critical decisions which will affect student learning, to assess and diagnose the learning needs of students, to plan, develop, implement, evaluate and report. A musician may know music, but can he or she relate to all of the above? You denigrate the profession when you suggest that certified teachers are not best qualified to teach.
We know your real reason for wanting to hire unqualified personnel is to reduce costs. But we also know that the needs of our students will not be best served by hiring non-certified personnel to teach them. Apart from the fact that this move would redefine our profession, along with the loss of prep time, it would also cost the jobs of up to 10,000 teachers. This is not a principle to which we can agree, either pedagogically or ethically.
The concept of prep time is also poorly understood and therefore easily attacked. It seems to me that it does not require a great deal of knowledge of the requirements of teaching to realize that the time a teacher spends with students is only one part of a long process. Prior to instructional time, program has to be developed, lessons have to be planned, materials have to be gathered, the classroom has to be organized. After the instructional period, work has to be assessed and evaluated, discussion with students has to take place; remedial assistance may have to be arranged and contact often has to be made with parents.
These are only some of the many responsibilities that teachers have. There are also grade and divisional meetings, various committee meetings, extracurricular activities -- this list is endless and participation in these things is what provides students with the professional and caring environment that enhances their learning. Most teachers work several hours a day in addition to instructional time. Prep time is only a small part of this. At the elementary level in Metro --
The Chair: Excuse me. You only have two minutes left and I don't think you're going to finish unless you speak a lot quicker.
Ms Gladstone: Okay -- we have not yet achieved what we consider an adequate amount of time for preparation. Neither we nor our secondary colleagues can afford to lose any of the prep time that we have gained through collective bargaining.
Ultimately, what this legislation means for us is loss of jobs, loss of funding to the system and, most important, loss of the democratic process. You have used various forms of propaganda to denigrate our profession and to attempt to make teachers look avaricious and overindulged. But the public is not in agreement with you. Parents are well aware of how much their children's teachers care, of how much time they put into their profession and of how successful they are.
You attempt to confuse people by providing incomplete or inaccurate information when trying to prove how badly our students compare in test results. You neglected to explain, for example, that in the Third International Math and Science Study 98% of the test questions matched the British Columbia curriculum, while only 53% matched the Ontario curriculum. Despite this, Ontario students scored only 6% lower than BC students. You ignore much important data that shows how successful Ontario schools are. You skew the results to make us look incompetent. You make every effort to make the system look broken, so that you can come along in your shining armour like a knight on a charger and fix it. Well, you can no longer sell that concept to an unsuspecting public.
Education requires money. A good education requires a lot of money. We have been doing the best we can in a system where funds have consistently been reduced. We have reached rock bottom. The inadequacy of funding is beginning to show in the reduction of services, the longer waiting lists for review of children with special needs, the decline in materials available for use, the lack of adequate maintenance and the gradual deterioration of school buildings.
This government needs to fund the education system adequately if it wants good results. The desired results will not come by reducing standards. Hiring of non-certified personnel, reducing services, such as educational assistants and student support staff, and outsourcing of jobs will not make this a better system. You will have to put back some of the money already taken out if you are sincere in your desire to improve education. Recent polls have shown that people are willing to pay for this.
Your promise to reduce taxes because that was what people wanted is based on a false premise. You asked the wrong question. If you ask anyone if they would prefer to pay less tax, the answer is likely to be yes. But if you ask the same people whether they want lower taxes and reduced services, the answer is likely to be no. This government asked the first, not the second, question. We all know that if we want good service, we have to pay for it.
I believe it is time to scrap this legislation. It will not improve the educational system -- quite the contrary. It is dictatorial in its nature. It leaves too much control in the hands of the government. We cannot and will not agree to so draconian a bill. The students we teach and the community we serve mean too much to us to enable us to allow you to ride roughshod over us in this way. The legislation is an abuse of the democratic process and we will not accept it. Thank you.
The Chair: Your time has elapsed. I thank you very much for your presentation.
ONTARIO PARENT COUNCIL
The Chair: Our next presenter will be the Ontario Parent Council, William Robson, chair. Welcome and proceed.
Mr Bill Robson: Thank you very much for the opportunity to appear here today. I am Bill Robson. I am the chair of the Ontario Parent Council. Beside me for moral support and correcting anything that needs correcting is my vice-chair, Mary Margaret Laing.
You have in the written document in front of you a quick blurb on what the Ontario Parent Council is. I will not repeat it here. I don't know if that alone will be sufficient to get you back on to your schedule, but we'll see.
To repeat, the Ontario Parent Council welcomes the opportunity in these hearings on Bill 160. As parents, our priority is obviously the education of our children.
Bill 160 represents a significant change in educational decision-making. The OPC recognizes the need for change. Parents are concerned, as you know, about increasing class sizes and lack of adequate supplies and resource support in many classrooms. They also want schools to have the flexibility to meet high standards and to respond to local conditions. For these reasons, the OPC sees merit in Bill 160's attention to the following areas: provincial authority to limit class size and increase instructional time, the legislating of school councils and differentiated staffing.
At the same time, the OPC is deeply concerned about the amount of regulatory authority that Bill 160 will provide to the provincial government. To the extent that such powers cannot be defined more precisely in the bill itself, the OPC strongly urges, as a general principle, that such regulations be established through an open and transparent process. More specifically, the OPC feels that several amendments would help to address concerns about the potential use of this authority and would increase the OPC's satisfaction with the bill.
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To promote the dual objectives of more resources in the classroom and increasing local input and flexibility, we would ask that provisions of Bill 160 be amended, first, to enable school councils to request reviews of regulations regarding class size and instructional time that apply to their schools; second, to give the Ontario College of Teachers an initial opportunity to define an accreditation system for staff who are not certified teachers; third, to delete the term "advisory" from its description of school councils, give school councils some resources for communication with their school communities and give them representation on board committees; and, fourth, to take non-teaching principals and vice-principals out of the teacher unions.
Although neither budget cuts nor actual amounts of teacher preparation time are specifically addressed by Bill 160, the prominence of these two issues in the debate around the bill prompts us to offer a brief comment. The OPC supports the Education Improvement Commission's recommendation that any savings realized through changes to regulations should be reinvested in the classroom. The amendments that we are suggesting to Bill 160 are largely motivated by that objective. We would welcome a commitment from the government that resources freed up by such changes will be reinvested in classrooms for the benefit of the students.
Let me, if I may, enlarge on the background to some of these recommendations.
When it comes to class size and instructional time, parents generally see small classes as better than large ones. Particularly in areas where class sizes have been rising, the prospect of further increases is extremely unwelcome. This concern is higher when teachers need to deal with severe learning problems or other special factors that can adversely affect the instructional time they give to many of the students in their classes. More generally, parents do need reassurance that instruction time with students is given first-rank priority in school and board management.
The OPC's members believe that the current collective bargaining framework in Ontario provides insufficient safeguards against agreements that act directly or indirectly to increase class size and lower instructional time. A particular concern centres around the use of complicated and inconsistent formulas for average pupil-teacher ratios that are often starkly at variance with the situation in actual classrooms. We support clause 170.1(3)(a) of Bill 160, which gives authority to the government to regulate class size and instructional time.
In view of the variety of experience and needs across schools and regions, however, we do see a need to provide an option for local flexibility by permitting individual schools to appeal for modifications in provincially or regionally established norms, particularly if they are aimed at maintaining smaller class sizes, more instructional time or other similarly higher standards. We therefore recommend the following addition to subsection 170.1(3) of Bill 160:
"Upon request of a school council or group of councils, the Minister of Education and Training may modify the application of some or all of the regulations made under this subsection with respect to a school or group of schools."
On the subject of differentiated staffing, the OPC believes that there is a place in the education system for it. Indeed, such arrangements already exist in hundreds of schools. We would repeat that our support for differentiated staffing arises from our expectation that it can improve student learning. The OPC has in the past recommended the hiring of early childhood educators in junior kindergarten and the hiring of personnel to perform functions such as library, career counselling and computer-related services if it can be demonstrated that program quality can be maintained and student safety ensured.
Because the recently established Ontario College of Teachers has been charged with responsibility for licensing and regulating the practice of teaching, we would urge that the college be asked to indicate what criteria they would use to certify non-teachers to assist in schools. Only if the college fails to establish reasonable criteria within a reasonable period of time would the OPC urge the establishment of a separate certification system.
There is one subsection of this bill that appeared to us to excessively open-ended in the scope it would provide for non-teachers to fill any teaching position. We would urge that subsection 170.1(5) be either restricted in its scope or deleted. The regulatory process itself should provide the necessary flexibility to deal with new or unanticipated categories as the need arises and as we develop certification processes.
Moving on to the subject of school councils, it was a source of enormous satisfaction to the Ontario Parent Council to see the legislation of school councils proposed in this bill. The description of school councils as "advisory" in subsection 170(1) was unexpected to us, however, and appears undesirable for several reasons.
First, if we go back to Bill 104, that legislation charged the Education Improvement Commission with the duty to provide the Minister of Education and Training with recommendations "on the feasibility of strengthening the role of school councils over time" and also quoting "on the feasibility of increasing parental involvement in education governance." For Bill 160 to describe school councils as advisory conflicts with this mandate: It prejudges the EIC's deliberations and pre-empts many of the recommendations it might otherwise make to the minister.
It has also been the experience of Ontario Parent Council members, both personally and in contact with school councils around the province, that the word "advisory" often means ignorable to some principals and boards. In those circumstances school council participation is unattractive to many able people who might otherwise participate, and for those who believe in the importance of parent and community involvement in promoting student achievement, this is a regrettable development.
We also want to point out that many school councils in Ontario already participate in important activities such as the selection and evaluation of principals, approving school objectives and priorities, approving spending plans for their schools and other activities that would be seen as going beyond advisory by some administrators or boards. In our view, Bill 160 should safeguard these activities and facilitate their extension to other jurisdictions. Describing councils as "advisory" would have the opposite effect. We therefore recommend that the term "advisory" where it refers to school councils be deleted from the bill.
Further on the question of school councils, a couple of observations. School councils, we have found in our communications with school councils around the province, need resources to communicate. The OPC believes this should also be specified in Bill 160 and that the power to make regulations to ensure financing and access to school resources for councils ought to be in the bill. We therefore suggest that the passage added in subsection 80(5) be amended to read, "...including regulations relating to their establishment," -- this is with regard to school councils -- "composition, functions, funding and use of school resources."
Again referring to the research that the OPC has done around the province, we have found a nearly universal need on the part of individual school councils for greater board-wide networking. Such communication was part of the Minister of Education and Training's original policy directive on school councils, but it appears to be inadequate or non-existent in many areas. The OPC feels that a formal school council presence on board committees would help promote the creation of these networks. For this reason, we would suggest that subsection 104(2) be amended to provide for substantial representation of school councils on school board advisory committees.
The final point on which we would like to enlarge has to do with principals and vice-principals and their membership in the teachers' federations. The OPC feels strongly that supervisory officers, principals and vice-principals who have no classroom responsibilities, should not be members of the teacher unions. Such membership confuses the principal's line of accountability. It also impairs principals' ability to act as effective managers, since union codes of conduct may make it difficult for principals to exercise managerial responsibilities such as discipline and performance evaluation. It is also our view that membership in the unions impairs principals' ability to communicate effectively with parents regarding teacher performance.
In recent weeks a more pressing concern has come to our attention as classrooms and schools have been pressed into service in pursuit of political objectives. The OPC has received complaints from parents all over the province, and we've also seen it in our own schools and in our own boards, about partisan activities that do nothing to further the education of students occurring in classrooms and schools. It appears, in our view, that union membership has been an obstacle to many principals who might otherwise have been expected to take steps to prevent pupils at their schools being used for partisan purposes.
For these reasons, the OPC would recommend that the definition of "teacher" in subsection 277.1(1) be amended to read "...but does not include a non-teaching principal, a non-teaching vice-principal" etc as it currently stands.
Let me conclude by observing that the primary goal of any education reform initiative should be to provide quality education and equal education opportunity to all children in Ontario. We in the Ontario Parent Council are resolutely focused on the principle that the classroom should be the primary focus of education and, equally, on the principle that local input in decisions that affect individual schools is critical.
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With this in mind, to recap, the OPC supports Bill 160's attention to class size and instructional time, the legislating of school councils and differentiated staffing. As we have indicated, however, we think Bill 160 would promote the objectives of more resources in the classroom and local responsiveness if several amendments were made to enable school councils to request reviews of regulations; to give the Ontario College of Teachers an initial opportunity to define an accreditation system; to delete the term "advisory" from the descriptions of school councils in the bill and to make provisions for school council resources and represent them on board committees; and to take non-teaching principals and vice-principals out of the teachers' unions.
Finally, we would reiterate our request for a transparent and open regulatory process and for a commitment from the government that savings resulting from changes in the areas addressed by Bill 160 be reinvested in the classroom. Along with the changes we have suggested, those measures will provide parents with greater assurance that the reforms now under way in Ontario's publicly funded schools will promote the better education of their children.
Thank you for the opportunity to make this presentation. Perhaps dinner is looking a little bit more accessible than it was. I smell the food.
The Chair: It's not ours.
We have five minutes per caucus for questions.
Mrs McLeod: First of all, I appreciate the fact that you began your presentation with the recommendation that any savings which might be found in education be reinvested. You're quite right that that was the recommendation of the EIC, and it comes at a time when, as you may know, there are indications that the government's plan for September 1998 is to see a further $667 million removed from elementary and secondary education. I think that recommendation is a very important one.
I've got about four questions; I don't know if I can get them all in in five minutes. I'm going to start from the back of the brief, to ask you about local input in decisions, the importance of that from the Ontario Parent Council's perspective and how you see Bill 160 as furthering local decision-making when so much decision-making power is now vested directly in cabinet through regulatory power. There are some 186 areas of the bill in which the Lieutenant Governor in Council has essentially unilateral regulatory power over education. How does that serve the purpose of better local decision-making?
Mr Robson: Going back to Bill 104, the view we expressed at that point was that with the amalgamation of school boards and now, with Bill 160 proposing to remove some of the elements from the collective bargaining agreements and so on that currently are under some control at the board level, there was a need for the strengthening of local input. The way we thought that should be accomplished was through the strengthening of school councils.
We are delighted to see the legislation of school councils in this bill. We have some experience, most of us as individuals and certainly in our communications around the province with people involved in school councils, they have often found that the process of getting a group of people -- parents, staff, community members and so on -- around a table to discuss issues that affect the quality of life in the school is tremendously valuable.
The problem we faced prior to this bill was that although in some boards and in some areas those councils are up and running and are functioning well, in other areas of the province they have simply not been established at all -- certainly that was widely the case here in Toronto -- or have been established in ways that were inconsistent with the direction that was given by the previous government when it came to the establishment of school councils. In our view, what this bill can do by legislating school councils is strengthen that critical local area input.
Of course, many of you will know that originally school boards did often deal with individual schools. It's not all that novel an idea. In our view, school councils are the right place for a lot of these local decisions that affect local individual schools to be made. That's the sense in which we offered that observation.
Mrs McLeod: Legislating doesn't necessarily mean there are going to be the resources provided for those school councils to function effectively, and the role of school councils is as yet to be determined and will be done largely, I assume, through regulation, without further public debate.
Mr Robson: May I respond to that?
Mrs McLeod: Let me ask you another question, and then you can respond to whatever part of it you like.
One of the concerns we've had presented to us repeatedly by school councils in Bill 104 and now again on Bill 160 is that as more and more decision-making is centralized in the hands of not only the provincial government but now in cabinet, the parent councils don't feel as though they will be able to make their voice heard. As frustrating as it may be to deal with the local school board, it's even more frustrating to try and deal with Queen's Park. From their perspective, the amount of centralized power in this bill seems to remove decision-making even further from them.
Mr Robson: To start off with your point about resources for school councils, that is why we suggested that the list of regulations or areas to be dealt with should be extended to the question of funding for school councils and access to school resources -- we're talking about ordinary stuff here like photocopying and so on -- access on reasonable terms, obviously.
It might be worth observing as a footnote that in places where funding for school councils has been provided as part of a per student grant formula, it's typically very small. It doesn't need to be big. School councils are very low-overhead operations. Obviously, there are no honorariums paid to the people involved. It's simply a matter of being able to pay for your paper, your copying, your staples and your phone bill. The question of resources is on our mind, but I hasten to add that it's not a big thing we're asking for here. School councils don't need a lot of resources; they need a small amount.
The question you asked with regard to making your voice heard really brings us, as far as our own priorities on the parent council are concerned, to this question of putting the word "advisory" in the bill. Some school councils, it is true, have found their existence to be an exercise in frustration because of whatever obstacles they have faced to being heard or having their views effectively acted on. Other school councils, though, have a quite wide range of activities, and that's very rewarding. There is research on this that seems to indicate that it's a very valuable thing for student achievement. We're worried that the use of the word "advisory" might preclude some of those things. We'd like it taken out. We think if school councils are not prejudged to be only advisory bodies at the beginning, some of these things you're referring to can, in the fullness of time, become important activities for school councils.
Mrs McLeod: Where does that leave school boards?
Mr Robson: The fact is that school boards have been getting bigger and more distant from people for quite some time. We're ambivalent about that, as I think it showed in the presentation. Our answer is to look at the school council area and see if we can re-establish the local input right where it counts the most: at the school level.
Mr Wildman: Thank you for your presentation. I noted two matters in particular that I'd like to ask for some further clarification on.
You expressed some concern about the regulatory powers under the bill, which are quite extensive. That has been a recurring matter raised by both supporters and opponents of the legislation who have appeared before the committee. You suggested it might be better if there were some sort of transparent process for changes in regulation. I certainly agree with that. Would it be better to have it actually in the legislation, so that if this government or any future government or minister wished to make changes, if the powers are to be centralized here at Queen's Park, at least there would have to be debate in the Legislature among the elected representatives of the province on any such changes?
Mr Robson: In the presentation I mentioned the desirability of trying to put some of these things into the legislation. In our examination of the bill and looking at some of the types of problems it addresses, we weren't confident in coming forward and presenting a long list of areas that we think would be susceptible to that sort of treatment.
That leads me to the second point that I think is important, which is the whole question of flexibility. Class sizes -- I know this wasn't directly your point, so I'll be brief.
Mr Wildman: Actually, that was the next one I was going to move to, so go ahead.
Mr Robson: There is tremendous variation, and often for a good reason, in these things. Our concern is a sheer overload problem. There are limits, either in legislation or regulation, to what you can effectively manage from Queen's Park. The way we thought it might be best to address that was to offer school councils the ability to trigger reviews, if you like, of these things. We are concerned about the possibility that some of these things can be affected by collective bargaining agreements in ways that demand some sort of attention, but the issue of flexibility made us think that the best way to address this problem is to go to the local school and give them the option of asking for a review when local circumstances make it desirable.
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Mr Wildman: Parents and, I suppose, students at the secondary level and teachers should have input into changes in class size. But as my colleague indicated, that then brings forward the whole question of financing. If you're going to lower class size or limit class size, you have to have adequate resources to make that possible. We don't have the funding formula yet.
I have two questions. You mentioned the EIC's recommendation for reinvestment. Do you think it would be appropriate for the government to make a commitment to reinvest whatever savings come out of restructuring in education back into the education system? That might, parenthetically, help to avert the confrontation that seems to be building this week. Should there be a commitment for reinvestment made clear, and should the funding formula be available to all concerned before this legislation becomes law, so we know exactly what the plans of the government are if it is to have the kind of control over education that the bill would give it?
Mr Robson: First, as regards the EIC's recommendation that savings as a result of the restructuring be reinvested in the classroom, yes, we support that.
With regard to the funding formula, the OPC has kept itself abreast, as best it can, of the developments in this area. Certainly there are aspects with regard to the way the funding formula is looking, the per student basis of it, that we regard positively, but we would like to see more about it.
To make what is perhaps an obvious point, the split in Ontario between provincial and local government funding for education means that you never see the picture until you see all the picture. There were some numbers cited with regard to the provincial budgetary contribution, but until we see the local contribution, obviously we're not in a position to say anything about that. I think it's fair to say that parents would be reassured if they knew more about the money.
Mr Wildman: In that regard, the Treasurer has indicated two things. The bill of course gives the Minister of Finance control over mill rates. He has said that at least for the next year mill rates will be frozen, so we know what the figures are going to be in that regard if he maintains that commitment. What we don't know is what the grants will be.
The question is, if the government is going to reinvest, we need to know what the grant levels are going to be and what different kinds of grants there are going to be. We don't know that yet either. If the government isn't going to take $1 billion out -- that's the other thing the Treasurer said, that he didn't think the government would have to take that amount out -- we need to know, are they going to take anything out, is it $667 million or is it something else, or are they not going to take anything out and reinvest it all? Surely we should see that before this becomes law.
The Chair: Mr Wildman, your time is up. We're moving to Mr Smith.
Mr Smith: Thank you for your presentation this evening. One issue that's been recurring fairly regularly with respect to the differentiated staffing issue is the particular section you highlighted, section 170.1(5), the "no presumption" clause with respect to this issue. Could you run by me again the concerns, so I gain a better understanding of your organization's position on this issue, a little better sense of the concerns you have with it?
Mr Robson: I understand that the intent is to not hedge around with preceding definitions, what might be covered. But our concern on reading it, without as much access to legal expertise as we might have liked, was that it appeared to be a very open-ended thing, that perhaps in the interests of making the borders flexible, something extremely general had been written in. For that reason, we have asked that either it be made more specific, so that it's clear what might or might not be covered, or that it be deleted, because it appeared to us as though the regulatory authority conveyed some flexibility to deal with these categories that might not be envisioned off the top.
Mr Smith: In their recommendations to this committee, the Ontario Public School Boards' Association recommended against legislating advisory school councils. Their view was that it's inappropriate or that you cannot legislate voluntarism. How would you respond to that recommendation?
Mr Robson: Who made that recommendation?
Mr Smith: The Ontario Public School Boards' Association. Basically, they indicated that they could not support or recommended against legislating advisory school councils.
Mr Robson: On volunteer grounds -- well, I haven't seen the brief, so I'll have to be cautious in how I comment. School boards once were voluntary, and they seemed to work. School councils now, in many areas, work quite well. The main obstacle, as we see it, to their more effective functioning is that because there is no obligation for the board to even cause them to exist or for the principal of a school, for example -- I'm not singling out principals here, but this is an example -- to constitute it as it is supposed to be constituted, or for a council, once up and running, to have its advice listened to, this is a discouraging thing for potential members of school councils who would have a lot to contribute to their local schools.
We would see the requirement to have a school council in place and the formalization of roles for these councils as an enormous encouragement to enable people to come forward. This isn't all that exotic an idea any more. Such things do exist in other jurisdictions. Our sense is that they work quite well. We know of well-functioning school councils in Ontario, and what bothers us is the areas where those things aren't working so well. We'd like to see that beneficial experience extended.
Ms Mary Margaret Laing: Could I also speak to that? Two things are relevant here. One is that if you look at research data on school councils in areas where they have been legislated, there are data to support the fact that they work very well, thank you very much, and bring, as Bill says, remarkable value to the process.
The second thing that I think is quite important is that we have lots of examples in our own jurisdictions, both locally and province-wide -- I'm thinking specifically of hospital boards, for example -- which are legislated and are volunteer and work very well.
Mr Froese: Your group wants to have more parental involvement in decision-making at the local level in the schools. I assume that's the case, because you want the "advisory" name taken out -- not just advisory; you want more say.
In conjunction with that and in conjunction with the reinvestment of the dollars saved in education, do you see that as one and the same? If you get reinvestment but you don't have a say in what happens with it, are you concerned about that? If there are reinvestment dollars but you might still be in an advisory role, would you want to see -- obviously, from your recommendation, you want to see both. How do we ensure that the dollars are used efficiently, that we reinvest those dollars into the classroom? That's where we have a question, the ability of the boards to ensure that those dollars go directly into the classroom. Could you just give me a comment on that?
Mr Robson: We would see local input as a key ingredient. There's nobody better informed about what is needed than the people who are on the spot. We do feel ambivalent, as I mentioned before, about a process whereby -- perhaps it's inevitable -- school boards become bigger, more remote, the world grows, communication problems increase. It seems to us, especially in regard to some of the regulatory authority that is going to be taken on here, that the need for local input becomes very great. That is a major concern of ours, because we see it as an important ingredient in making sure that the resources are used properly and that local school communities continue to be vibrant.
On the Ontario Parent Council, we often focus, because we tend to adopt a troubleshooting frame of mind, on areas where school councils aren't working well, in trying to provide some encouragement and some limited services to them. But in the process of doing that, you find out that there are a lot of school councils that are working well, where their opinions are being sought on all sorts of things that affect resources in the school. We think that's a tremendous thing and we'd like to see it more widespread in the province.
Ms Laing: If I could also comment --
The Chair: No, I'm sorry. We've gone over our time. I thank you both very much for your presentation.
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JORDAN LANNAN
The Chair: Our next presenter is Jordan Lannan, student. Do you want your parents up at the table with you, Jordan?
Mr Jordan Lannan: No, that's okay.
The Chair: That's good, then. You've got 10 minutes.
Mr Lannan: Good afternoon. My name is Jordan Lannan. I am 14 years old, a grade 9 student at North Toronto Collegiate. North Toronto has a great music program, one that I am involved in, specifically in the symphonic band, in which I play the alto saxophone. I value music as a source of education, as well as a way to learn teamwork, responsibility and other parts of life that you just can't learn sitting cramped behind a desk.
I also have an interest in politics, inside and outside of school. Inside, I am part of the student council as my home form representative. Outside of school, I am involved in a volunteer organization called Free the Children. However, I represent no group or organization. Also, I helped to mobilize students for some of the walkouts that occurred.
I greatly appreciate the committee's consideration of my views on this subject.
I am here today speaking to you because I disagree with the proposed Bill 160. As well as a disagreement with this bill, I also believe there should be quality consultation of students regarding proposed education changes.
First, Bill 160, titled the Education Quality Improvement Act, will damage, not improve, the education system's quality. For one thing, the government is going to be taking $1 billion out of education. It would most likely be impossible to actually improve anything when you have $1 billion less money to invest in quality. The education system currently needs all the money it can get for program funding, and taking away money just won't solve anything. Besides, taking away money might mean schools sacrificing "frills," as they are called by the government, like music, drama, visual arts and other such programs that are necessary for a student's learning.
It seems to me impossible to be able to improve anything if you have $1 billion less. Unless you are absolute geniuses, I really honestly don't see how you can put any quality improvement in it if you have $1 billion less to spend. No matter how bright you are, I don't think you are geniuses, and I don't think I'm a genius. I don't think anyone in this room right now could figure out how to increase quality in education financially.
I wonder, once you've saved this money by hiring uncertified teachers, firing professionals and cutting extracurricular programs, just who does this saved money go to? Not the students, not the school boards, not the parents, not the teachers, not anyone. Who does it go to? You? I hope not. In the long term, who really benefits from this kind of cut?
As well, I see certified teachers teaching classes as something that is necessary, something that cannot be flushed down the toilet as soon as a tax cut arrives. Bill 160 will expand the use of non-certified teachers replacing professional teachers. Usually, if one has not been certified in the teaching profession, it is either because of a lack of interest or a lack of capability to teach properly. The government has no right to put in teachers like this just to save money.
But what bothers me most about Bill 160 is the amount of power this government puts on itself, in two aspects.
To begin, there is not nearly sufficient consultation with students, as opposed to the amount of time the government is giving to teacher unions. We, the students, are the generation that is going to take care of you guys, so it really doesn't make sense to me that you don't want to know what we think. If you were trying to turn us into morons so that we would be the cheap labour class and the private school students become the executives and the politicians, this bill would be a very good first step. However, it is not going to be that easy. There have already been over five student protests and walkouts this year.
It seems to me that this government has a grudge against anything that is remotely local, maybe because, typically, the more local you get, the more left you get, and this government has a vendetta against the left. I wonder what it will take for the government to understand that its responsibility is to govern for the people, not in spite of the people, or for a certain fraction of the people.
The government has a responsibility, when changing education, to find out what the students think. You need to find out what we think. If we disagree with this bill, I think it should mean so much to you. We're not going to lose any jobs by this bill. We're not going to lose any money or anything. We have no special interest in disagreeing with this bill. We have no hidden agenda or anything. You don't even need to fear us. If we disagree with this bill, then we disagree with it. It's a free country. Not only is it a free country where you can say what you want, but what you say should be respected by the people representing you.
If the government really thinks that students should not participate in walkouts, then maybe you should talk to us once in a while to see what we think. I imagine you'd be very surprised.
Second, it is not only the bill itself that threatens education; it is the fact that a centralized government will have complete control over education, and that scares me. You will be able to do whatever you want, whenever you want, and that really scares me. The fact that this government is taking out its ultra-right-wing rampage on the students bothers me, because I personally do not think this is the way to run a stable province or education system. The government has no right to do this kind of thing.
In conclusion, I believe that Bill 160 should be withdrawn and that any further changes to the education system require the accurate, sufficient consultation of all students. I would like to leave the committee knowing that they know you cannot buy and sell the education system, no matter how much money you have or how much money you are willing to save. The government must understand that education is not merely a tool to make tax cuts off of, and that you cannot continue in this pattern; otherwise we, the students, will be on your backs. This is not a threat, mind you; it's a mere fact. We will be on your backs if you do not listen to us and consult us and if you do not withdraw Bill 160. Our education, unlike many businesses, is not something to be downsized at the mere snapping of a finger. Thank you for your time.
The Chair: We have about 40 second per caucus.
Mr Wildman: Thank you very much for your presentation. I really appreciate your taking the time, and I understand your concern about consultation.
I'd like to consult with you now specifically about what you said about your school and the band you are a part of. One of the things the supporters of the bill say is that it will make it possible to bring so-called experts into the classroom to teach students, rather than teachers. If it were possible to bring a great jazz or classical saxophonist in to instruct you, wouldn't that be a good thing?
Mr Lannan: Sure it would, but it won't be a good thing if the government and the supporters of this bill are going to claim on the one hand that they're bringing in experts and then on the other hand they fire professional teachers who have spent most of their life being with students and teaching, which is their passion, and bringing in uncertified teachers. It really doesn't seem to me to be --
The Chair: Thank you. We'll move on to Mr Froese.
Mr Froese: On behalf of the government, I'd like to thank you for taking your democratic right in expressing your concerns and your opinions.
Mrs McLeod: I also want to thank you for being here. I have a sense of the frustration you're feeling, as I think many students do, that they're not consulted and that their views are not counted because they are not even asked, in the first place, what their views are.
I heard the government members gasp when you used the $1-billion figure. I just want you to know that you are the second person today to use that figure. The president of the Ontario Public School Boards' Association for this province said that she had seen documentation that the plan was to take $1 billion out of education, so I want you to know that you're in company that's seen some evidence.
Mr Lannan: It was also on the CBC news too.
Mrs McLeod: And beyond even the CBC. You're in good company.
The Chair: Jordan, thank you very much for the work that went into this presentation.
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RICHARD LUFT
The Chair: Richard Luft. Good evening, Mr Luft. I don't want to tell you how to make your presentation. You are not going to make it in 10 minutes, but you proceed as you see fit because at 10 minutes I will be cutting you off.
Mr Richard Luft: That's fine. Thank you very much. I particularly appreciate following in Jordan's wake.
I was informed last night by a telephone call from Mr Berry that I could testimony at this particular committee tonight if I so wished. I wasn't expecting that to happen, so what I'm about to say is not as tempered as I would like it to be.
The second thing I want to point out is that I note I am the head of history at Applewood Heights Secondary School in Mississauga. I simply indicate that for the information of the committee. What I say does not necessarily reflect the views of anyone else in that school.
After the telephone call last night I sat before my computer and I pondered the day that lay before me. I would be at my school, Applewood Heights Secondary School in Mississauga, by 7:30 am. I would inform my principal and my federation branch president that I would be speaking before the committee taking counsel on Bill 160 this evening. I would make Xerox copies of a Globe and Mail article to pass out to my students. This because I had promised them some sort of an explanation in the event that teachers would leave their classes.
I would teach a community service class, a new initiative at my school designed to impress upon the students the importance of serving the community and of championing the weak and the disadvantaged. I would work with a faculty of education, University of Toronto teacher whom I have agreed to help along the way as she seeks formal certification as a teacher in the province. I would teach a grade 10 class in Canadian history, wrapping up a period in Canadian history commonly referred to as the Laurier era, or the turn of the century. I guess we're on the verge of another turn of the century. I would teach a grade 11 society, challenge and change class.
I would see the principal about what we might have to do to alleviate the heavy workload that one of my colleagues has assumed because of a reorganization in timetables that has taken place because of a teacher taking maternity leave. I might grab 20 minutes for lunch. I would try to do some evaluating of students. I would spend some time with students who are having problems for a host of reasons, such as struggling with English as a second language, poor work habits that cripple their ability to succeed, personal and behavioural problems caused by difficult family situations.
I would go, as I did, to a branch meeting of my federation to be updated on the protest that I shall most willingly undertake when I am so instructed. Finally, I would pick up my wife and come down here to the Amethyst Room to tell this committee why this government has incurred my most bitter enmity.
Perhaps the committee is somewhat startled by the animus that I bring to my presentation. I can assure you that I am. Over the years, like many teachers in this province, I have carefully cultivated a persona that radiates calmness and rationality. I have tried to avoid demonizing those whom I encounter in public or private spheres. But to continue the metaphor and to pay heed to the family lore that I was taught, when you smell sulphur and you hear the clack of what sounds like a cloven hoof on the terrazzo, then you'd better have your wits about you.
First of all, I have a government that proposes to take to itself enabling powers -- that is a sinister phrase in the history of western jurisprudence -- of the most sweeping scope. Along the way, it seems intent on destroying local school boards as an effective organ of local government and on centralizing control of this province's educational system in the hands of the minister and the Lieutenant Governor in Council. It has always been a tenet of democratic politics that local government is most responsive to community needs, save when grave social and economic injustices are being perpetrated in that community by virtue of blind and wilful prejudice and ignorance. That is the only justification that warrants suspension of the local authority.
Is that what has been happening throughout this province? Had the boards somehow been captured by ideologically driven factions that wreaked their will and their personal theologies upon a mute and helpless public? I think not, but I do suspect that there are such factions -- and I use that word most deliberately -- afoot in this province and that they believe they can do what their creed impels them to do. After all, close to 30% of the eligible voters of this province voted for them just over two years ago.
This faction creates geographically huge wards which it will be impossible for those elected to represent adequately. It proposes to fix a $5000 limit on the stipend that a trustee can receive. It strips trustees of any real input into matters affecting the financing of their people's needs. And of course it justifies that destruction of the common good in the name of common sense.
Then it turns its attention to the teachers' federations. It prefers to call them "unions." In Bill 160 it arrogates to the minister and the Lieutenant Governor in Council sole jurisdiction over such issues as teacher prep time and what constitutes a teacher. It says that its reduction of teachers' preparation time will allow teachers to spend more time in the classroom, but when you examine the rather typical day that I described in my opening remarks, it should be obvious that my work is far more complicated and multidimensional than this bill seems to understand.
Isn't it abundantly clear that if you increase the number of hours that I spend in formal class work, you literally rob my students of the time that I require to serve their particular needs? You increase my evaluation load, you increase the number of classes for which I am responsible, you multiply my paperwork and, in the process, deprive me literally of the time that I now use to meet with my students and carry out other tasks associated with the sustaining of the common or public education system.
But when I or others say this or invite government officials to live with me for a couple of weeks -- not to stay with me at the school for five or six hours a day -- but to live with me so that they might get a full taste of what it means to be a teacher, I am met with an invincible incomprehension -- medieval theologians called it "invincible ignorance" -- that is absolutely determined to push its agenda. It is as if an attending physician should yield to any charlatan or quack who rides in and proclaims he has exclusive rights to the panacea that will cure all ills.
That is why, unfortunately, increasing numbers of people in my profession believe that this bill has a terrible Orwellian ring to it. It is named the Education Quality Improvement Act, but many of us do not believe that it's about improving the quality of public education at all. There is this conviction, approaching in intensity the zeal that the faction brings to its labour, that it's really about destroying the common education system.
We suspect that the system will be underfunded. The Treasurer says that he never intended to take another $1 billion from education, but we think he's merely being the casuist here, bending his public pronouncements to suit the current situation. We believe that the system may lose as many as 10,000 teachers as the minister and the Lieutenant Governor in Council pursue their theologies. We suspect that programs for the disadvantaged will be slashed or, to put it another way, there could be so little revenue that a school will only be able to offer the most basic of curricula or one stripped of frills such as music, art and drama. Then the hue and cry will go up, the cry that the public system is failing even more than in those crisis-ridden days when John Snobelen rode herd over it.
Parents, driven by anxiety for their children's nurturing and future, will begin to demand charter schools, where they can be assured that their children will receive fuller opportunity. Those with the personal resources to afford access to such schools will send their children there. The children of the poor, of immigrants, of single-parent families will be consigned to what their local communities are able to muster or are allotted.
I am willing to drop this conspiratorial approach to the matter if the Premier and the Treasurer would but deny my charges publicly and, of course, because I am so suspicious, offer all their private wealth as a surety that they are not being casuists when they make that pledge.
What do I hope with regard to Bill 160? It is abundantly clear that the government cannot expect the federations to surrender hard-won professional rights without a major confrontation. I regret that deeply, by the way; it brings me no cheer. Granted, it is contemptuous, perhaps fearful of the union movement, but I'd like to think that there are enough pragmatists in their ranks to make them sense that something might be loosed here that will do major damage to the social fabric of this province and irrevocable damage to their hopes of being re-elected.
I hope that the pragmatists in that crowd will start challenging the ideologues on this matter and urge them to withdraw the offending sections of the bill, tear out those provisions that threaten the wellbeing of the province's children, the efficacy of local school boards and the morale and professional standards of this province's teachers.
But if the government persists in behaving like a faction, then it can only expect a reaction that is extragovernmental, a protest from teachers and all who support them that will eventually lead to its defeat. But, sadly, along the way perhaps, something monumental will be badly damaged as this government lurches its way to that next election, and that will be the public education system of this province and the children it serves. It's even possible that the reputation and honour of this province's Parliament will be seriously besmirched by the passage of such a power grab. Surely it doesn't take a Solomon or a Queen of Sheba to see how fraught with peril that consequence is and will be. I thank the committee.
The Chair: Thank you, sir. Your timing was excellent. It was right on the 10 minutes. Thank you very much for taking the trouble to come before us.
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ONTARIO ASSOCIATION FOR COUNSELLING AND ATTENDANCE SERVICES
The Chair: We have one last presentation of the afternoon or evening: the Ontario Association for Counselling and Attendance Services, Steve McCann, chair.
Mr Steve McCann: Thank you, Mr Chairman and members of the committee. On behalf of the Ontario Association for Counselling and Attendance Services executive and its membership, I want to thank you for the opportunity to make our presentation here today. In listening to the presentations that preceded us, I think our topic of conversation in this last 10 minutes before your break is probably the least discussed issue in all of Bill 160, and it's one that's very deeply buried within the bill, but it's certainly of issue and importance to us and that's what brings us here this afternoon.
In addition to chairing the OACAS habitual absence committee, I am also an attendance counsellor social worker with the Wentworth County Board of Education. I would also like to introduce Jill Elliott-Brennan, who is a member of the habitual absence committee and a counsellor with the North York Board of Education.
Ms Jill Elliott-Brennan: The Ontario Association for Counselling and Attendance Services is a provincial organization which represents counsellors whose job involves working with students, schools and families to promote regular school attendance. The purpose of the association, which was founded in 1954, is to encourage attendance counselling services throughout Ontario. Our remarks during this presentation deal solely with the government's recommendation to repeal section 30.5 of the Education Act and replace it with the amendment found on page 21, item 12.2 of the consolidation of acts affected by the Education Quality Improvement Act, 1997. This particular section of the Education Act, 30.5, deals with habitually absent students, and we support the recommended changes.
Mr McCann: As outlined in section 25.1 of the ed act, every school board shall appoint one or more attendance counsellors for the purpose of enforcing Ontario's compulsory school attendance laws. In this province, all children between the ages of 6 and 16, unless legally excused, are expected to be involved in some form of educational program. I think historically governments of Ontario have supported the philosophical belief of the need for compulsory school attendance laws. In fact, I would argue that most people, if you talk to them on the street, would support the belief that kids should be involved in some kind of a school program and that our young people need to be in a school program in order to develop the necessary skills that will make them the leaders of tomorrow.
Participation, involvement and regular attendance in an educational program is an important aspect of any child's schooling. Students who are persistently absent from school often experience academic failure, school frustration; they do not develop appropriate social and problem-solving skills. As academic frustration increases, students often become more isolated and alienated from the school community and are at greater risk for dropping out of school.
But what do we do with these kids who are of compulsory school age and not attending school? That's a question that's often asked of us as attendance counsellors and social workers in the school. Some people would argue that students who are not regularly attending school are not hurting anybody but themselves: just leave them alone, there's no problem. Just leave them be. I think that this particular viewpoint is naïve and uninformed. Longitudinal studies on adult outcomes of habitual absence paint a very unsettling picture.
One study found a significantly higher incidence of anti-social tendencies, low job status, unstable job records and social assistance dependency among adults who had been habitually absent as children. Another study found that habitual absence was one of the childhood symptoms that most reliably predicted an elevated rate of anti-social personality and alcoholism as an adult. A third study has found that habitual absence in secondary school was associated with a much higher incidence of alcoholism, marital problems, criminality, irresponsibility as a parent and family violence.
In the case of family violence, males who were habitually absent in secondary school were nine times more likely to be assaultive of their partners or children in comparison to the normal population. The studies I'm referencing are cited in the handout that has been distributed, so we know empirically that young people who are consistently truant from school are more likely to experience social, personal and financial problems as adults.
Ms Elliott-Brennan: But what of the young people themselves? In 1990, the London family court clinic studied a group of young people between the ages of 12 and 16 who had been found guilty under the Education Act of being habitually absent from school. The researchers found this group of young people were not the Huck Finn type of kid who decided to skip school for a day and go down to the fishing hole. This group of youth was experiencing significant family, personal and social problems. They were often involved in drug use and other forms of criminal behaviour in their community, and many had problems with violence. What the researchers discovered is that habitual absent behaviour is often an indicator of other significant problems the young person is experiencing.
For several years legislation pertaining to habitual absence, legislation that should enable student attendance counsellors to enforce compulsory attendance laws and offer assistance to habitually absent students, has been unclear and confusing. In 1983, when the Juvenile Delinquents Act and the Child Welfare Act were repealed and replaced with the Young Offenders Act and the Child and Family Services Act, the Education Act was not updated to be consistent with these new pieces of legislation.
Because of this, habitual absence legislation is currently confusing, often misunderstood and interpreted in a variety of ways. Because of this legislative confusion, judges in many communities are refusing to allow cases of habitual absence into their courtrooms. Other judges interpret the Education Act, particularly section 30.5, in different and often opposite ways. In several Ontario communities compulsory school attendance laws are not being enforced.
In January 1996, the office of the Chief Judge, Ontario Court of Justice (Provincial Division) reviewed a variety of findings in cases involving habitual absence. In recognizing the inconsistency, confusion and discrepancy of findings across Ontario, the Chief Judge's office stated, and I paraphrase here, "Taken together, Justice Campbell's decision and various other cases have the apparent effect of rendering subsection 30.5 of the Education Act practically impotent."
School attendance counsellors do not use court intervention as a first response to habitual absence behaviour. Counsellors work with students, families, school staff and various community groups in an effort to understand and resolve the student's problems. In most situations the school attendance problem is resolved and the student returns to school, but in circumstances where young people are unwilling to work towards possible solutions, the court option must be a viable alternative. Many of the young people with whom we work require a bottom line. At this time in Ontario, a bottom line does not exist.
Mr McCann: In an odd way all three political parties have had direct influence and involvement with this amendment. It was Dianne Cunningham's questions in the House in 1994 that led us to meet with David Cooke, who was the Minister of Education and Training at that time. A group of us met with Mr Cooke in September of that year, and I'll never forget he asked two very important questions. He said, "First of all, how often do you take students to court?" and "Does it work when you take them to court?" We didn't have a really good answer for him, but they were two very important questions.
So what we did is we went out and accessed the Use of Court Survey that was done by Gary Diamond in 1993 as the provincial school attendance counsellor, and the results of that study were really interesting. I just want to share a couple of the highlights.
In 1993, there were approximately 1.2 million children of compulsory school age in Ontario. Of those, over 18,000 students were referred to the school attendance counsellor in their home school board. Of those 18,000 who were referred to the attendance counsellor, only 439 students and 42 parents were actually taken to court.
Of those 439 students taken to court, only 90 students were returned to court because of their failure to comply with court orders. To me that means court intervention was effective in almost 80% of the cases. To this day, I appreciate Mr Cooke's questions, because it caused us to go back and do our homework and to be able to prove that, yes, court intervention is effective in 80% of the cases and it isn't something that is used as a first response when kids aren't attending school.
Another significant development in this issue occurred in February 1997, when Rick Bartolucci, the Liberal MPP from Sudbury, introduced his private members' bill recommending amendments to the Education Act, specifically section 30.5. Now the Conservative government has come forward with their own recommendations.
In the package of material that we have distributed, you will notice that our association has proposed two options. The first one we like to call our Cadillac version and that's got everything in it that we want, everything but the kitchen sink. The second option is more what has been proposed by the government.
In summary, we believe that if government supports the concept and the philosophical intent of compulsory school attendance and truancy is perceived as a symptom of a young person's distress, boards of education, community agencies, courts and government must work cooperatively to resolve the problems affecting our young people. If we don't resolve the problems of our students now, research shows us that we pay a cost when they become adults.
The Ontario Association for Counselling and Attendance Services supports the proposed legislative changes to section 30.5 of the Education Act. We believe that this change is needed in order to create a more effective, efficient and caring system for habitually absent students and their families in Ontario. Thank you for this opportunity to share our thoughts, our ideas and observations.
The Chair: The 10 minutes are up. I thank you for attending and assisting the committee today.
Mrs McLeod: Mr Chairman, on a point of order, because obviously it's important for us to have heard from these people and they have a couple of very specific recommendations in an area where I think there is three-party agreement that there needs to be some amendments to the act, I'm wondering if the parliamentary assistant might be asked to give the committee a report on option A versus option B or at least bring into the ministry recommendation as to whether Option A could be considered as a further amendment.
The Chair: I'll bring that to his attention.
Mr Wildman: I would agree with that, because all three parties considered change and it hasn't happened.
The Chair: Fine. Thank you very much. The committee will now adjourn until 7 pm.
The committee recessed from 1813 to 1900.
The Chair: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. This is a continuation of the justice committee's consideration of Bill 160. It is traditional to wait until all three caucuses are represented, and I'll therefore take a little time reading off a list of written submissions that we have received, and then we will hear our first presenter. They will get their full 30 minutes, I can assure you, but I'll take this opportunity to read this while waiting for someone from the NDP caucus to attend.
These are written submissions received and distributed to the committee this day from parents of St Nicholas Catholic School, Scarborough; Brian Tuddenham, West Hill; Dorothy Thomson; Juanita Rathbun, St Catharines; and parents representing 10 schools in central Etobicoke.
ONTARIO FEDERATION OF LABOUR
The Chair: I'm sure Mr Wildman will be attending in a moment; therefore, I think we should proceed. All members should have received a copy of the written submission of the Ontario Federation of Labour. Ms LaValley, if you would introduce everyone who will take part in the presentation, I will start clocking the 30 minutes.
Ms Ethel LaValley: First of all, on behalf of the Ontario Federation of Labour I'd like to thank the committee for taking the time to receive our submission on Bill 160. Our organization represents 650,000 members in over 50 unions in the province of Ontario and is the largest provincial federation of labour in Canada.
Joining me this evening is our education director, Sandra Clifford, and Janet Koecher, who unfortunately was unable to get standing before the committee, and we're very pleased to have her as part of our delegation this evening. As a result of this, my presentation will be shorter, and Janet will do a verbal presentation, so I'd like at this time to turn it over to Janet.
Ms Janet Koecher: First I would like to thank the Ontario Federation of Labour for giving up some of its valuable allotted time at these hearings to allow me an opportunity to speak. I had applied a few weeks ago but, like some thousand other individual and groups, was not accepted to speak. I might add that the only reason I am here is that the OFL noticed an article in the Toronto Star in which I criticized the selection process for speakers at these hearings. By inviting a number of groups to participate who did not even apply and by excluding parents such as myself, it appears that the committee did not want to hear from us. So I got here whether you wanted me or not. Unfortunately, the newspaper couldn't feature all the other parents who were turned down.
If I can sum up how I feel about Bill 160 in one word, it's this: scared. I have two daughters in school. My eldest is seven and in grade 2; the youngest is four and in junior kindergarten. I have a huge interest in seeing that this bill does not get passed as is. I don't want to spend the next 13 years -- the period of time that my children will be in the system -- scared.
There are many things that scare me about this bill, but I will tell you about just three.
I'm scared of any piece of legislation that hands control of our education system to a group of bureaucrats who have likely not been surrounded by children in a very long time. I don't believe these are the people best suited to make decisions about the education of my very young children. The existing structures of local school boards and elected trustees, trustees who know the needs of the students in their wards and are sensitive to the issues in their wards, will be powerless with the passing of this bill.
How can a Minister of Education know what is best for my children in Toronto city centre while at the same time being in touch with the needs of the other 2.1 million school children in the province? He or she can't, and this is exactly where school boards and trustees have fit in. Since my elected official, the school trustee, will no longer have an effective voice, it means that as a parent I won't have one either. After this bill is passed, changes will be made by regulation, without any public input and without any debate. Giving this kind of power over the education of my children to anyone is frightening indeed.
I'm scared because Bill 160 will allow uncertified individuals to masquerade as teachers. The idea of hiring content specialists to teach children is ludicrous. Teaching is more than imparting information; learning is more than simply hearing content. I want teachers teaching my children to care about and understand the whole child, not just the subject matter. I want teachers who will teach my child and not someone who will teach music or computers or reading and writing. Specialists tend to work well with people who are comfortable with the subject matter. It's knowing what to do with the others, the ones who find it more difficult, that is critical, and this is something that teachers are trained to do.
I feel comfortable knowing that my children's gym teacher will plan his class for whatever age group he is teaching. Would I feel as much at ease releasing my four-year-old into a gym class led by someone who has had no educational training? I don't think so. I also feel comfortable knowing that because of her teaching certificate, my children's music teacher is able to gauge the strengths and weaknesses of each child's learning ability and also knows that every child does not have the ability nor the inclination to be a musician and doesn't try to make them into one. It would be scary for me indeed to send my children off to school each day to try and learn from people who are not teachers.
I'm also scared about the concept of school closures or transfers. Our school is not just a building where our children go for a few hours a day; it's the focus of our community, and in this I'm sure it's not unique in Ontario. We attend events, hold dances, fund-raise together. Children and parents alike forge friendships. It is a community, and if for some reason our school was deemed inefficient or no longer cost-effective to run, this community in effect would be dispersed. That would be a tragedy. Cabinet doesn't understand the intricacies of community and should not have the unilateral power to destroy such a community.
In closing, I'd like to say that my children deserve better than Bill 160. They deserve an education bill that is not at the mercy of politics, one that makes sure that teachers are teachers and one that doesn't run their education like a business, because it isn't one.
Ms LaValley: Ontario Federation of Labour members live and work across Ontario in all regions and economic sectors, including the teaching and non-teaching professions in the public education sector. Our interest in the public education system stems from our role as representatives of our affiliated members who work in the sector, as well as our roles as taxpayers and as parents with children in the public school system. It is with all these roles in mind that we present this submission here today.
The stated objective of the government in introducing Bill 160 is to ensure the highest quality of education in the most cost-effective manner, but as we examine the bill, we have to come to the conclusion that there is another agenda at work here. The true objective of this government appears to be to remove school boards as players in the control of education finance, to neutralize the influence of teacher unions on educational policy, and to concentrate control of education spending in the hands of the minister.
This process began in April of this year with the passage of Bill 104, the Fewer School Boards Act. Bill 104 provided for the amalgamation of the majority of Ontario school boards, reducing the total number of boards by about 100. The estimated annual cost savings resulting from these amalgamations amounts to roughly $150 million.
Bill 104 also established the Education Improvement Commission to oversee the transition from the old school board system to the new system of school board governance. In response to a request from the minister last year, the EIC issued a report entitled The Road Ahead. This report made a number of recommendations not about school board amalgamation transition issues, which is the commission's legislated function, but about the terms and conditions of employment of teachers. Many of these recommendations found their way into Bill 160.
Bill 160 completes the process of school board amalgamations set out in Bill 104. It deals with other aspects of the impending school board amalgamations, such as governance, finance, labour relations, and matters related to instruction in Ontario's schools, and makes amendments to the Education Act in these regards.
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Bill 160 purports to be transition legislation similar to Bill 136, the Public Sector Transition Stability Act. However, it goes far beyond dealing with the transition processes associated with school board amalgamations by making changes to education finance as well as to the scope of teacher collective bargaining.
The Ontario Federation of Labour is adamantly opposed to Bill 160. It is a piece of legislation that is both disruptive and unnecessary. The name of the bill, the Education Quality Improvement Act, is a deception. The majority of provisions in this bill will not improve the quality of our education system but will do, quite frankly, just the opposite. Bill 160 appears to have been designed with objectives other than that of improving the quality of our education system.
Our opposition to the bill centres around several main points. The first is that Bill 160 is undemocratic. It gives Queen's Park sweeping dictatorial powers over every aspect of the education system: school boards, funding, school councils, teacher qualifications, the number of teachers and the amount of time teachers have to spend with their students.
The second point is that Bill 160 is not about improving quality in education. It is, rather, about downsizing public education, eliminating programs, laying off 10,000 teachers, and replacing teachers with unqualified personnel. Bill 160 targets the two areas that stand in the way of the government's agenda: school board control of a significant part of education funding and the negotiated guarantees in teachers' collective agreements.
The bill allows the government to reform the education system in these two key areas by removing control of education spending and taxation from school boards and trustees and centralizing it at Queen's Park, and by controlling teachers' terms and conditions of employment by regulation so that certain perceived cost items such as preparation time, class size and the resultant number of teachers will not be negotiable.
At the same time, the government is attempting to get support from the public for their agenda by convincing them that these changes are necessary, that educational spending is out of control, that school boards and teachers' unions are to blame, and that in order to make inroads into the deficit and to ensure that the future costs of education are managed successfully, Queen's Park must control the education purse-strings and limit the power of teachers' unions to negotiate certain terms and conditions of employment on behalf of their members. It also purports to be about the quality of education, when in fact it is merely a legislative tool for extracting resources and expertise from the education system.
The Ministry of Education and Training has embarked upon a comprehensive review and rewriting of curriculum for grades 1 through OAC which the ministry claims will result in a more rigorous curriculum and enhanced student performance. However, it is to be implemented at precisely the same time that Bill 160 reduces teacher preparation time and professional development days by 50%. The introduction of massive curriculum changes while reducing preparation time and professional development days are mutually exclusive objectives and fly in the face of claims that Bill 160 is about education quality.
In a similar fashion, the government has recently established a College of Teachers which is charged with defining standards of professional practice and with ensuring the highest qualifications among Ontario's teachers. Despite the existence of this self-governing College of Teachers, and without consultation with this college, Bill 160 calls for an unprecedented diminishment of professional qualifications in Ontario schools and aims to introduce thousands of non-qualified personnel into teaching positions. Once again, it is impossible to maintain the position that Bill 160 will improve the quality of education in Ontario in light of proposals such as this.
Bill 160 will radically alter existing, well-known labour practices. It will severely limit the scope of bargaining and will result in chronic litigation as boards and teachers attempt to conduct negotiations. The legislation introduces the provincial government as a direct third party in those employment relations. It will create chaos while teacher affiliates and school boards struggle to adjust to new labour policies and practices and legal challenges to restore a balance to employee-employer relations.
Not only will Bill 160 result in unsettled teacher affiliate-school board labour relations, but it will result in the destabilization of the teaching profession itself. It will not increase accountability to the taxpayer, since the EIC and the Minister of Finance are given expanded and consolidated powers in perpetuity. The proposed legislation will result in an extraordinary degree of centralized control by the province while at the same time leaving all of the implementation problems at the local level. Under Bill 160, the province assumes all authority but accepts no responsibility.
Bill 160 proposes to regulate teacher-school board relationships during the transition period of amalgamation brought forth by Bill 104 and several other related government initiatives. It involves successor rights, representation rights, the composition of bargaining units and transition collective agreements. It limits the scope of transition and future collective agreements.
The bill also extends the powers and life of the previously cabinet-appointed Education Improvement Commission beyond the transition period to oversee certain collective bargaining issues traditionally left to teacher affiliates and school boards. The term appointment of the EIC was scheduled to expire within five years, but Bill 160 will make it permanent.
Meanwhile, the government is unable to provide any convincing evidence that teacher-school board relations require the sweeping permanent provisions of the bill or that its permanent features will in any way improve teacher-school board relations.
Scope of bargaining: Bill 160 gives Queen's Park the power to make regulations concerning teachers' terms and conditions of employment that are both unnecessary and unacceptable. The right to bargain staffing, working conditions, and job security provisions has been used wisely by school boards and teachers ever since the enactment of the School Boards and Teachers Collective Negotiations Act in 1975. Bargaining these fundamental issues has enhanced the quality of learning conditions for students across Ontario over the past 22 years.
Placing teachers under the Ontario Labour Relations Act does not diminish open-scope bargaining, because that act places no restrictions on terms or conditions of employment which are negotiable. Teachers, however, would be denied the democratic right to bargain all terms and conditions of employment, which everyone else under the act enjoys.
Bill 160 introduces new regulation-making powers in a number of fundamental areas and provides that in the case of a conflict, the bill and its regulations prevail over the provisions of collective agreements. The injection of the minister into the negotiation process will lead to disastrous teacher-school board relations. It is an unprecedented interference by the minister as a third party in the negotiation process. But the government will not be a true party. It will set the taxation rates to generate money and the spending ceilings to allocate money, but it will not be present at the table. Many of the regulatory sections of the bill already exist in the purview of the minister, but what we see here is a tightening of the central grip on traditionally local matters.
We would like to comment briefly on some of the proposed regulations.
Regulating work time preceding the start of the school year: By suggesting that a regulation is needed to require teachers to work during the week immediately preceding the start of school, the government is taking a voluntary service and turning it into a compulsory part of the job. Most teachers also spend time in school during the week preparing for opening day. This is what professional teachers do. This change will place enormous stress upon the relationship between school administrators and their teachers, not to mention among teachers themselves.
Regulating the length of the school day, school year and their components: Regulation 304, as it is currently drafted, already deals adequately with these matters by giving the minister the power to make regulations governing these areas. Other than prescribing a minimum number of instructional days and a maximum number of examination and professional activity days, teachers and school boards should be left alone to determine these issues locally through bargaining.
Regulating class size: We cannot agree with any provision that would limit the right of teachers to negotiate class size with their employing school board. Teachers in Ontario have historically bargained pupil-teacher ratios, class size, teacher workload and other associated terms and conditions of employment. School boards and teachers recognize that particular grade levels, subjects or programs may vary enormously from board to board and school to school.
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The former education minister suggested that school boards and teachers lack the responsibility to be permitted to control this very important subject. The record shows otherwise. Recent increases in class size have been a direct result of the $800 million in cuts made by this government in the last school year. If proper funding were available, reasonable class sizes would prevail in every class in every school board in Ontario. The government's sole objective in this exercise is to be able to reduce the absolute number of teachers in the classroom.
Regulating preparation time: This government seems to have made it a priority to attack teachers' preparation time. It has gone out of its way to promote the myth that Ontario teachers have more preparation time than colleagues elsewhere in Canada and that the achievement level of Ontario students would improve if only it can force teachers to spend some of that excessive preparation time in direct contact with their students.
In reality, Ontario teachers do not enjoy more preparation time than their counterparts in other provinces. Most elementary and secondary teachers receive up to 40 minutes a day for preparation time. This is comparable to other provinces, and the use of this preparation time by teachers is well documented. The tasks in which they engage are endless, all of which contribute to being as effective as possible when performing their actual in-class duties with students.
What is the government's motivation to reduce teachers' preparation time? The answer, quite frankly, is obvious. In order to find more savings from Ontario's education system, the government must cut the number of teaching jobs, but there is virtually nothing left to cut. By reducing the number of preparation periods, two key objectives of the government are realized: the significant cost savings the government is seeking and a reduction in the number of teachers.
Regulating the amount of teachers' non-teaching time: Limiting the amount of time teachers spend performing other necessary tasks such as on-calls would deprive schools of the resources and skills that teachers bring to these tasks. It appears the government is simply intent on teachers teaching in the classroom. All the other important interaction which teachers have with students outside of the classroom in a school is apparently unimportant. How will that positively affect the tone of most schools and the relationship that most teachers enjoy with their students? If schools operate less efficiently or are a more impersonal place to be, how will they improve the quality of education?
The government's intrusion in this area will be counterproductive. There can be no central control over goodwill, volunteer time, or extracurricular activities. The more the minister assigns during the day, the more the minister extends the day or the year, the less time will be available for other valued activities.
Regulating who teaches and what qualifications teachers should have: We are adamantly opposed to any recommendation that would allow instructors who are not certified teachers to supervise or deliver programs and any other regulatory change that would facilitate that. Qualified teachers are the foundation of a quality education system. Successive governments, teachers' federations and school boards have long stressed the need for qualified teachers to provide instruction to students. In the 1970s, qualifications were changed to require at least a bachelor's degree in order to gain entrance to a faculty of education, at least for academic teachers. The royal commission even went so far as to suggest that teachers ought to have a master's degree to teach. The practice over the years has been to increase the requirements to be a teacher, not decrease them.
In the modern world of ever more rapidly changing technology, the education system of a successful society must employ teachers who are more competent and highly trained than ever before. Teachers will have to have ever-increasing levels of post-secondary and post-graduate training. They will need not less but more qualifications than in the past, and yet this government declares this to be the time to dilute and limit the job description and qualification requirements of teachers and teaching positions. This is a move that will lead to the erosion of our educational standards and that will lead to Ontario becoming a second- or third-rate province, unable to compete in an increasingly complex global economy. Devaluing teacher qualifications and expectations will lead to economic and social disaster.
All of the above regulations will place unnecessary restrictions on the scope of bargaining and violate the right of teachers to negotiate freely their terms and conditions of employment. The Ontario Federation of Labour will support the teachers' federation in their resolve to use every means possible to oppose the passage of these amendments into law.
Education finance: Bill 160 radically alters the system of education finance used in the province of Ontario by suspending the rights of school boards to levy taxes. What this means is that school boards are effectively taken over, out of the power loop. They no longer have decision-making powers over either the generating formula or the allocating formula for education dollars.
In order to support its claim that education finance in Ontario must be reformed, the government is trying to foster the notion that Ontario's education spending is out of line with that of other Canadian provinces and that $1 billion must be extracted from the system. In fact, for the 1996-97 school year, Ontario ranked 49th of 63 North American education systems in per pupil spending. Forty-two American states, the District of Columbia, three Canadian provinces -- Manitoba, British Columbia and Quebec -- and the two Canadian territories all surpassed Ontario's per pupil costs.
In view of the time, I'm going to skip over school boards and government's regulatory powers, collective agreements, the right to strike, and I'm going to move right to the conclusion.
Interjection.
Ms LaValley: I apologize. I'm just going to briefly go through the right to strike.
Bill 160 also gives the Lieutenant Governor in Council the authority to remove the right to strike under the guise of preventing disruption in the education of pupils. We consider this to be an arbitrary misuse of power. The right to strike is a right under the Ontario Labour Relations Act, but this bill allows the government to circumvent parliamentary debate in the denial of this right. Bill 160 gives the government the right to write a regulation that overrides any act and thus gives it the ability to remove the right to strike without holding any debate in the House.
Under Bill 160, the cabinet, through the EIC, is given unlimited powers to determine the manner of restructuring in this transition period. The EIC has the duty to oversee and make decisions with respect to the transfer of assets, liabilities and employees. There are minimal protections for employees who are transferred unilaterally from one school board to another, save their right to retain employment. These transfers may be beyond the group of predecessor school boards. The EIC has the right to override local collective agreements in any matter before them.
Since the EIC is composed of cabinet-appointed individuals who are directly responsible to the cabinet, and since all decisions by the EIC can be reviewed by the cabinet, the EIC will be the mouthpiece of the government. Their role will be to echo the desires of the government. To further complicate this problem, the commissioners have no responsibilities to explain their decisions to the affected parties, nor to provide any rationale behind their actions. There will be no accountability between the parties or to the public.
In conclusion, the Ontario Federation of Labour is not opposed to education reform if it serves to truly improve the quality of education students in this province receive, but as we have illustrated in this submission, Bill 160 is not about improving quality. It is an attack on the education system, an attack on the rights of teachers. We urge this government to scrap this legislation and to bring in real reform based on fundamental democratic principles.
For education reform to be acceptable to parents, to students and to teachers, there must be no adverse impact on students or programs. The reform must guarantee adequate funding under the control of local school boards to maintain quality programs for Ontario students. It must guarantee that teachers will continue to have all terms and conditions of employment negotiated through direct and free bargaining with their employer. It must also guarantee that every student in every Ontario classroom has a qualified, certified teacher. It must minimize the regulatory control of Queen's Park and its educational bureaucrats and reinstate shared decision-making on educational policy so that students and their programs are protected. It must guarantee that local school boards maintain their constitutional right to levy taxes to meet the educational needs of their students. Finally, it must provide the Ontario Labour Relations Board with the authority, if necessary, to determine transitional bargaining issues resulting from the merging of teacher bargaining units.
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We believe that educational reform which has these guarantees as underlying principles will best serve the students and teachers of Ontario and will maintain a strong and viable public education system.
On behalf of the Ontario Federation of Labour, I respectfully submit this brief and thank you very much.
The Chair: Thank you, Ms LaValley. We have one minute left per caucus and we can start off with Mr Smith.
Mr Smith: Ms Koecher, we've had a number of presentations today dealing with a range of viewpoints on the extent to which parents should be involved in the decision-making of their school community. As a parent, could you give me an idea of where your comfort level is in terms of involvement in decisions in the school community?
Ms Koecher: I like knowing that my trustee is available for me to call and that he or she will have a knowledge of what goes on in the ward. I would like to be able to call her and talk about problems with her and know that she might have somewhere to take my problems and deal with them. I feel that with this bill that isn't going to happen any more.
Mrs McLeod: Under Bill 160 teachers who are in amalgamated boards, or in boards that in fact are not being amalgamated, will have to renegotiate their contracts as of January 1. As of January 1, all contracts, although they are carried over, are put in suspension. They have to renegotiate new ones by September 1.
Do you know whether or not that is true for non-teaching employees of school boards in boards that are not amalgamating? I don't know how close you were to Bill 136 as it was working its way through the system. If you don't know the answer, you're not alone, because I haven't been able to get any --
Ms LaValley: I'm not sure, to be honest. We could fine out, but let me say that from the Ontario Federation of Labour's point of view, we've been quite occupied not only with Bill 136 but with this bill, Bill 160. But we could certainly find an answer for you.
Mrs McLeod: It seems to me it's a recipe for chaos to have even just the teaching contracts of all amalgamated and non-amalgamated boards expiring and having to be renegotiated. Do you think you could comment on why the government would feel it was necessary to have all the contracts of non-amalgamated boards reopened and renegotiated within that time frame?
Ms LaValley: My personal view on it is that it's all part of the plan to provide chaos. It's all part of the plan to have the teachers and everyone look like a bunch of greedy people who just want to protect their jobs etc. I also believe there isn't enough dialogue. They talk about the fact that they want to dialogue with the teachers and they want to make this fair and reasonable, but in fact that's not there. I believe it's all part of the process where it's set up to make everyone appear as if they don't want any form of change.
Mr Wildman: One of the reasons for that, of course, is the fact that if the government is about taking money out of the system, the only way they can do that is by having fewer teachers. If there are protections in the collective agreements on class size, prep time and so on, that prevents the government from acting to take the money out.
You were very much involved with the OFL with regard to Bill 136, which was also purported to be a transition piece of legislation to smooth the transition: the amalgamation of hospitals, the amalgamation of municipalities and so on.
This is the same sort of thing, the amalgamation of boards. Do you have any idea why the government would move and try to accommodate the concerns of the labour movement on Bill 136 but apparently is not prepared to take a similar approach when dealing with teachers?
Ms LaValley: I guess everyone was kind of wondering what happened with Bill 136. I like to think that the government has seen the right of what has been done, the fights in the community saying to the government: "This is wrong. This isn't the way to do it."
Clearly from my own personal point of view, particularly as the government looks at where they are in the polls, it looks as if they have certainly been on a roll to try to pick a fight with the teachers. If you watched Mr Johnson tonight on the news, it's: "We're trying to attempt; we're really sorry that they've left," but I think this was all window dressing. I think they want the teachers out on strike. They want to create this chaos and they want to call it an illegal strike and get them forced back; they want to show they've got the power. That's my view of this.
The Chair: Thank you for your presentation here this evening.
BOARD OF TRADE OF METROPOLITAN TORONTO
The Chair: Our next presentation will be by the Metropolitan Toronto board of trade, Louise Verity, director of policy. Welcome, Ms Verity. I know you know the rules, but I would ask that everyone be introduced for the purposes of Hansard.
Ms Louise Verity: Thank you very much. I would turn it over to Paul Fisher, who is the chair of the Metropolitan Toronto board's education and training committee.
Mr Paul Fisher: Thank you, Mr Chairman, for allowing the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Toronto to make a presentation before this committee. My name is Paul Fisher and, as Louise has said, I am the chair of the education committee of the board of trade. With me, as you've noted, are Louise Verity, director of policy, Norm Tulsiani, internal legal counsel, and John Bech-Hansen, staff economist.
The Board of Trade of Metropolitan Toronto is the largest community board of trade or chamber of commerce in Canada. Our membership comprises a broad cross-section of the greater Metropolitan Toronto business community, from self-employed businesspersons to major corporations, both domestic and foreign-owned, private and publicly traded, engaged in all manner of business from service to financial and manufacturing activities.
The board of trade welcomes the opportunity to comment on Bill 160. While the board would normally provide detailed commentary on the various aspects of the bill and offer concrete recommendations for improvement, because of time constraints we will restrict ourselves to commenting on a few key areas. For a more in-depth look at our response to Bill 160, I would refer you to our brief.
For the purposes of my opening remarks, I will address the five key aspects of Bill 160 from the perspective of the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Toronto. They include instructional time, preparation time, illegal strikes, differentiated staffing and education finance.
The board of trade supports an increase in instructional time. The board supports the regulation-making powers in this bill which will give the province the ability to limit class size and the number of exam days and professional development days to ensure that students receive the ideal amount of instructional time in the classroom. The board of trade supports the finding of the Education Improvement Commission that students should spend more time in the classroom.
The need for students to receive greater instructional time is clear. As outlined in the EIC's first report of August 1997, Canada compares rather unfavourably with a number of other countries in terms of the average number of days in the school year. China has the highest annual number of school days with 251, Canada ranks tenth with an average of 188, and Portugal has the lowest at 172. Ontario's 300-minute instructional day places us eighth out of 20 jurisdictions surveyed, with France ranking first at 370 minutes and Brazil the shortest at 223 minutes.
It is critical that the Ontario education system give students the skills required to compete in a global marketplace. The regulation-making powers set out in this bill will allow for a flexible system to ensure students are spending enough time in the classroom.
The board of trade supports the right of the province to designate teachers' preparation time by regulation. We recognize that teachers are professionals and do spend time to keep up to date in their subject areas and to revise and improve their teaching lessons. Such preparation is vital to ensuring the quality of education received by students. Such effort of preparation is routinely expected of professionals in other sectors. The board of trade supports the right of the province to set teachers' preparation time by regulation, but notes that preparation time should be applied consistently to all teachers across the province.
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The board of trade supports a flexible education system where students are able to benefit from the knowledge and experience of experts in particular areas who are not certified teachers. The board of trade recognizes that the appropriateness or necessity of using non-certified teachers will have to be decided on a case-by-case basis. We support the regulation-making power of cabinet as a flexible tool to achieve this purpose. The board of trade recognizes that the use of such experts is to supplement the work of certified teachers.
The board of trade strongly opposes any illegal strike on the grounds that it would be irresponsible and detrimental to the education of students. The board of trade supports the provisions by which strikes and lockouts which commence before January 1, 1998, will be terminated on that date and that no strike or lockout can occur without meeting the requirements of the Ontario Labour Relations Act. This will encourage the parties to negotiate their differences.
The board of trade also supports the requirement that the first collective agreement negotiated between the parties have a term of operation of at least two years to ensure some stability during the transition period and to ensure the non-interruption of the school year for students during this time. An illegal strike would be irresponsible and unacceptable. Our children would pay the price.
The board of trade still has major concerns in the area of education finance. Education finance decisions still to be made by the province will have major consequences on the quality of Metro Toronto's education system. Centralizing the financing of the elementary and secondary education system, however, is long overdue. Total school enrolment increased by only 16% between 1985 and 1995, while school board spending increased by 82% and property taxes increased by more than 120%. No provincially controlled tax on either persons or businesses has increased by anywhere near this much over the same period.
The provincial government must establish a single, uniform, province-wide property tax on non-residential property for the support of elementary and secondary education.
Business taxpayers in Ontario currently face massive interjurisdictional inequities in the burden of non-residential, that is, commercial and industrial, education property taxes. According to the report of the Ontario Fair Tax Commission, effective non-residential property tax rates in Ontario for education vary over a range of six to one.
All Ontario businesses benefit equally from a well-educated society. Elementary and secondary education is as much a provincial responsibility as health care, social services and post-secondary education, which are already financed from uniform provincial taxes. The costs and benefits of education spill over school board boundaries to a very large degree. Education is poised to become a universal service with province-wide standardization of basic service levels and performance measures.
Having a uniform commercial-industrial rate would parallel planned changes in the treatment of residential education taxpayers. The provincial government must establish a single, uniform province-wide property tax on residential property for the support of elementary and secondary education.
The Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing's August 6 announcement concerning the estimated changes in municipal costs and revenues that would result from the government's Who Does What initiative contained two alternatives for the halving of residential education taxes. Alternative 1 called for every municipality's residential education tax rate to be halved; alternative 2 called for a single, uniform rate of tax modified to ensure that taxpayers in all municipalities receive at least a 40% reduction from 1997 taxes.
The board of trade believes that the rationale for province-wide uniformity in non-residential taxes applies in equal measure to residential taxes. We therefore urge the province to adopt a single province-wide rate of property tax rather than halving existing tax rates in each municipality.
The provincial government must ensure that education funding formulas give adequate recognition of special needs. If the provincial government proceeds to centralize education finance, it is imperative that the new grant system take local circumstances into account, such as the learning readiness of children entering the school system, the costs of providing education to students for whom English or French is a second language and the costs associated with educating children from low-income families or students with special needs. All of these are heavily concentrated in Metropolitan Toronto.
Our support for the centralization of education finance will remain conditional until we are assured the amount of this grant reflects the true costs associated with educating children at risk and is not structured as a token grant with minimal resources attached to it.
That concludes our remarks. We'd be pleased to answer any questions.
The Chair: Thank you. We have about five minutes per caucus. We'll start off with the opposition.
Mr Gerry Phillips (Scarborough-Agincourt): I appreciate the board's presentation; thoughtful as always.
I'm looking for your advice on your support for the bill, in that you say it's subject to three conditions and then a general dissent. The bill we have to approve, the one that will be rammed through, does not meet at least two of your concerns. In fact, it runs contrary to them in that your condition 1 was a single, uniform province-wide property tax on non-residential property. The bill actually is the opposite of that. If you've read the bill, the minister has unfettered rights to tax whatever he or she wants, and it isn't just this government, it'll be the next government. So I say strike one, if you will.
I've listened to the Conservative members and your condition 3 about meeting the special needs of Metro Toronto -- you speak well for them, I might say, for all the residents. I fear deeply that the plan of the government is to gut the support for special needs in Metropolitan Toronto. I've been at public meetings where they say the city of Toronto school board is spending way too much money. So we're going to have to approve a bill with no assurances on your condition 3.
On your general dissent, businesses in Metro Toronto are going to have 100% of the education left on them, nothing is coming off; unfettered rights by the minister to tax you in any way he or she wants; and you're picking up social housing, social assistance, child care, all sensitive social services that nobody, particularly the board of trade -- but nobody; David Crombie -- thinks is right.
You're here today I think kind of encouraging us to vote for Bill 160 and I'm telling you that at least three of your four conditions on the financial side are not only not going to be met, but we're going to put in law the opposite of what you want. I guess I'm looking for some advice from the board. What is your advice to us? Do we fight to hold this bill up until we get the assurances the board of trade wants or what?
Mr Fisher: Thank you for those questions. I'll answer the one about the Metro Toronto concern about adequate compensation for special needs and then I'll turn it over to John on the tax issues.
I was the lead founder of something called Principal for a Day on behalf of both the Metropolitan Toronto board of trade and the Learning Partnership. As part of that, I myself went to Wilkinson Public School. Mr Smith came and spoke to us at the board of trade and I empathized with him what I saw there: 50% Muslim students, 38% students with English as a first language. We have very special needs brought on by immigration into Metropolitan Toronto, so we are very concerned.
On the other hand, we at the board understand the importance of good education and feel the system has not been flexible enough and needs adjustment. So it's perhaps one of those leaps we are prepared to take because we see the overall need for rate flexibility and restructuring, and we see this bill as the only opportunity that has come along in a long time to do that. It's in the context of the other restructuring, of course, with the school boards. Now I turn it to John for the tax aspects.
Mr John Bech-Hansen: Actually, I just wanted to make a supplementary remark on the grants issue. It's always been a bit of a divisive issue for us in the business community because we've certainly examined the costs of the Metro school board and we've always understood that the out-of-classroom expenditures by the Metro public board are quite a bit higher than they are anywhere else in the province.
We anticipate that part of what the government is trying to achieve is some control on the out-of-classroom expenditure side and they're to be commended for that, but at the same time we recognize there will always have to be some higher level of spending in Metro per student than the provincial average on account of the special needs that are there.
We're kind of hoping that on the one hand some of the out-of-classroom expenditure is going to be addressed, but at the same time that there will be improvements on the grant side, which are directed at the classroom for special needs children. We're hoping there will be a reasonable balancing out of what's happening. We don't expect at the end of the day that the Metro school boards will probably get as much per pupil as they are now, but we aren't convinced they necessarily need that to provide the services that are needed.
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On the question of the taxes, we recommend that commercial-industrial taxpayers pay a uniform rate province-wide. Our understanding is that's what the Business Education Tax Review Panel has recommended to the government and I guess we just have to wait and see if that's going to happen. We don't really see any reason why the government would have any reason not to support doing that inasmuch as it's planning to do the same thing on the residential taxes.
Mr Phillips: Would any of your members proceed to approve a business plan with those vague, unanswered questions? I don't think so.
The Chair: I'm sorry, Mr Phillips, our time has elapsed. We have to move on to Mr Wildman.
Mr Wildman: I'd like to follow up on Mr Phillips's questions. I thank you for your presentation. It's nice to see you again, Louise.
Two areas, particularly on the funding formula: You're quite right. You said all you can do is hope. We don't know what the funding formula is. It was originally supposed to be coming out in September, then it was supposed to be mid-October. Now we don't know when. It appears it's not going to be coming out until after this bill is law. Wouldn't you think it would be more reasonable to delay the passage of this bill into law until everybody knows what the funding formula is and understands what the government intends to do with regard to funding classroom education for students? Would that not be a more reasonable approach? Would you approve a business plan without knowing what the numbers were?
Ms Verity: The bill actually is very complex and we did indicate at the beginning of the presentation the difficulty a group such as ours has in responding, that there are so many facets to the legislation.
What we have to keep in mind, on the basis of the fact that there are so many facets to the legislation, is that there are some components where there are definitely timing considerations in terms of the broader restructuring that's happening with the school boards and other things.
The timing of the legislation passing -- I can only speculate at this point, given where I am now -- is that we have a municipal election campaign in under one month and there are some components that are really key to that process. I think from the labour relations side and others, there's certainly some rationale for it.
In terms of the board's position on education financing and some of the decisions we have not seen, that certainly is a real concern, but from a logistical, operational standpoint there are many components of this legislation which I think will have to be passed by the Legislature in a timely fashion, if the government wishes to proceed on its path.
Mr Wildman: Over the last year Louise and I have had numerous discussions about the timely passage of legislation.
Could I ask one other question, and that is with regard to your comments about the Education Improvement Commission and its recommendations with regard to changes in prep time. You pointed out quite correctly that the EIC recommended there be more contact between teacher and students in the classroom, and it recommended changes to prep time. But the law that is proposed here, Bill 160, is proposing double the cut that was recommended by the Education Improvement Commission. While you can say they recommended it, they didn't recommend it in this magnitude. They also recommended a reinvestment of all dollars saved in education and the government hasn't been prepared to make that commitment. I'm just asking if you would check with the EIC about its recommendations and perhaps try to find out for all of us why the government doubled it.
Mr Fisher: I guess our feeling was that the regulation-making power, which I emphasized a number of times, provides the cabinet with the flexibility to implement whatever is necessary. Our understanding is that the cabinet will be prepared to listen to submissions as to what would be the correct amount. There's an element, I agree, of trial and error there, but we feel you try something and if you find that it's ineffective, that it's not working, then you should have that flexibility to make changes.
Mr Froese: I was a little surprised at Mr Phillips's and Mr Wildman's reference in some of the questions. I'm sure they referred to education as a business and I thought they had said before that education wasn't supposed to be treated as a business.
I'll make a statement and then I'll ask you to respond to it. The statement might be quite lengthy but just bear with me for a minute.
The bottom line to our reform of education is basically three things, and that is less waste, more teaching and better results. If we come with our new curriculum and we talk about teaching time and so on and so forth, it's basically those areas. Those who have come in opposition against our education reform, by far the majority of them just come and say, "No, no, no," and don't give any proposal for changes to improve the education system. Everybody has talked about education reform for years and years.
I'd like to get your comments or what your feeling is on an article that was in the St Catharines Standard; that's where I'm from, St Catharines-Brock, the riding. It's an editorial. I'll refer to what they say is a role for clarification. They talk in terms of customers, management and service providers, the parents being the customers. They talk about the outcomes of the Ontario education system should be measured and evaluated by parents, and parents only. They talk about the government and the administrative branch as being the management of that model system, and that in that role the management portion, the government in this case, is responsible for the long-term strategies, the design and enhancements of the education system and change.
When you're in that position, as government or management, you always keep in mind the needs of your customer, which in this case would be the parents. If the parents aren't satisfied, they're going to judge it and they're going to tell the government what's wrong. If the government doesn't listen, you know what happens the next time around.
We've heard a lot about the teachers unions and their complaints, but in the model they're the service providers and they have a critical role. We all understand that. They have a responsibility for delivering that system.
They talk about it being dangerous for the teachers to elevate themselves above that role they're there for and to start determining what the class sizes would be, what the curriculum should be and other standards.
I would like to know if you can comment on that type of model. Would you agree with something similar to that?
Mr Fisher: I'd be glad to comment on that, certainly. First of all, I should emphasize the system in Ontario is very good. We do have good-quality education, but it's not as good as it should be and we are spending too much money on it. It's too inflexible a model.
I'll say as an aside that, as a banker, I know about inflexibility, I know about bureaucracy. We in banking are doing a lot, as a lot of institutions such as hospitals etc have done in Ontario over the last number of years, over the last number of decades, to make ourselves more consumer oriented. We certainly are not as consumer oriented in business as we need to be.
I heard a presentation last week from the Institute of the Future in the United States on the new consumer. The consumer is demanding a lot more. I think what we're seeing here is business as provider of the taxes, and the residents and parents. I have three children in the education system, up to high school. We are wanting more. We are consumers who are asking for more. In terms of can the suppliers, can the tellers in the system, in effect -- I don't want to lower -- I mean, these are professionals we're talking about as teachers, but as an analogy, they are not ones really to evaluate the quality of their own services, I don't think, and to make the decisions as to when they should open and close the doors. We are now listening more and more to consumers as to when that should happen. If we don't satisfy the consumers, they leave. This system is a monopoly basically. Nobody can leave with the exception of a few private schools, and even then you're double paying.
We support, I think, what you're saying very fully. We want to emphasize the quality of the education that's there, the quality of the teaching. We just want it better.
The Chair: Thank you very much for your presentation this morning.
2000
ONTARIO PUBLIC SUPERVISORY OFFICIALS' ASSOCIATION
The Chair: Our next and last presentation for the evening is the Ontario Public Supervisory Officials' Association. The committee welcomes you call, and my personal welcome to the director of education in the region of Waterloo.
Mr Terry Lynch: My name is Terry Lynch. I'm the president of OPSOA. Introducing my fellow presenters, Ron Sudds is our treasurer; Grant Yeo is past president; and Patti Haskell is our president-elect for 1998-99 school year. Also in the audience tonight is Rae Stoness, our executive director.
OPSOA is pleased that this opportunity is afforded to us to comment on Bill 160. We would like you to see our presentation characterized as a discussion of conceptual concerns about the long-range impact that the approval of this bill will have on effective implementation and supervision of the delivery of exemplary instruction to Ontario's students. The considerable training and experience of our members provide support to the issues we wish to raise this evening.
The Ontario Public Supervisory Officials' Association represents the senior education leaders in the public boards of education in Ontario. Directors and superintendents have been providing strong leadership and management within the directions of government legislation and regulation and school board policy since the implementation of Bill 44 in January 1969. OPSOA's main goals are to influence the direction of education policy in the province and to provide professional services to its members.
By way of background, OPSOA has valued, since its organizational inception, one publicly funded school system which would provide for the constitutional rights of Ontario's population. Such a pluralistic structure would be open and equitable to the diversity of this province. This belief is a matter of public record for OPSOA.
OPSOA is dismayed by the counterproductive climate growing within our school districts because of the government's intentions in Bill 160 and the teacher reaction to those intentions. The threat of an illegal strike is consuming the time and energy of the classroom teacher in a manner which threatens effective instruction. OPSOA's members wish to manage these potential confrontations and civil discontent fairly and legally to ensure student safety and wellbeing.
The Premier's comments to the effect that, "School boards and unions cannot be trusted to manage the education system," are statements which only exacerbate an already volatile situation. Historical perspectives which analyse the long-standing partnership of provincial governments and local school boards in the provision of educational services will show that cause for the alleged ineffectiveness does not rest solely with the school boards and unions. Mature thinking and rigorous planning are required to develop and implement change and OPSOA is disappointed that the Premier apparently has sought to inflame a difficult situation.
Bill 160 provides for greater regulatory direction in the delivery of programs and services in education than ever before. OPSOA has experienced the manner in which previous government regulations have been developed and is concerned therefore that broad consultation from the education community will be overlooked or perhaps ignored as excessive centralized control is imposed.
Bill 160, which extends the government's intentions introduced in Bill 104, clearly signals a comprehensive and excessive shift of control. OPSOA's concern is that the recent erosion of the management and supervision infrastructure in both the Ministry of Education and local school systems will render supervision of centralized directives ineffective. Dysfunction and new inequities will result. This bill does not contemplate, nor has the government publicly addressed, the essential requirement of supervision for the province's 5,000 schools.
Bill 160 will empower the Minister of Education and Training to effect provincial centralized control in a manner OPSOA believes is unnecessary. OPSOA had, and continues to have, serious reservations about the unfettered powers given to the Education Improvement Commission in Bill 104 and the same erosion of local determination proposed by this bill we view to be excessive.
The implementation of programs and services, the supervision of that delivery and the evaluation of effectiveness should allow for local distinctions, interests, priorities and diversity. The regulatory invasion of the Minister of Education and Training proposed by this bill will be counterproductive to those values. In addition, OPSOA views the new funding model without local taxation discretion as a further impediment to providing for local differences.
The diversity of this province which you represent negates the application of "one size fits all."
The role of the supervisory officer: Effective employment relationships is a long-standing value of our organization. With the introduction of greater regulatory directives, OPSOA is concerned about its members' relationships with their employers, the local school district boards.
OPSOA's members, including the CEOs, will be required to assume increased responsibilities for the Minister of Education and Training. An increased reporting relationship to the minister is proposed by this bill. As such, OPSOA sees a significant shift for its members from their responsibilities to their employers. This shift has the potential to produce difficult relationships and significant misunderstandings between the supervisory official and the local district school board. This will be a new tension that has the potential for mismanagement and disaffected leadership.
The role of the school principal: The implementation of Bill 160 will produce considerable new tensions for the school principal as he or she manages increased federation intervention, the new advisory input of school councils and the application of provincial regulations.
With the decrease in the supervision and administrative infrastructure in school boards, the principal will incur vastly increased responsibilities. The attendant pull of those commitments and changing allegiances will be inordinately onerous for incumbents and will negatively influence the decision of future aspirants.
OPSOA believes that we cannot be assured of the most effective future leadership for our schools when considered in the context of the impact of Bill 160.
Changes for improvement: OPSOA suggests that the following proposed changes in Bill 160 have potential merit for improved learning opportunities for students: reconfiguration of the school year, including professional activity days and examination days, in a manner which supports effective curriculum implementation; realignment of the collective bargaining process; legislated institution of advisory school councils; and management latitude which encourages productive change to enhance the quality of instruction.
On the other hand, we have some changes that we believe could be/would be counterproductive to improvement. OPSOA challenges the elimination of local taxation powers for the district school boards. Some discretion beyond basic perpupil funding on a provincial norm is essential to delivering effective programs and services which are responsive to local diversity.
OPSOA believes there is an excessive shift of power to the Minister of Education and Training from the jurisdiction of the local school system. Effectively managing and supervising the implementation of excessive regulation at the local level will be most difficult, if not impossible.
The government has said it does not intend to pull a further $1 billion from provincial education expenditures. What then does it intend and when will we know?
The potential for complete provincial control places in serious question the ability to deliver education in an open, universally accessible and equitable manner. Can the government guarantee an expenditure level which supports the implementation of those values, or will the new funding model create new inequities for opportunities for student learning?
OPSOA believes that the government must commit to reinvest in elementary and secondary classrooms in this province any savings projected from the restructuring flowing from the implementation of Bills 104 and 160.
In conclusion, we thank you for the opportunity to present OPSOA's views on some of the proposed changes intended by Bill 160. As supervisory officials, we are concerned about improvements in learning for all of Ontario's students. We have reservations, however, that parts of Bill 160 will not accomplish the government's stated goals. Thank you.
2010
The Chair: We have six minutes per caucus. We'll start off with Mr Wildman.
Mr Wildman: Thank you for your presentation. I know a number of you, and it's nice to see you again. I agree completely with your view that there must be a commitment to reinvest. Frankly, I believe, parenthetically, that if that commitment were clear and were made, it might go a long way to avoiding the confrontation that seems to be impending.
Having said that, we don't know what the new funding formula is. In your view -- and perhaps you don't want to take a position; if you don't, fine -- would it make sense to hold off the final passage of the legislation until we know what the funding formula is so that everybody, all the stakeholders -- students, parents, trustees, supervisory personnel, unions, taxpayers, everybody -- would know what the government intends to do with regard to spending?
Mr Lynch: I will offer a brief comment and then perhaps turn to our treasurer, who is also the superintendent of business in one of our school boards.
We well understand the time frame and the time lines by which governments have to operate, so we are not naïve in any sense, but it is our strong sense that we are literally weeks away from 1998 and stub-year funding. As the senior officials charged with working with new school boards, which will have many new trustees, we are desperately worried that the information that will come to us will be so late in the game that we will be scrambling trying to make sense of it.
We are equally concerned that the new funding model proposed for September 1998 will require a lengthy lead-in period in terms of both our knowledge, our understanding and our analysis and our ability to make the decisions with our trustees that will genuinely impact positively on the classroom.
We are worried that time is slipping away from us, and we know it's very much caught up in and around Bill 160. Perhaps for more specificity, I would ask Mr Sudds to comment.
Mr Ron Sudds: It would be helpful to know what the expert panels have to say. The former minister has said that the expert panels would give advice and that the minister would formulate a funding model that would take that into consideration.
That is a concern, because if you look at one of the statements that was made earlier about the 16% and the 82%, it's an interesting set of numbers that I've heard a number of times, but you need to understand what the numbers mean. If you look at it over an 11-year period, you've got 16% enrolment growth and you've got inflation that was about 44% during that period. Then I just listed very quickly some provincial initiatives that deal with what were special concerns over various governments, not just the present government, like Bill 82, which is special education, which was implemented in 1985 -- a significant impact. You can go through Bill 30, which was the extension of separate school funding. You can look at pay equity. You can name them. It's very easy to find the other 22%.
What has to happen in a funding model or legislation is that you need to understand, what are the initiatives that we are going to put into place to make a quality education product, who is putting that in there, and what is the cost of that? We don't have that at this point in time.
My concern, based on the funding model and some of the concerns I'm hearing, is that we're not talking about a foundation grant; we're talking about specialty grants, and then what's left over becomes somewhat of a foundation. That's not known yet either. Clearly the legislation makes some significant changes in how we will pay for whatever the product is, and it would certainly be important to see what the funding model looks like.
Mr Wildman: The other question I have relates to your second paragraph on the third page about the shift of power and your comments on the second page regarding the role of the supervisory official and your concern about the relationship between supervisory officials and their employers because of the shift in power and the change in relationship that will produce.
I would look at it from another angle. I honestly don't know -- and I've said this a number of times -- why anybody would run for trustee any more. They don't know what their role is going to be. Nobody seems to. All the decisions are going to be made at Queen's Park. You're saying you're going to end up having to report on more issues and on a more regular basis to the ministry, for obvious reasons, and that may lead to problems and misunderstandings with your employers. Am I overdramatizing that problem, or is it a serious concern that there may be a blurring of who really runs things in the local education system?
Mr Grant Yeo: I'd be pleased to respond to that. Our organization has looked at what has happened in other provinces. One of the concerns that come to us from other chief executive or chief education officers in regard to legislation is that the relationships with their boards have changed, and they have changed because of a blurring of roles. Instead of being the educational leaders, they have become the political messengers of the minister and therefore have not had the ability to implement change in the manner in which we have learned to do that. That is a concern to us.
In regard to the governance aspects, the roles of trustees, senior admins, principals and school community councils should be developed together and not in a piecemeal fashion, and certainly before people are in those positions.
Mr Smith: Thank you for your presentation. May I conclude from your comments in your submission with respect to your management of potential confrontations and civil discontent that OPSOA would not be supportive of illegal strike action by teachers in the province?
Mr Lynch: I will respond in terms of how OPSOA views this issue. We are very much working with our boards and with our employee groups. I think I can say to a person representing OPSOA that we have probably been meeting with our employee group leaders more often in the last six to seven weeks than we ever have before. It's almost on a daily basis. We're doing our level best to keep peace at home, to keep students in classrooms and to try to maintain a sense of business as usual at a time when, frankly, it's not.
Our boards have taken the position that they cannot support or condone unlawful activities, and that is the message we have been sharing with our employees and our employee groups. That's not to say that there isn't some empathy for some of the concerns we're hearing from the quality classroom teachers throughout our systems. But our message has been somewhat singular, that we would much prefer that people carry their protest forward in lawful ways.
Mr Smith: Given the comments you made about the new funding model and your experience as senior people in the education community, what do you believe would be a reasonable lead-in time for implementation of the new funding model?
Ms Patti Haskell: I'd be happy to respond to that. As senior executives -- and it was interesting to hear from members of the board of trade prior to our submission. The question asked of them, "Would you, as the CEO of any corporation, be able to put together a quality education system without adequate notice of funding and so on?" was something we all chuckled about sitting in our rows. We are dealing with that and have been dealing with that for the last number of years.
If we are going to effectively implement changes in program, if we are going to be able to notify staff of those changes, if we are going to be able to bargain with the local jurisdictions that we still will have some relationships with and so on, I think it is imperative that we have at least one year's notice for any changes to funding models.
Preparation for shifts and changes in staffing formulas, for changes within requirements in teaching contracts, our requirements of other employees, notification of parents and students of changes of programs and so on, are not things that happen overnight. Parents and students deserve sufficient notice to know exactly what they can anticipate of their education. In many of our schools, particularly our secondary schools, statements are released and instructions are given around the development of concepts of programs, registration for classes and so on, in order to anticipate that, often in December or January of the year prior to that. In many cases we are months into a budget before we even have sufficient understanding of the dollars that would be available to support those programs. Things don't happen overnight when you're dealing with young people. They deserve notification so they can plan productively for their quality education. Bottom line: a year.
Mr Smith: The other issue you raised was stub-year funding; it's something the Ontario Public School Boards' Association raised as well. Is your association following the approach or the potential outcomes of stub-year funding? Are you doing any analysis or assessment around that?
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Mr Sudds: Yes, through various associations we are affiliated with, we are watching that. The problem with the approach right now seems to be that we're looking for a number that would be appropriate, again the one size fits all. Boards have got to where they are through various things meeting various needs of students in a local community. To simply say, "This percentage is what you have," and it's something that is no longer relevant as you move forward -- it's eight months -- will cause considerable problems for jurisdictions, at the same time as they're amalgamating.
You're taking two boards or four boards or a number of boards and putting them together and then creating an unknown revenue source, but clearly a revenue source that has nothing to do with expenditure patterns right now. That's causing grave concern, because we have no information as to what that is yet. I've been involved in some committees where it's being discussed, but we clearly know it will have to go to Management Board. There needs to be some commitment from treasury. A number of pieces are still not there. We're now talking late October, and that year starts in January.
Mr Smith: Have the concerns you are experiencing or potentially are experiencing been articulated to ministry officials?
Mr Sudds: We have been talking with ministry officials, to anybody we can find who will listen, to say that this is a concern and we need answers as soon as possible.
Mr Lynch: If I can very briefly add to that, it has been our view all along that we have some expertise to share, and we have been reasonably generous in trying to offer the ministry, on many occasions, the advice of people like Mr Sudds and others serving as business officials in our organizations. The ministry has often taken us up on that offer. We would not want you to think it's a one-way street. We realize the complexity. Sometimes we wonder if others have recognized the complexity of this change process. It has been said it's 25 years in the making, in terms of education finance reform. There are reasons for that.
Mrs McLeod: I was thinking that if there was a broad-enough early retirement package available, every supervisory officer in the province would take it tomorrow. I can't quite imagine the position these people are in. You have always had a difficult role to play in being the bridge between the provincial government and your school board employers and the teachers who deliver the education on the front line and the citizens and the parents. None of us, in spite of all the tensions that job has always entailed, would ever have imagined that we would be on the brink of the kind of situation where 126,000 teachers have been pushed to the edge of having to leave their classrooms, creating the kind of situation you will have to manage.
I just want to preface my comments by saying how much I appreciate the fact that you have built and continue to build the kinds of relationships between both the boards and your employees that have meant that the meetings keep going on and that you still believe in the kind of partnership that will allow you to manage this situation as effectively as possible for the wellbeing and the safety of our students. I want to thank you for that most sincerely. I know this is going to be a rough time for you.
I feel the frustration that's in your brief. Six minutes isn't enough time to draw it out of you much more fully. I was glad you touched on the trust issue, because as people who have been very much involved in managing things at a local level, looking for ways of resolving issues at a local level, the accusation to be levelled that you can't trust boards and unions with quality education is highly offensive as well as being a very provocative and inflammatory statement to make at this point. I have an admittedly vested interest, but it really angers me when I see school boards now being written out of the equation altogether. I think you touch on that in your brief with the shift in powers.
I'll come back to the funding issue too, because one of the things you noted -- it would have been interesting if you had been able to share some figures with the board of trade that just presented, because some of the figures that get floated out in terms of increasing expenditures over the years by these free-wheeling boards, with all the money they spend on administration, which of course we know are simply not factual costs -- administration is less than 5% of total educational spending, and the increased total expenditures don't reflect student enrolment increases, as you've said, and the increase, when you actually take student enrolment, is much less than the figures being bandied about.
My concern is that with the increased student enrolment that is to come, even if we got a commitment to reinvest the dollars that currently are going into education, we would still see a significant decrease in per student funding over the course of the next years. It has been made very clear that there certainly won't be new money for new students in the overall pot. The effectiveness of any funding formula is going to be totally dependent on the total amount of money that's in the pot to pay for the various components of the funding formula.
Stub-year funding is an issue that has come up in terms of the shortfall that boards are going to be facing between January and September, for a variety of reasons. Lynn Peterson gave some indication of the figure today, although I know it's not a final figure. She also talked about $300 million to $500 million in harmonization costs, which certainly runs counter to the $150 million in supposed savings that amalgamation is to bring. Then today we have the performance contract from the Deputy Ministry of Education, which shows a further $667 million to be found, to be put in place in the 1998-99 school year.
My question is, where are you going to go to manage those kinds of fiscal realities?
Mr Lynch: I wish I had the answer. I think I could market that one. I think I could sit here on behalf of not just the four boards we represent, but I suspect on behalf of all the public boards in the province. For the last four to five years, we have been stripping our budgets on an annual basis. Each year we think we've hit rock bottom, and we're forced to go lower. We're not certain, as CEOs and supervisory officers, that there's much left in our larder that we can come back to for another round or two of budget cuts.
We too are gravely concerned that the transition costs, the enrolment growth, the inflationary factors don't seem to have been accounted for, at least in so far as early discussions around stub-year funding or a new funding model are concerned. We fear that although there's talk of stable funding for the first part of 1998, that stable funding is open to interpretation. Along with our officials and boards of trustees, we are looking at the potential to have to reduce costs even more, and we do not have simple solutions to that very complex problem.
Mrs McLeod: Do I have time for another question?
The Chair: You have another minute.
Mrs McLeod: I'll ask you to comment on how you feel the safety of our students can be managed in the face of what may come. I know that's not an easy question to answer.
Ms Haskell: As has already been indicated, each of us has communicated with our employees that our expectation is that they be at work, that they look after the health and safety of the young people of this province and that we do not condone an illegal action.
That being said, one of the prime responsibilities we have, and a number of us here are directors of education, is for the health and safety of those students. As this situation escalates and as the tensions mount, we have grave concerns for the safety of those young people. We owe it to the parents and we owe it to the students to ensure that they are able to attend our schools on a daily basis in an environment that is safe, yet what we hear from others is that there will not be sufficient supervision in our schools to provide for that kind of program.
That's one of the reasons I'd like to reiterate what has been said before: We're meeting on a daily basis with the federations, with our other employee groups, to see if we can't reach some local compromises, to see if we can't find some other resolutions to these issues. We, like you, have been following, minute by minute, the negotiations of today, because we are most anxious. We have, poised in our backyards, others of our staff who are waiting for direction from us in terms of what we should do in case this kind of action is announced. We are very concerned about the time line that will be provided for us to do all that we need to do to ensure that health and safety contingency plans are in place in all our schools.
Mr Wildman: Is 48 hours enough?
Ms Haskell: As one director facetiously said one day, it's better than a snowstorm at 4 o'clock in the morning.
Not under these circumstances. Not for the kinds of communications that need to take place with all our employees. I do believe if something like that were announced, there would be local opportunities to reach other kinds of agreements that would be most helpful.
The Chair: Thank you for your presentation here today. It has been most valuable to the committee.
Having finished our hearings for this evening, we are adjourning until 10 am tomorrow at the Royal Canadian Legion hall, 294 Vine Street North, St Catharines, Ontario.
The committee adjourned at 2030.