An Open Letter to Minister Paul Calandra
Minister Calandra,
You have stated publicly that you have heard “absolutely nothing” to dissuade you from the position that elected school board trustees are not “necessarily the right avenue to deliver education across the province of Ontario.”
Consider this your argument.
Trustees are not administrators. They are democratic infrastructure.
Ontario’s education system serves more than two million students across communities that are not interchangeable. Urban, rural, northern, Indigenous, francophone, newcomer, high-density, low-income — each with distinct needs, distinct histories, and distinct relationships with their local schools.
Trustees are the only elected officials in Ontario whose sole mandate is to represent those communities at the school board level. They are not political generalists managing broad portfolios. They are community specialists accountable to a specific ward, a specific population, and a specific set of schools.
Your appointed supervisors have none of that accountability. They answer to you. Not to the parents of Ward 16 in Beaches-East York. Not to the families of central Scarborough. Not to the Indigenous communities whose children sit in those classrooms. To you, and only you.
That is not governance. That is administration by decree.
Trustees do work that supervisors structurally cannot.
Consider what trustees actually do that your supervisors are not doing.
Trustees attend community meetings at 7pm on a Tuesday in a school gymnasium to hear from parents about why their child’s EA has been cut. Supervisors do not.
Trustees field calls from a parent who cannot get their autistic child’s IEP followed and has nowhere else to turn. According to the Ontario Autism Coalition, over 28% of children with special education needs required their parents to advocate with their trustee at least once last year — representing more than 100,000 points of contact with democratically elected representatives. Your Student and Family Support Offices are not replacing those 100,000 moments. They are absorbing them into a generic inbox.
Trustees vote on budgets in public, on the record, with their names attached. When the vote is wrong, communities know who to hold accountable. When your supervisor cut $14.5 million from classrooms by enlarging class sizes, there was no vote, no record, and no accountability. Parents learned about it after the fact, if at all.
Trustees carry institutional memory. They know which schools in their ward are overcrowded. They know which principals are struggling. They know which communities have been underserved for decades and why. That knowledge takes years to build. It cannot be replicated by a finance professional appointed from Queen’s Park.
Trustees provide the only democratic mechanism by which parents can remove underperforming school board decision-makers through a vote. Your supervisors answer to no electorate. If they fail, there is no ballot. There is only you.
The record of supervision does not support your case.
You took over the TDSB citing financial mismanagement. PricewaterhouseCoopers found no evidence of financial mismanagement. They found a structural deficit driven by provincial underfunding — a $389.4 million gap documented in the TDSB’s own budget analysis, $112.6 million of which represents costs the board cannot control: unfunded statutory benefits, teacher salaries over Ministry benchmarks, ECE wages the Ministry funds at rates that don’t match reality.
The Financial Accountability Office warned that without increased provincial spending, service cuts were inevitable. This was not board mismanagement. This was Ministry design.
Since supervision began, here is the measurable record:
Emergency teacher replacements — lunchroom supervisors, volunteer parents, people with a police check and no teaching credentials — spiked 1,100% since 2017, with 51,000 filling in for absent teachers in a single school year.
Your supervisor cut $14.5 million from classrooms by enlarging class sizes. Parents received no advance notice and had no recourse.
The Director of Education was fired ten months into a four-year contract, generating a buyout at unnecessary public expense — paid from the same budget you cited as evidence of mismanagement.
Summer school programs have been cut. Special education classes have been enlarged. Advisory committees have been cancelled. Public meetings have been eliminated. Livestreams of the last remaining public forums have been banned by your office.
This is the record of supervision you are proposing to make permanent.
What you destroyed in the process.
Before supervision was imposed, the Toronto Lands Corporation — the TDSB’s land management subsidiary — was executing the most sophisticated community asset strategy in its history.
In the three weeks before you imposed supervision, three major initiatives were simultaneously in active development:
At 705 Progress Avenue in central Scarborough, a 29-year community commitment was finally reaching execution — a new elementary school, affordable housing, a community hub, and a city park, with construction targeted for 2027. CreateTO had endorsed it. City Council had endorsed it. An RFP had been launched.
At 50 Ethennonnhawahstihnen’ Lane in North York, architecture firms had been contracted for the first-of-its-kind urban format podium school integrating affordable housing near a subway station. A business case was being prepared for your Ministry.
At St. Margaret’s Public School in Scarborough — a building where repair costs exceed rebuild costs — a proposal had been developed to construct a new school and a long-term care facility on the same site, with most costs covered by a not-for-profit partner. Your Ministry had already rejected it once. Two additional LTC partnership sites were in active development. A framework report was due by end of 2025.
A city-wide Memorandum of Understanding was being negotiated committing to 20% affordable housing across eight TDSB properties. The TDSB board was set to vote on it in fall 2025.
On June 27, 2025, you imposed supervision. Everything stopped.
None of these projects have received a public update since. The 29-year Scarborough commitment is in doubt. The Ethennonnhawahstihnen’ business case was never submitted to your Ministry. The LTC framework report was never delivered. The affordable housing MOU was never voted on.
Trustee Michelle Aarts, who helped build this strategy from 2018 to 2023, described what your supervision replaced:
“We worked to shift the property management ethos and practices away from ‘basic real estate’ to ‘schools as community assets’ — that property value is optimized for the benefit of students, families, and communities, not simply to pad a real estate portfolio.”
You have since described school properties as assets whose value must be maintained to the highest level. The TDSB, under your supervision, is now fighting a city decision that would protect school lands from mid-rise redevelopment. You have publicly supported that appeal.
The board that spent years building affordable housing partnerships and community-benefit land strategies is now, under your control, fighting the city’s attempt to protect school lands from developers.
That is not fiscal rescue. That is asset capture.
The province is not capable of replacing what trustees do.
You have suggested that centralized provincial management can deliver education more efficiently than locally elected trustees. The evidence says otherwise.
The province funded 45 school building projects across Ontario. Not one in the TDSB — the largest board in Canada, with 84.1% of buildings below a state of good repair and a $4.5 billion maintenance backlog. That is not efficient management. That is politically directed neglect.
The province blocked the St. Margaret’s proposal — a self-financing plan to rebuild a crumbling Scarborough school alongside a long-term care facility at near-zero cost to the province. That is not efficient management. That is bureaucratic obstruction of a solution the board built without your help.
The province has withheld capital funding from the TDSB for years while your Ministry’s own funding formulas created structural deficits the board could not close. Since 2018, your government has removed $6.3 billion from Ontario’s publicly funded education system. Per-student funding remains below 2018-19 levels. That is not efficient management. That is a manufactured crisis used to justify a takeover.
Centralized authority has not improved outcomes at a single supervised board. It has silenced the people closest to the problems and replaced them with appointees who answer to no one but you.
What elimination would actually cost.
If you eliminate elected trustees, Ontario will lose:
The only elected officials whose full-time mandate is school accountability at the community level.
The only democratic mechanism by which parents can remove underperforming school board decision-makers through a vote.
The institutional knowledge of communities that appointed supervisors cannot build in months or years.
The legal protection of First Nations communities whose appointed trustees provide accountability for financial transfer payments and oversight ensuring the history of residential schools is never repeated. Elaine Johnston, Chair of the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Trustees’ Council, made this point explicitly at your government’s own doorstep in March 2026. Your office did not respond.
The advocacy infrastructure that produced 100,000 points of contact between special education families and their democratic representatives last year alone — contacts that your generic inboxes are not replacing.
The community asset philosophy that was delivering affordable housing, school rebuilds, and long-term care partnerships across Toronto before supervision made it impossible.
You will replace all of that with supervisors who answer only to the Minister of Education — a single politician, accountable to no parent, no community, and no child.
What other governments have done.
British Columbia dismissed the Vancouver school board in 2016 for documented failure to comply with budget law — actual mismanagement, not a structural deficit caused by provincial underfunding. They appointed a supervisor with 30 years of education experience. They maintained public meetings by law. They set a one-year timeline and restored elected governance on schedule.
Alberta amended its Education Act in 2025 specifically to strengthen democratic accountability — removing the ability to disqualify elected trustees and leaving those decisions with voters. That same year you moved in the opposite direction.
Ontario once led Canada in educational autonomy. You are proposing to make it the only province in modern Canadian history to permanently eliminate elected education governance from its public school system.
One final point, Minister.
This week you sent a memo to Ontario school boards directing that graduation ceremonies be kept strictly apolitical. You threatened binding regulations — and left open the possibility of supervision — for boards that fail to comply.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association responded that political speech enables individuals to hold those in power accountable, and that these are precisely the skills our education system should cultivate.
You have spent the better part of a year eliminating every formal mechanism by which communities hold education decision-makers accountable. Trustees silenced. Public meetings cancelled. Livestreams banned. Advisory committees dissolved. Parents redirected to generic inboxes.
And now graduation ceremonies.
You have systematically removed every space where dissent was possible and are now moving into the last public moment students have to speak before they leave the system you have spent a year making unaccountable.
If you are confident your governance of Ontario’s education system can withstand scrutiny, you have nothing to fear from a valedictorian.
The fact that you are regulating graduation speeches suggests otherwise.
The argument you said you hadn’t heard.
You told Global News in December 2025 that you had heard absolutely nothing to dissuade you from eliminating trustees.
You have now heard it.
Trustees are democratic infrastructure. They do work supervisors structurally cannot. The record of supervision does not support your case. The province has destroyed community-benefit initiatives worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Centralized management has not improved a single measurable outcome. Elimination would cost communities, families, and students more than your Ministry is capable of replacing.
The question is not whether the argument exists, Minister.
The question is whether you were ever actually listening.
Published by The Old Guardian Toronto, Ontario March 2026
Chris Allen is an independent investigative journalist and founder of The Old Guardian. He has been covering the Ontario education governance story since September 2025.
Published by The Old Guardian Toronto, Ontario March 2026
Chris Allen is an independent investigative journalist and founder of The Old Guardian. He has been covering the Ontario education governance story since September 2025.