TDSB Investigation - Part 8
The Silenced Majority
There was a time when public education meant more than a funding formula. It meant access, community, and accountability — people in a room, debating what their schools needed. That time is slipping away.
Across Toronto and beyond, school boards once rooted in transparency and local trust have been stripped of their voice. Trustees, parents, and advocates now watch decisions unfold behind closed doors, with no way to intervene. As Trustee Michelle Aarts recently revealed, the few remaining committees that allowed public participation — SEAC, PIAC, and Audit — have been reclassified by the Ministry as “unwanted politics.”
That phrase should stop everyone cold. These committees are not political machines; they are the last venues where parents of special education students, inclusion advocates, and community representatives can be heard. When even discussion itself becomes inconvenient, the system no longer serves the public. It manages them.
The New Normal of Control
Over the past year, power has migrated upward. Supervisors now stand where trustees once did. Parents are directed to generic email inboxes that go unanswered. Meetings are cancelled, decisions are posted after the fact, and oversight is replaced with pre-approved talking points about “efficiency” and “accountability.”
But these are not reforms. They are removals.
Bill 33, tabled by the Ford government and now fast-tracked without full committee review, formalizes this shift. Alongside Bills 56 and 60, it was pushed through the Legislature with no public hearings, skipping the opportunity for parents and educators to speak. The process of exclusion has become the policy itself.
The Ministry’s Story vs. Reality
The Ministry calls this modernization and consistency. But parents across Ontario are seeing something else: larger class sizes, combined-grade classrooms, stripped funding for special education, and entire programs cancelled without notice.
The Ontario Autism Coalition has called the current state “devastating.” Teachers report burnout. Parents describe endless cycles of emails, silence, and closed doors. These are not isolated issues; they are evidence of a system that has replaced listening with dictating.
When you remove oversight, you remove friction. When you remove friction, you remove democracy.
The Cost of Silence
Months ago, Aarts and Morrison warned that ministry supervision was not temporary oversight but a permanent structural shift. They were right. Each legislative cycle widens the gap between decision-makers and the people those decisions affect.
For parents, this means confusion and loss of faith. For educators, it means exhaustion. For the province, it means the slow erosion of public consent. When people no longer believe their voices matter, they stop speaking up. That is not reform. That is capture.
Lessons from History
Ontario has been here before. The 1990s saw mass centralization of education funding under the “Common Sense Revolution.” The United Kingdom took a similar path with its Academies program. Both promised efficiency and accountability. Both delivered less transparency and more bureaucracy.
When the state moves faster than the public can respond, governance becomes reactionary. And once centralized authority hardens, it rarely gives power back.
The Record Must Stand
This series began as an investigation into budget deficits and provincial oversight. It has become a chronicle of democratic erosion — how local governance can be dismantled under the language of reform.
The Ministry may close meetings, mute committees, and fast-track bills, but it cannot erase the record. Parents, teachers, and advocates documenting this moment are now the custodians of truth in a system that no longer values it.
They silenced the trustees. They ignored the parents. But the record remains.
The threads now connect: boards, bills, budgets, and silence. This isn’t chaos — it’s choreography.
→ Read Part 9: The Province-Wide Pattern.
