The Case for Supervision
A good faith Argument.
A note before you read this:
Everything I publish here starts from a position I’ve built through two years of reporting. That’s normal, and it’s how it should work. But it also means I owe it to you, and to the work itself, to occasionally test that position against its strongest opposition rather than its weakest.
So this piece is an exercise. I assigned myself the other side, arguing for supervision as persuasively as the actual evidence allows, not as a strawman, not cherry-picked to fail. The goal wasn’t to convince you supervision was right. It was to find out whether my own conclusions could survive contact with the best version of the argument against them. You learn more about what you actually believe, and why, by seriously trying on the other position than by only ever defending your own.
What follows is that argument, built honestly from real sources, some of which I’ve already reported on myself. At the end, I come back as myself and tell you where it held up and where it didn’t.
The Case for Supervision
For two years, critics of provincial supervision have treated it as self-evidently a power grab, a pretext, an ideological project dressed up as fiscal responsibility. That framing has to work hard to ignore what was actually sitting in these boards’ own records before the Ministry ever stepped in.
Start with what an independent auditor found, not a Ministry press release, the Auditor General of Ontario, examining TDSB’s own conduct from 2017 to 2023, entirely before any supervisor arrived. No long-term capital plan existed for a board with the worst Facility Condition Index in the province. Six completed capital projects ran an average of 39 months over the board’s own estimates, at $146 million against $102 million approved. Violent incidents in schools hit a six-year high, up 67 percent since 2017, and the board underreported them to the Ministry by 9 percent. Fifty-three of sixty-six administrators were placed on paid leave during investigations, some for over 1,200 days, costing $4.3 million, with no documentation justifying the leave in the majority of sampled cases. An Expert Reference Panel on school safety was disbanded the same month it delivered its recommendations.
None of that is Calandra’s characterization. That’s the province’s own independent auditor, and it describes a board that had lost the basic administrative competence to run itself, years before supervision existed as an option on the table.
Critics point to PwC’s investigation finding no evidence of deliberate wrongdoing or recklessness, as though that settles the matter. It doesn’t. A forensic investigation not finding fraud is not the same as finding the institution was being run well. The deficits were real and compounding across TDSB, TCDSB, Peel, and Dufferin-Peel simultaneously, an unusual clustering that suggests a systemic problem with how Ontario’s largest boards were governing themselves under a structure of 22 or more trustees with limited financial expertise, not four unrelated coincidences. When Peel’s own chair disputes “mismanagement” and calls it underfunding, that’s the institution being investigated defending itself. It would be surprising if he said anything else.
Bill 101’s consolidation of trustees from 22 to 12, defenders would argue, is not democratic erosion, it’s an acknowledgment that a board this size had become too large to govern effectively, exactly the diagnosis the Auditor General’s own findings support. Toronto is the only board of 72 in the province over the new cap. That’s not an arbitrary target, it’s the biggest instance of the exact problem being addressed.
On responsiveness, critics have built a narrative that supervision means nobody is accountable. The record doesn’t support that as a blanket claim. When Rosedale Heights parents and students organized against Barrie Sketchley’s transfer, the supervisor reversed it within two months, a faster and more direct response than the elected board had ever offered on a comparable community dispute. Whatever else is true about how that reversal came about, it demonstrates a supervisor capable of responding to public pressure, not one insulated from it by design.
And on land, the harder case for skeptics, the province would argue there’s a coherent, defensible logic that has nothing to do with a hidden agenda. A board losing tens of millions of dollars a year while sitting on a $15 to 20 billion property portfolio is not a board that has optimized its own assets. Pursuing higher-value zoning designations on underused sites isn’t proof of a plan to sell schools out from under students, both boards remain on record stating they aren’t, it’s what any competently run institution with a real estate arm this size would be expected to do with property it isn’t using to capacity.
The honest version of this case is not “everything critics have found is wrong.” It’s narrower and more defensible than that: a demonstrably dysfunctional governance structure, documented independently and before supervision existed, justified an intervention that has been applied unevenly, sometimes responsive, sometimes not, but whose original premise holds up better than the “manufactured crisis” framing gives it credit for.
Post-exercise note: Where this argument is strongest is exactly where it leans on the Auditor General’s findings, those are independently corroborated and genuinely damning on their own terms. Where it’s weakest is where it has to explain away the parts that don’t fit, Calandra’s own “no constitutional cover” quote, the TLC transparency narrowing that postdates the audit and can’t be explained by pre-supervision dysfunction, and the uneven pattern where responsiveness tracks with how much political noise a community can generate rather than with any consistent standard. The steelman survives as an argument that intervention was justified. It does not survive as an argument that everything done since has been in good faith or free of the centralization the series has documented. Those are two separate claims, and conflating them is the rhetorical move worth watching for the next time this argument shows up in a National Post column.