The Old Guardian | TDSB Investigation Series Part 2
Discretionary Spending or Structural Sabotage?
“In public debates, it’s always easier to point at a $20 receipt than a $20 million shortfall.”
SECTION 1: The Public Face of Spending
When the public hears about trustee “spending,” it usually comes through scandal headlines: conference trips, mileage claims, discretionary budgets that look wasteful in isolation.
These stories stick because they’re simple. But as Trustee Michelle Aarts has noted, scrutiny almost always lands on the smallest line items — while structural deficits worth tens of millions go unexamined.
The optics are powerful by design. Trustees don’t control the formulas that drive deficits. They operate inside a system engineered to look bloated while being structurally underfunded.
SECTION 2: The Use-It-or-Lose-It Trap
One of the least understood features of school board budgeting is the Ministry’s use-it-or-lose-it funding structure.
If trustees or departments don’t spend their full allocation in a given line item, those funds risk being clawed back the following year.
On paper that sounds efficient. In practice it creates the opposite effect:
Boards are pressured to spend to protect future budgets — even if the allocation doesn’t match current needs. Programs may be patched together with short-term fixes instead of sustainable solutions. Trustees are effectively penalized for fiscal restraint.
This creates a cycle where spending looks unnecessary — but is actually forced by the system itself.
SECTION 3: The Transparency Blackout
Under normal circumstances, the TDSB publishes detailed trustee expense reports and financial records. Since the Ministry appointed a supervisor, much of that transparency has gone dark.
This blackout erases accountability at the exact moment the Ministry claims to be enforcing it.
What the public record still supports:
Trustee budgets are modest — covering outreach, mileage, and office costs. Most scrutinized spending is routine and operational — often under $50. The real deficit drivers lie elsewhere: CPP, EI, Early Childhood Educators, Special Education — all systematically underfunded by the province.
When transparency disappears, suspicion fills the vacuum. And suspicion is exactly what the Ministry benefits from.
SECTION 4: What’s Really Driving the Deficit?
The largest shortfalls aren’t discretionary expenses — they’re structural funding gaps created at Queen’s Park.
The TDSB’s own internal budget analysis — Appendix A, Summary of Unfunded/Underfunded/Overspent Areas — documents a total shortfall of $389.4 million.
Of that, $112.6 million represents costs entirely outside the board’s control:
Unfunded statutory benefits: $43.7 million
Teacher salaries over Ministry benchmarks: $26.1 million
ECE salaries over Ministry benchmarks: $1.5 million
Loss of excess capacity top-up grant: $41.3 million
The board is legally obligated to pay these costs. The Ministry does not fully fund them. There is no trustee decision that changes this arithmetic.
The human cost is equally documented. Special Education alone carries a $38.5 million shortfall. Itinerant music instructors are entirely unfunded at $4.2 million. Mental health supports sit $13.9 million short. School safety is underfunded by $30.5 million.
As Aarts explained:
“If the Ministry allocates funding for 200 positions, it’s based on the provincial wage structure of 200 teachers. But if you need 200 librarians — whose pay is different — that money only covers around 180 librarians.”
These gaps compound year after year, locking the TDSB into structural deficit before a single trustee submits an expense claim.
Source: TDSB Budget Appendix A — Summary of Unfunded/Underfunded/Overspent Areas, provided to TOG by Trustee Michelle Aarts, September 2025.
Source: TDSB Structural Deficit Presentation, March 2025 — https://www.tdsb.on.ca/Leadership/Agendas,MinutesDecisions.aspx?Type=A&Folder=Agenda%2f20250326&Filename=250326+Structural+Deficit+Update.pdf
SECTION 5: Accountability or Optics?
The Ontario Auditor General’s December 2024 report identified staffing imbalances across boards, including differences in administrative capacity affecting oversight and financial management. The Ministry’s response emphasized governance failures rather than the structural funding constraints the report identified.
Yet trustees remain in the crosshairs — not for deficits they cannot control, but for the optics of modest discretionary budgets.
The numbers tell the real story: $389.4 million in documented shortfalls. Not from trustee mismanagement. From Ministry underfunding.
That isn’t accountability. That’s narrative management.
Source: December 2024 Annual Report, Office of the Auditor General of Ontario —
https://www.auditor.on.ca
SECTION 6: The Bigger Picture
This is not an accident. The pattern is consistent:
Amplify minor spending optics. Use deficits as justification for centralized control. Erase transparency by sidelining trustees and shutting down public reporting.
The result: families lose programs, staff, and safe facilities — while headlines chase receipts.
The supervisor does not speak to the public. Trustees have been warned not to speak to staff or parents. Decisions are made behind closed doors and announced after the fact.
As Aarts told TOG directly: trustees are not being supervised. They are being silenced.
The Ontario Autism Coalition’s 2025 reporting underscores what that silence costs: children with disabilities are being pushed out of classrooms due to staff shortages — while the advocates fighting for them are being removed from the room.
Source: Ontario Autism Coalition —
https://www.ontarioautismcoalition.com
→ Read Part 3: The Shadow Administration.
