In May, Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative provincial government proposed the Supporting Children and Students Act, Bill 33. It amends the 2017 Child, Youth and Family Services Act; the Education Act; the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities Act; and the Ombudsman Act. The alterations and amendments include limits on financial transactions, increased ministerial powers to request audits, increased government jurisdiction, and board requirements to collaborate with local police services. 

I believe this bill, and other policies to be mentioned, contribute to the privatization of Ontario, particularly through worsening and defunding public services. 

The inclusion of collaboration with police requires boards to implement School Resource Officer (SRO) programs. This means the bill mandates Ontario school boards to grant officers access to school grounds and permission to participate in school programming. 

Additionally, via the Lieutenant Governor in Council, the bill regulates interactions between the boards and the officers. This means determining the circumstances in which the board must provide officers access to the school’s premises and allowing officers to participate in school programs, sidelining democratically elected school board officials.

The Ford government justified Bill 33 in a news release published on May 29 saying its purpose is to “strengthen government oversight, accountability and transparency,” making it one of their many attempts to increase their control of school boards under the guise of accountability and safety.

One such attempt was made by Minister of Education Paul Calandra, who publicly criticized school boards for financial mismanagement, and used the claim to assume control of over five school boards. Another is the Ford government’s current use of rising school violence rates to propose the reintroduction of SROs.

These educational reform policies are justified by their advocates as an attempt to ensure safety and efficiency. But this relies on the idea that the proposed solutions resolve the issue of violence in schools — a notion I vehemently disagree with. 

One of the problems that the Ford government aims to use SROs to solve is the supposed financial mismanagement by school boards, where claims of trustees spending exorbitant amounts of funds are cited as an example. One instance was a school board spending upwards of $45,000–50,000 on an art trip to Italy. The situation is presented as greedy trustees brazenly misappropriating system-altering funds. But according to the CBC and Global News, the travel and upgrades funds came from an amalgamation of staff savings and predetermined expense budgets in a surplus year. 

While I do not agree with the spending, I do think that the provincial government’s outrage was excessive, as those funds alone could not resolve staff shortages nor cover classroom expenses.

As for the increase in school violence, overpolicing is not an appropriate solution. A quintessential example to prove this is Toronto and Montréal’s crime-to-officer ratio. In 2023, Toronto had 167.8 officers per 100,000 people and a 61.10 Crime Severity Index (CSI) –– CSI measures changes in crime severity year-to-year. Comparatively, Montréal had 221.1 officers per 100,000 and a CSI of 78.26. This statistic implies that having more officers does not necessarily reduce crime rates and their severity. 

Another counterpoint against the overpolicing proposal was the program’s past failure. SROs were first instituted in 2008 and cancelled in 2017. It was removed as a result of the harm the officers caused from their hypersurveillance and arrests of predominantly non-white students, which warranted an apology from the Toronto city school board. 

SROs simply proliferated racial profiling and discrimination. Students of colour are profiled both in and out of the classroom — Black students in particular. In fact, Black people in Toronto were 3.25 times more likely to experience a street check than white people. There is no reason to believe that these statistics that exist outside schools will not reappear within schools. Frequent suspensions of Black students, lack of resources in the classroom, and heightened surveillance risk pushing students into the prison system, thereby strengthening the “school-to-prison” pipeline.

This bill does not solely affect students, but also parents, teachers and the wider community, as it is being used to justify budget cuts to education and greater government overreach. 

Increased overreach lessens the power of democratically elected trustees. Parents then feel they no longer have a voice, causing parental frustration. This, in tandem with fear of police violence or racial profiling, will likely push parents away from public education, thereby legitimizing further budget cuts, privatization, and the funnelling of funds from education to policing.

We have already seen a similar scenario with hospitals in Ontario. Bill 60, Your Health Act, was proposed in 2023 to lessen burdens on the healthcare system through allocating funds to integrated community health centres or private corporations. The result was less funding for public hospital equipment and salaries. 

Another example was the Greenbelt — Canada’s largest protected farmland — controversy spanning from 2018 until this year, where Ford proposed to sell the land to housing developers. Although due to public backlash, he rescinded his promise, the point remains. 

Ford’s policies primarily cut low-income Ontario residents off from accessing publicly funded services. Doug Ford wishes to privatize Ontario, and with his policies, he might succeed.​

But this need not be the case. As seen with the Greenbelt controversy, voicing your opinion publicly and choosing to educate others on policies can affect the path politicians take. Voice your grievances, and just maybe we might be able to block Bill 33’s overreach of power.