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This is what arbitrary government looks like. By provincial decree, dozens of locally elected trustees in the ɫɫ�� District School Board, as well as the ɫɫ�� Catholic, Dufferin Peel Catholic and Ottawa Carleton school boards, have had their responsibilities revoked and transferred to a provincial appointee.

Who cares? We all should.

The province announced this takeover late on the Friday afternoon of a long weekend, on the final day of the school year, hoping no one would notice. With school over and the public’s thoughts of education now on holiday, too, it was great timing to put the axe to school boards.

And for what purpose? Education Minister Paul Calandra has said that it’s to address financial mismanagement and a lack of accountability at these boards, which is rich coming from a provincial government that’s been repeatedly slammed by the auditor general for multiple such transgressions.

The Ford government has come in for scathing criticism for its handling of issues such as the Greenbelt, Ontario Place and children’s mental-health services. The auditor general has called out the province for a host of failings: cost escalations, favouritism, poor spending oversight and failure to comply with legally mandated record-keeping and accountability requirements.

Canada’s Constitution saves the Ontario government from meeting the same fate it inflicted on school boards: the prime minister cannot suspend a duly elected provincial government, even for financial mismanagement or failings of accountability.

Nor should school boards be so vulnerable. Especially when the province’s own recent report on the TDSB, by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, found that there had been no wrongdoing, no lack of financial oversight and no self-inflicted reputational damage on the part of the board.

It is true that Ontario school boards have been facing severe economic challenges. Regrettably, most of these flow from decisions imposed by the province. Since 2018, the Ford government has cut board budgets by $6.3 billion, adjusted for inflation and increased school enrolment.

School boards have no powers of taxation. They rely on an annual “allowance” of reduced real per-student funding handed down by the province. And the province won’t let them generate savings by closing under-used schools. Boards also aren’t funded to cover rising contribution costs to government pension and EI programs.

So school boards struggle to balance their books, year after year. Just recently, the TDSB managed to reduce a projected 2025-26 deficit of $34.4 million to $2.8 million. Meanwhile, Ontario’s projected deficit for 2025-26 has skyrocketed to $14.6 billion. Is it the TDSB or the Ford government that needs tutoring in financial management?

Arguably the worst impact of the provincial takeover of these school boards is the affront and threat to democracy. School boards were the first elected government bodies in Ontario: Upper Canada passed the Common School Act in 1816, providing for elected trustees to run local schools.

Since then, trustees in Ontario have been the voice of parents and the public in guiding our schools. For their service, they receive nowhere near a living wage. For the vast majority, it’s a token sum.

With trustees now sidelined in these four boards, Premier Doug Ford’s appointed supervisors are taking over. Their mandate will be to cut schooling expenses, enabling further provincial reductions in education spending, and fast-track school programs favoured by the government.

Parents, students, teachers and the public are being frozen out — but they may have a surprise in store for Ford and Calandra. Come September and the return of school, parents and the public could well discover that schools are better led by elected trustees than appointed supervisors.

And one day, Ontarians may wonder whose bright idea this was. It’s not as if education policies haven’t brought down Ontario governments before.