Scott Stinson: Ontario plans to keep school trustees, but make them powerless

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Anyone who is wondering why the Doug Ford government expects to have political cover for making sweeping changes to Ontario's school boards, effectively neutering the authority of elected trustees in the process, need only look to one of the pages in the background document that was released on Monday.

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On it, under the heading "Holding School Board Trustees Accountable," the government says that many trustees have run huge deficits and "wasted public funds" that were intended for the classroom.

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Then the kicker: At the Brant Haldimand Norfolk Catholic board southwest of Hamilton, trustees spent almost "$190,000 of school board funds in expenses related to a trip to Italy to purchase art."

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At the Toronto Catholic board, it says, one trustee spent almost $7,000 in public money on "personal electronics," including an iPad, Air Pods and "Europe SIM cards."

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Why, those do indeed sound like some trustees who need to be held accountable.

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There are undoubtedly hundreds of school board trustees in Ontario who work diligently and attentively, guarding the classroom purse to ensure that every last pencil and eraser is properly sourced.

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But there have been so many cases of runaway spending, with eight boards across the province now under ministry supervision until their finances are returned to normal, that effectively cutting up their credit cards was always going to be a popular option. Or at least not an unpopular one.

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In the same way that former Conservative MP Bev Oda is instantly associated with a $16 glass of orange juice that was put on the taxpayer tab, stories of school trustees sending themselves to Italy or buying SIM cards — again with the travel to Europe! — are the kind of thing that voters remember.

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And, so: "The role of a trustee is changing dramatically," Education Minister Paul Calandra said at a news conference at Queen's Park on Monday. In case there was any doubt that the potential for wasteful spending was being curbed, he said that trustees would have their duties "vastly reduced" under the legislation that he was introducing.

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Trustee honorariums would be capped, and trustees would no longer be able to claim expenses for items like "personal electronics" or "unnecessary" travel and hospitality expenses.

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They will still be able to claim, say, mileage expenses for driving to a board meeting, but those board meetings better not be at a Muskoka resort. (Muskoka-area school boards, naturally, excepted.)

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That's the headline-grabbing stuff, but the proposed changes would limit trustee oversight over even the perfectly justifiable kind of education expenses. The current board position of director of education would be replaced by a chief executive officer, who would develop the school-board budget, with trustee input — but nothing more authoritative than that. If trustees did not agree with the budget as designed by their board's chief executive, the matter would go to the education minister to decide. One guess which way that intervention is likely to go.