Abolishing school trustees could backfire

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/03/2021 (1745 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

EARLIER this week, the Supreme Court of Canada heard a challenge from the City of Toronto related to the Ontario government’s 2018 decision to unilaterally reduce the number of wards in Toronto’s municipal election from 47 to 25. The decision was widely seen as imperious since campaigning was already well underway. The government’s decision threw the Toronto election into chaos.

The Ontario government almost certainly had the constitutional authority to meddle in Toronto’s civic election. As I always tell students in my Canadian politics classes, Canada’s constitution gives power to the federal and provincial governments. In contrast, municipal governments and other elected bodies such as school boards and regional governments only exercise power because the provincial governments give them some of their own powers. And what provincial governments give, provincial governments can take away.

Toronto has put forward some novel arguments to counter this strict formal interpretation. In particular, the city argued that democracy and representation are important unwritten aspects of the Constitution and Canadian governance, and that the Ontario government violated these by messing with Toronto’s election. We will see if the Supreme Court justices are persuaded by these arguments.

It’s fitting this case was heard the day after the Manitoba government introduced its far-reaching reforms to the provincial K-12 education system. The most important change is the decision to abolish almost all school divisions, along with each of their elected boards of trustees. This decision has, not surprisingly, not gone over well with current trustees and the Manitoba School Boards Association.

Like the City of Toronto, the president of the MSBA objected to provincial dictates by arguing they would hurt democracy. “By outlining today’s plan,” argued president Alan Campbell, “government has said that there is no need for democratic voice in the provision of education in local public schools.”

Decentralized, elected school boards allow many important decisions about public schooling to be made closer to the people. The idea underlying such decentralization is that locally elected and responsive school trustees can tailor certain aspects of public schooling to local needs and concerns. The Winnipeg School Division and the Hanover School Division based in Steinbach, for example, might decide quite different things on the same question in response to local input, and that’s a good thing.

Popular elections of trustees is key since the board is bound to local concerns, and trustees who fail to be responsive could be turfed in the next election. This is the same logic for why we have provincial governments in Canada rather than a single unitary government in faraway Ottawa making decisions for the entire country.

Conservatives have traditionally been proponents of this form of decentralization. But the primary motivation for abolishing the elected boards appears to be to cut costs. I don’t personally think attaching a price tag to democratic practices is a good idea. And Premier Brian Pallister, in defending his legislation, argued that abolishing popular election of education officials would make the system more, not less, accountable to the people. This is an argument only our premier could make.

Centralization of decision-making power in a new provincial education authority might seem like a great idea to the PCs now. One wonders if they’ll think the same thing when the NDP eventually takes office and the newly NDP-appointed members of the education authority begin dictating to the residents of what was formerly the Hanover School Division.

That all having been said, it’s important to be realistic about the democratic and representational vitality of the current system of electing trustees. “Right now,” NDP leader Wab Kinew argued, “if you have an issue with your child’s schooling, you can take it up with your local school trustee or the local school division.” But it’s not at all clear that many Manitobans see trustees as elected representatives whom they could approach to help them with problems related to their kids and public schooling.

Turnout in trustee elections, despite being held alongside municipal elections, is often quite low. It’s a bit of a puzzle why people vote the way they do. Name recognition appears to play a major role in vote choice, and existing trustees enjoy a massive incumbency advantage. Needless to say, this is not something we typically associate with vibrant local democracy.

But these issues should have led to reforms within the context of the current system of school trustee elections. No one is proposing to abolish the provincial legislature because they’re dissatisfied with the conduct of Manitoba politics. Axing the entire system is overreach, especially when the overriding goal is to achieve savings that may never actually materialize.

There’s little doubt in my mind that the Manitoba government, like the Ontario government when it meddled in Toronto’s local election, has the power to do what it proposes in this legislation. But, also like the Ontario government’s dictate, the decision to do away with locally elected school boards is democratically dubious.

Royce Koop is an associate professor in the department of political studies and co-ordinator of the Canadian studies program at the University of Manitoba.