It was Aug. 13, 2002 when 31 trustees from nine of the largest school boards in Ontario met at the Peel District School Board to show their solidarity against what they called the bully tactics of the Ontario government.
The provincial Conservative government of the day had just sent in investigators to review the books of the Big Bad Three, the Hamilton, Toronto and Ottawa boards that had all illegally and knowingly approved budgets with deficits. They wanted to highlight the fact that the Tories’ much-vaunted funding formula for schools was not working.
Among the most feisty of the trustees at the post-meeting press conference was Toronto’s Kathleen Wynne. She drew applause from her fellow trustees after her impassioned remarks in which she called the provincially-appointed auditors, “henchmen — sent in to do the job for the Premier.”
Tonight, Wynne will be back in Mississauga again, across the road at the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board this time, singing a slightly different tune.
Exasperated with the Tory education policy, she ran as an MPP in 2003 when the Liberals won on an education-friendly agenda. Somewhere in Halton Region John Snobelen (speaking of henchmen commissioned by Premiers) is on his favourite quarter horse and smiling broadly.
Now, as the third education minister in six months, Wynne will be the one sending in auditors, investigators, advisors and supervisors (otherwise known as henchmen) to figure out why school boards can’t balance their books.
Methinks she already knows. Methinks she had it figured out when she was a school trustee.
It appears that Dalton and the boys have decided that there’s been a little too much Snobelen-like, Harris-like confrontation with school boards over budget problems from the self-proclaimed “education government.”
Sandra Pupatello (bad cop) is gone and Kathleen Wynne (good cop) is here to calm the choppy waters.
The fact that Wynne will speak to Dufferin-Peel trustees in a public forum tonight signals a change in approach, a change undoubtedly triggered by the fact that the next provincial election is barely more than a year away.
It looks like the Liberals may want to postpone their fiscal fight with school boards for a year, perhaps by commissioning the full review of the funding formula that they promised the last time around.
They’d better be careful how they do it, though. You can bet John The Tory is waiting to paint the Premier as a weak-willed wimp if he and his education minister cave too easily to the school boards.