Ontario education minister blasts TDSB for considering cutting programs

Ontario’s education minister says the province’s largest school board must make significant cuts to balance its books but has started highlighting areas he won’t allow trustees to touch.

Toronto District School Board is one of several boards in Ontario the Ford government is currently subjecting to intense financial scrutiny, with the threat of a takeover if they can’t make changes.

Trustees at the board were presented with options to consider cutting after the investigation was announced, including closing swimming pools, cutting music programs and delaying access to school computers.

Education Minister Paul Calandra said on Wednesday he was frustrated with those options and continued to threaten further action.

“Their solutions are unsurprising to me — the first thing that they said that they would do would be to fire teachers and close pools,” he said to reporters. “So that’s always going to be the TDSB’s position and, as I said in the house, to be very clear to them that is not where they should start.”

Calandra insisted there were other ways to balance the books at TDSB without cutting staff or programs.

“They should look at other avenues to balance the budget,” he continued. “They’ve had a lot of time to do it and quite frankly, I’m never going to allow them to fire teachers and I will not allow them to close pools that mean so much to the community.”

Global News sent questions to the TDSB. A spokesperson did not comment on them but referred to a news conference held later in the afternoon by trustees.

Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles, however, accused Calandra of forcing school boards to cut too deeply already, and leaving them with no good choices.

“He keeps demanding more cuts from our school boards, there’s nothing left to cut,” she said. “What is happening now is impacting our kids in their classrooms, and parents across the province are seeing that firsthand.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that the Minister of Education said he did not want TDSB to consider closing swimming pools.