“Please Hold: Your child’s future is important to us”

Nigel Barriffe  – 2025-11-14

Ontario’s new call-centre solution reveals the Ford government’s real plan for public education.

This week, in a quiet room at lunch hour, educators told me what they would change tomorrow if they had one superpower.

They didn’t ask for executive perks.

They didn’t ask for bonuses.

They didn’t ask for $350,000 salaries and $40,000 expense accounts.

They asked for what every child deserves:

      • class sizes small enough to be safe
      • enough Education Assistants, (EAs) and Child and Youth Workers (CYWs) so that inclusion isn’t a cruel lie
      • timely assessments of special needs, not multi-year waits
      • violence prevention that isn’t duct-taped together by paperwork
      • transitions families can trust
      • actual humans supporting students, not bureaucratic gatekeeping

Every answer was about children.

Every answer was about dignity.

 

And then the other reality surfaced — the one engineered by Doug Ford and Education Minister Paul Calandra, where the public is expected to applaud deliberate sabotage.

We learned last week — through FOI documents — that the Ford government is paying political allies, including former Metrolinx advisor Rohit Gupta, $350,000 a year plus $40,000 in expenses to “fix” school boards that Ford’s own underfunding helped break. (Global News, Nov. 11, 2025)

Gupta’s appointment came months ago, but the scale of the compensation only became public now.

This is the same government that now spends $1,200 less per student than in 2018 

The same government presiding over a decade where EQAO provincial test accommodations rose 40% while supports plummeted.

The same government pushing Bill 33 that undermines school boards and makes it easier to remove elected trustees — the only democratic oversight families have.

 

And instead of restoring funding?

Instead of smaller classes?

Instead of special-education supports?

Calandra unveiled a call-centre-style “Student and Family Support Office.” No extra funding for it has been announced. But even more important, Calandra’s move looks like he’ll use the call centres to replace elected trustees across the province.

Parents immediately saw through the announcement. One responded:

“Reinstate trustees. Fund schools. We don’t need a call centre.”

Because this isn’t mismanagement.

This is ideology.

The Ford government has embraced a politics rooted in the same authoritarian, far-right worldview spreading across the continent:

Distract, divide, and dismantle public institutions while blaming immigrants, teachers, queer and trans kids, and anyone but the wealthy donors driving inequality.

It’s the same script behind the government’s Skills Development Fund scandal, which the Auditor General condemned as “ not  fair, transparent, nor accountable.” Hundreds of millions flowed to low-scoring, politically connected applicants after ministerial interference. (Ontario Auditor General, 2025)

 

This isn’t a government strengthening public services.

It’s a government that defunds them and declares them broken. It replaces democracy with appointees, cronies, lobbyists and party loyalists as it funnels public money in their direction.

 

The government’s recipe for disaster:

Starve a public system.

Declare it failing.

Install loyal overseers.

Blame marginalized communities.

Distract the public with hotlines and culture wars.

Protect billionaires.

Repeat.

 

It’s happening in our schools right now. But Ford and Calandra miscalculated one thing:

Ontario is organizing.

You can feel it in the York South–Weston Tenants’ Union, where neighbours defend each other instead of waiting to be rescued.

You can find it in the Better Call Paul campaign produced by the Ontario Autism Coalition.

You see it in Adopt-a-Blue-Riding, of the Fund Our Schools Campaign where parents talk to other parents, schoolyard by schoolyard, hallway by hallway.

You can follow it in the ads and publications of teachers and education workers across the province

 

Supervisors won’t save public education.

Call centres won’t save it.

Ideology won’t save it.

But organized people will.

And they already are.

Ontario’s schools aren’t failing — they’re being targeted.

And the only firewall left is us.

Together.

Everywhere.

All at once.

 

Nigel Barriffe: dad, public school teacher, singer songwriter