Rivers: Elected Trustees - time for a change

By Ray Rivers

March 9th, 2026

BURLINGTON, ON

“The Ford government’s proposed Bill 33 would allow the province to replace elected school board trustees with government-appointed supervisors whenever it determines it is in the “public interest”. The Minister of Education has further threatened to get rid of elected school board trustees entirely, prior to scheduled elections on October 26, 2026. (Elementary Teachers Ontario)

This is one time when I think the Doug Ford government is on the right track. The history of electing Ontario’s school board trustees dates back over 200 years.  The rationale then was that, since trustees needed to make decisions about public taxation to fund schooling, they should be held accountable at the ballot box.

One room school are a part of Ontario’s history. Things have changed.

But that is no longer the case since education funding is mostly determined by the provincial Ministry of Education.  School boards are still required to make local decisions, such as the provision and maintenance of physical facilities and choosing a principal but those are largely driven by the bureaucracy.  The curriculum and so much else has been consolidated at Queen’s Park that the trustee is becoming a rubber stamp and an historical artifact.

In fact, most electors likely can’t even name their trustee.  Voter turnout for municipal elections, as we know, is relatively low.  Checking off a choice for trustee in the voter’s booth for most of us has become a guess, if a choice is made at all.  For example, in recent school trustee elections in PEI just 1% of eligible provincial voters bothered to vote, which was down from the miserable 2% in the previous election.  And PEI voters had even been offered the option of on-line voting.

Four Halton District School Board trustees observing a community meeting.

Despite some opposition to the idea of eliminating the elected trustees, including from teachers unions, the truth is that the vast majority of electors vote with their feet come election time.  Holding elections for largely unimportant political roles doesn’t strengthen our democracy, it make a mockery of the concept.

And this is not just about cost savings.   Though the roughly 650 positions elected in Ontario in 2022 received an annual honorarium of between $7,500 and $30,000 each, depending on the Board.  Still, that would be money better spent on lowering class sizes, for example.

And one has to wonder why school boards have not already been brought under the umbrella of municipal councils. The value of integrating new schools into municipal development planning, for example, should be obvious to everyone.

Finally, since change is in the air for our provincial education system, isn’t it long past time that the Minister integrated the Catholic and public boards?

Ray Rivers, a Gazette Contributing Editor, writes regularly applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking.  Rivers was once a candidate for provincial office in Burlington.  He was the founder of the Burlington citizen committee on sustainability at a time when climate warming was a hotly debated subject.   Ray has a post graduate degree in economics that he earned at the University of Ottawa.  Tweet @rayzrivers

Background links:

Trustees –     PEI 1% voting –       School Board Data –       Not Everyone Agrees –