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Newsstand: August 14, 2015
In the news today: negotiations aplenty for Ontario teachers, a possible Toronto Olympic bid, and could it be? Is the Toronto District School Board making positive changes?
It’s been a year of education-related strikes in Ontario, from graduate students at York and University of Toronto to high school teachers doing regionalized walkouts toward the beginning of summer. The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario has been “in a legal strike position since May 10,” and with the beginning of a new school year approaching, everyone involved may be growing anxious. However, the ETFO announced yesterday that it will resume talks with the province on Sept. 1. The ETFO represents 76,000 teachers, and the issues they will be negotiating over include wages, class sizes, hiring, and teacher preparation times. This announcement follows the Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association, which is also on strike and returned to the bargaining table this week, and the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, also on strike and also returning to the bargaining table.
It seems as though a Toronto Olympic bid is, if not in the works, in the air. Mayor John Tory has been “quietly [meeting] with civic, business and union leaders to gauge their support” in the lead-up to the Sept. 15 deadline to submit a letter of interest to the International Olympic Committee. If Toronto does enter a bid, it will be competing against Paris, Budapest, Rome, Hamburg, and Los Angeles. Boston recently dropped its work on a bid after a vocal grassroots campaign against bringing the behemoth sporting event, which comes with huge expenditures on infrastructure, and often the displacement of many vulnerable citizens in desirable or accessible locations.
The Toronto District School Board, long known for its dysfunction and even “culture of fear,” according to one report on the board, may be turning a new leaf. When former board chair Shaun Chen stepped down to run for the Liberal Party in the federal election, a new trustee—fully half the 22 trustees were elected to their positions for the first time in last year’s municipal election-named Robin Pilkey took over. Pilkey says in the eight months she’s been on the job and over the course of canvassing for support to replace Chen, she hasn’t seen any of the negative institutional culture that looms large in the minds of many outsiders. Still, the province has not yet backed off its earlier decision to dramatically change the board, and may yet make those alterations.