Letter: The Province Calls It “Efficiency.” Rural Ontario Should Call It What It Is
A Mildmay resident warns that Ontario’s plan to eliminate elected school trustees in favour of centralized oversight risks silencing rural voices and weakening local democracy in education.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Dear Editor,
While most rural weeklies haven’t reported on it yet, Ontario has just taken a major step toward eliminating locally elected school trustees and replacing them with a single, centralized “Student and Family Support Office” in every school board. The province says this is all about “efficiency” and “modernizing governance.”
Anyone in Bruce or Grey County who has watched Queen’s Park operate in recent years knows what that really means.
According to the Minister of Education, Paul Calandra, he “can’t see ever handing back control” to trustees in boards currently under supervision.
He has also said English public school trustees “have no constitutional cover,” and therefore can be removed altogether. In plain English: the government is openly preparing to sideline local, elected oversight and replace it with appointed bureaucrats who answer upward—not to parents, not to communities, and certainly not to rural voters.
This is not modernization. It’s centralization wrapped in buzzwords.
For rural communities, trustees aren’t symbols of some outdated governance model. They are the first line of contact when a bus route runs 90 minutes each way, when a small school is threatened with closure, when a special-education program disappears, or when local voices need to be heard above the noise of big-city priorities.
Trustees are the democratic bridge between families and the system. Take that away, and rural issues get flattened by urban agendas.
And if this all sounds familiar, it should. The same thing has been happening to watershed governance in the Saugeen Valley.
The province didn’t call it elimination—they called it “streamlining.” But the result is the same: fewer local voices at the table, weaker community oversight, and more provincial intervention in decisions that should be shaped by the people who live along the rivers, fields, floodplains, and forests affected.
The pattern is unmistakable. Conservation authorities? Trimmed and controlled. Municipal planning? Overridden. School boards? Next in line.
Each move is justified using the same script:
• Too much “red tape.”
• Too many local opinions.
• Too slow.
• Too democratic.
And each move brings decisions closer to Queen’s Park and farther from the farm roads, riverbanks, and village schools where consequences are felt.
What’s most troubling is the timing. Rural Ontario is already navigating school-funding gaps, aging buildings, staffing shortages, and transportation challenges that city planners cannot begin to imagine. To weaken local oversight now—just as the system becomes more strained—puts communities at a disadvantage when they need strong representation the most.
If the province truly wanted efficiency, it would invest in classrooms, not bureaucracy. It would strengthen local governance, not amputate it. And it would trust rural residents to know what their children and watersheds need.
Democracy isn’t inefficient. It’s inconvenient for governments that prefer not to be questioned.
David Wood
Mildmay
Letters to the Editor do not necessarily reflect the opinions or beliefs of The Owen Sound Current and its editor or publisher.
Good points made. Urban and rural worlds are not the same. Rural communities have needs that are poorly understood by city dwellers. Relationships are built on common ground. Government oversight is one thing but takeover is another.