Ontario is going to the polls on June 2. On April 28, Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative Party (PC) election budget posted a $1.3 billion drop in Ontario’s school funds. The budget posits the idea that this drop is the result of a decline in “non-government revenue” such as fundraising. Despite resurgent waves of COVID-19 infections and deaths, schools were left hundreds of millions of dollars short because, among other things, students hosted too few bake sales. 

Of course, the problem was due to far more than a lack of bake sales and walkathons. Months earlier, Ford’s government quietly had revealed plans to cut all of its emergency funding to schools — funds that could have been used to shrink class sizes to allow for social distancing. These cuts would have left schools $1.6 billion poorer and forced school boards to issue redundancy notices to thousands of education workers. The ensuing public outcry prompted subsequent cash injections that delayed some of the cuts, but the replacement funding was highly uneven.

According to internal records, in April 2021’s COVID-19 surge, schools accounted for more COVID-19 infections than any other location. It isn’t hard to see why. Well into September 2021, cash-strapped schools were reportedly forced to “collapse” many classes together — pushing up to thirty and even forty kids in classrooms.