THUNDER BAY – POLITICS – There is a battle happening between the Ontario New Democrats and the Ontario Liberals.
The New Democrats are focusing on the previous Liberal Governments of Kathleen Wynne and Dalton McGuinty and their 15 years in power and stating that they were the ones who broke things, so how can they be trusted to fix things.
Today the Liberal Leader announced that a Liberal government in Ontario will cap classroom sizes at 20 students.
Liberal leader Stephen Del Duca states, “To reach our goal of hiring 10,000 more teachers, we’ll recruit teachers from other provinces, help qualified teachers immigrate to Ontario, and attract some of the 80,000 Ontario certified teachers not currently employed by schools back to teaching”.
“The Ontario Liberal plan will also support teacher education programs – particularly for French-language educators,” add Del Duca.
The Ontario Liberal education plan will:
- Hire 10,000 teachers, including by recruiting from other provinces and helping qualified teachers immigrate to Ontario
- Impose a hard cap of 20 students on class sizes in every grade, province-wide
- Build 200 new schools across Ontario
- Repair, upgrade and rebuild more than 4,500 schools
- Remove the Conservative’s mandatory requirement for 2 online credits for graduation
- Put new technology and devices in classrooms to close the digital divide
- Reverse the Ford Conservatives’ budget cuts to after-hours community programs in schools.
The New Democrats responded almost instantly, “The last time Steven Del Duca was in government, the Liberals let classroom sizes balloon, partnered with the PCs to freeze teacher and education workers’ wages, and failed to fix the broken school funding formula for fifteen years.
“Schools without proper resources couldn’t meet the old Liberal promise of capped classrooms. It was so bad, a lunchtime supervisor had to monitor 100 children”.
Both the Liberals and New Democrats are in their battle not forgetting the Ford Progressive Conservatives either.
Del Duca states, “As our kids try to catch up on learning lost during the pandemic, they need their teachers more than ever – but the Ford Conservatives’ budget slashed $1.3 billion in much-needed funding for schools and doubled down on disastrous mandatory online learning. Ontario Liberals will reverse Doug Ford’s cuts to public education, putting a hard class size cap of 20 students in every grade, and will put an end to the Ford Conservative plan to impose mandatory online learning on students”.
The NDP fire at the PC government’s record as well. “Andrea Horwath will fix what the Liberals and PCs broke, by reversing Ford’s cuts, clearing the school repair backlog the Liberals left behind, and hiring 20,000 educators. The PCs have made things even worse, raising the classroom size cap and now tabling a gimmicky ‘budget’ calling for a $1.3 billion cut to education”.
