The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Did Education Matter in Ontario's 44th Election?

Episode Date: March 1, 2025

The Agenda's week in review looked at the state of Ontario's K-12 and post-secondary education systems, how the PC government has handled both, and whether voters were paying attention to either when casting their ballots in the 44th general election.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I think that education is a huge part of daily life but it's not a huge part of political conversation in Ontario today. And when you talk to people who are in schools whether that be students or educators or parents who are deeply concerned there's a lot of concerns that schools aren't doing the job and they aren't getting the serious attention they need to thrive and and support our kids to be ready for a big scary future. Any last time you were on the show I understand you said we are not paying enough attention to education. Why is the political discourse not around education?

Well it's kind of a great question. And there have been provincial and territorial elections that have been happening across Canada and education has never been sort of one of the top issues except for some kind of semi-controversial parts. So I think as a society we have a tendency to sort of take our public schools for granted, even though more than 90% of our kids go to them. We don't understand the kind of foundational job they do in our social and economic future and we just sort of go they're there, whatever, they're not sexy, maybe even not as sexy as post-secondary education.

So they don't seem to, except in a crisis like the pandemic when they were in the news every day, they don't seem to get on the radar as a fundamental issue, which to me is even more amazing right now when the world is so messy. Obviously, I think we really should be paying attention to our schools as a place where we could be building more resilience in this sort of messy world. Why do you think post-education, post-secondary education is not getting the headlines it should maybe getting during this election cycle? Elizabeth, I'll start with you.

Yeah, it's unfortunate certainly. I think that voters are distracted. There are just simply more you know politically pressing issues. There's the tariffs, and there's health care crises. And post-secondary education always has to vie with other sectors for attention. And so even though we are in crisis in many ways, the other issues are more pressing. And I will also add that many of the individuals, the international students themselves, whose lives have

been upended by these policies are not voters. And so it is an issue that sort of has, you know, undue influence on people who aren't participating in the election. But this will impact domestic students too. Certainly it will. But again, post-secondary education is a small, you know, much smaller proportion of people are in post-secondary at any one time. So it's sort of on their radar than K-12, for example. And so unfortunately, that won't be the case.

If you have kids in schools now, you're going to need a strong post-secondary college and university sector in the future. But it might not be on the top of mind right now. I think what people have cared about post-secondary education when they have a child or a family member who's ready to go to post-secondary and they care that they have a spot for that family member and they care that the tuition is reasonable. To date, the colleges and universities in Ontario have done a great job.

They've been able to weather the storms. They've had capacity available to take those kids. And so it hasn't been an issue. It hasn't risen to the crisis level that we're probably likely to be facing in the short order. And it's never frankly pulled well. I've talked to a lot of people who have worked on the political side of the, you know, just political side. And they always say, it just doesn't pull well, because if there's capacity there, if your kid or your family member is going to get a spot, cost is reasonable,

I don't have to worry about it. But now we're at a point where I don't think the colleges, especially, and the universities are going to be able to recover from this total onslaught of issues to deal with. So if families care about this issue when it impacts their own, what about the labour market? What about governments? This is something that will impact everybody at some point, no? I don't think governments care about growth anymore. I don't see governments anywhere in this country making serious efforts to increase productivity,

to increase output. What they care about is dollars in pockets. You get these very short-term affordability discussions. There's nothing about investing for the future.