The Ben Mulroney Show - A new Chow tax, health care fiascos and a plan to undo education failures

Episode Date: December 3, 2025

 GUEST:  DR. Nadia Alam /  physician leader, strategist, policy analyst GUEST: Ontario Education Minister Paul Calandra If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Executive Producer:  Mike Drolet Reach out to Mike with story ideas or tips at [e-mail] Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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like your small business. Get insurance that's really big on care. Find an agent today at Dejardin.com slash business coverage. Hey, welcome, everybody. We made it to the midpoint of the week. It's hump day here. It's hump day every day.

everywhere. It's Wednesday, the 3rd of December, 2025. Thank you so much for joining us. I am Ben Mulrini, the host of the Ben Mulroney show, but I can't do this show alone. So please welcome live and in person, Amy, Amy Siegel. She is our video producer here at the show. How are you today? I'm good. How are you? I'm very good. We got Dave Spargalo behind the board. Nice to see you, my friend. You too? And he's gone, but not forgotten because he's sick as a dog. And he's self-isolating. He's, yeah, he's got the giant germs. He's my intrepid producer, Mike Drolet. You there, buddy?

Yeah, overjoyed to hear from you. Oh, you're so rejoined. Like again. Yeah, okay, so get this. I got the black lung pop. Yes, my, yesterday with your big germs. Yeah. So my daughter heard this for my wife, as I told you, was going to happen.

And now my, they started calling it BDG, big daddy germs. I love it when we could start a thing. Yes, I love it when we can start a thing. But you feel a little better? No, I'm not. In fact, I'm probably going to take a nap halfway through talking to you right now. Okay. Well, listen, let me ask you guys a question. I want to ask everyone here a question. Are you in the market for a $3 million home? Amy? Yeah. Yeah? Like, are you actively looking? No. No. What about you, Mike Dr. Leigh? I'm looking for two. I'm looking for two. Side by side, right? Yeah. His and hers? Jack and Jill. I want one for me and one for my wife and daughter who call me big daddy germs. Yes, yes.

What about you, Dave? Sure, why not? Everyone's looking for a $3 million. Well, the reason I ask that is because Olivia Chow is starting to color in the lines and she's shading in and giving us a little more detail as to how she sees next year's municipal budget coming down. Because as we know, she's firmly on the side of we don't have a spending problem. We have a revenue problem in this city. That's really the problem.

We don't have enough money coming into the. the city to do all the things that she and her teammates from Progress T.O. want to do, which means she got to go find more money. And she is proposing raising Toronto's land transfer tax on homes priced at $3 million or more. So you'd increase the rate by somewhere between 0.9% and 1.1 percentage points, starting on April 1st. And she claims that would generate $13.8 million next year to help fund affordability measures, such as the TTC Fair Freeze and Student Nutrition Program.

I love these student nutrition programs. Let's listen to the mayor, explain why she thinks this is a good idea. The stocks and bonds are doing quite well. And people that can afford a $10 million homes, I think they are not suffering, and they continue to buy luxury homes. So all, families have you heard a feeling to squeeze the budget is tight every dollar matters yeah every

dollar matters um but see look um yet again pitting one one type of trontonian against another say hey there's certain people out there that are doing really well but you're not you're not they're sitting there with their stocks and their bonds and buying their 10 million dollar houses but you're not doing well and i'm taking care of you and i'm going to do it by by making them pay more. It's the Robin Hood in me that's making, I'm making the world a just and right place. I don't like that. I do not like pit in one group against another, but that is, that's, I'm not the mayor. So it is what it is. But this is, I don't think this is going to hurt her politically. If you're, if you are somebody who's going to vote for Olivia Chow, this makes complete sense. What do you think,

Mike? Oh, he did take a nap. He did take a nap. No, I have to unmute. So, So then you didn't hear me breathing. No, it would have been funnier if you'd actually laid down to take a nap. I'm pretty close. But no, but like this is in her wheelhouse. I can't fault her for this because this is completely in keeping with her vision. And this is this tactically in terms of where she goes to get her votes in the next election, this makes perfect sense. It does.

So she doesn't care about the vote. She knows she's not getting the votes from the, that one percent or the two percent people that that are impacted by this. You know, she's not. Yeah. And, and you know, is it, is it such a bad idea to tax people who are getting a $5 million, $10 million homes? No, no, it's probably not.

But it's the way she, her message, the way she puts it out there. Yeah. That's the problem. Because it seems like she's very much like attack and blame everyone else for having something more. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. No, there's always more money to get from, from rich people. That's the message. And listen, that's a tale as old as time when it comes to progressive politics. Rich guys are bad guys. And they are taking advantage of you, the person who's struggling. And you're struggling because they're taking advantage of you. That's the coded language in there.

But here's an issue that may come up, may not. I've seen it happen before. We've all seen it happen before. Under Kathleen Wynn, there was a year under Kathleen Wynn. and you'll remember it was Dalton McGinty into Kathleen Wynn when our taxes were going up provincially and there was a tax hike that was anticipated and that tax hike they did the they did the back of the napkin math and they expected a certain amount of revenue to come in and when the revenue came in and they counted that revenue it was far less than they had

anticipated because taxpayers had reached a moment an intellectual Rubicon that they had crossed where all of a sudden they could not, in good conscience, pay, do what they used to do, which was just pay their taxes. No, no, a lot of them started employing tax avoidance strategies and some of them up and left. And all of a sudden, that anticipated tax revenue didn't exist. And that could start happening here. As a matter of fact, we are noticing that people are choosing to up and leave. You know, we're talking about the sale of these $3 million houses.

A lot of people are selling their $3 million houses. And you know what? They're buying houses elsewhere. More than 35,000 households left the GTA for other parts of Canada last year. Toronto's population, there were 300,000 newcomers that came in. But of those 300, 35,140 households left the GTA, representing just over half of all the interregional moves from the area. That's according to a new Enveronics analytics study. and most of the people they went to Simcoe County

they went to Hamilton they went to Calgary Waterloo the greater Vancouver area and the Niagara region there's also someone went to Middlesex and Wellington so look if you keep coming for a pound of flesh and people are going to say I'm fresh out of

flesh they're going to leave where the traffic's not as bad the homeless encampments aren't everywhere the drugs aren't everywhere they don't necessarily feel like crime is creeping up to their door fourth step and they're going to go find a way to work remote and work from a smaller community and all of a sudden that money that you were counting on uh it's not going to be there

right it's a people can move and remote work is a possibility and those who can do it you know you're talking about these people with their stocks and their bonds you're talking about these people are buying 10 million dollar houses they'll buy a 10 million dollar house elsewhere that's the thing about money it's portable and the more you have the the easier it is to decamp to somewhere else. And so it's not as easy as just saying, hey, guess what, rich people? You're going to pay just a little bit more.

We're going to see it happen in New York. It's going to happen under Mom Dani. You will see the flight of capital leaving that city for places like Miami, Palm Beach, and all over Texas, because they're ready to accept those people with, and Nevada, right? Those are three places where you will expect New York money to move. And then you, listen, if you make this bed, you've got to be prepared to lie in it. And I guarantee you this is not, it's not a straight line between we're going to tax more and we're going to get more.

At least that's how this, that's how Guy Smiley sees it. I used to have a Guy Smiley t-shirt, by the way. I thought back in my game show days, yeah, I thought I was an accurate human representation of Guy's smiling. Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, if people call me that, and then I might as well just embrace her, right? All right, listen, we've got a great show coming up, a lot of interesting stuff. The Ontario Auditor General says the province isn't properly monitoring doctor billing. There is a massive problem with how we are billing and how effective and efficient the system is.

There are some doctors that are billing for more than 24 hours in a day. But coming up later this hour, an interview with Education Minister Paul Calandra, who is releasing EQAO scores for Ontario students. But first, what's more important? More locally trained doctors or Saudi Arabian cash in the publicly funded university coffers. Don't go anywhere.

This is The Ben Mulroney Show. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. A story that actually surprised, disappointed, and dismayed me. It popped up in the Globe and Mail. The Ontario Auditor General says that the province of Ontario is not properly monitoring doctor billing you know and and we we just heard the mayor talk about this in the previous segment every dollar is important right and so when we find out that there are

cases of physicians billing more than 24 hours in a single day and even 500 patients in a day and those those those that graft that that type of abuse is not immediately flagged in real time because the system isn't ready for it and doesn't have we don't have the technology in place to do anything about it. That's a problem. So apparently, dozens of doctors have billed over 24 hours a day

each year and more than 100 billed every single day of the year, but the Ministry of Health rarely audits proactively. And one doctor was found to have $1.4 million in overbilling. And this is due, according to the auditor general,

to an outdated O-HIP billing system. Now, how outdated? It's from the 80s. I'm from the 80s. Well, I'm from 76, but really, I came to be fullest expression of myself in the 80s. I'm a child of the 80s.

And so is our OHIP billing system. And I promise you, my knees are failing me, and the knees of the OHIP billing system have failed it. It can't automatically catch suspicious activity. Like, look, I'm sure that there are systems out there

that have an AI trained to specifically root this out, like I said, in real time. And we just don't have it. So instead, it's an audit team of eight staff who are tasked with this sort of thing. Eight people are supposed to go through a sea of billing, a sea and ocean of billing in the hopes of identifying graft and abuse. Not today. Not in 2025. In 2025, you look around the world for a best practice.

Who has trained an AI model to do exactly this, and you plug it into your system, unless, of course, a system built in the 80s is one that you can't plug into. Ontario's plan to attach everyone to a family doctor is apparently also faltering. The Healthcare Connect system is barely used by doctors. Wait time stretch over a year for over 100,000 people. The province underestimated how many Ontarians lack a doctor. It's 2 million, not 1.3. again, all according to the auditor general.

So these are very real problems. And I could be positive and say, look, at least we're identifying the problems. Now we know how to solve them. But I don't know that things should have ever gotten this bad. You know, since the 80, the billing system has been around since the 80s. Name one thing in your house. Name one thing that you depend on besides a family member from the 80s. Like, name it.

Name one piece of technology that you have that still works from the 80s. I can wait, but the answer is pretty clear. We don't, we don't, we don't do that. Anything that we use from the 80s has been relegated to the dustbin of history. And my VCR, I haven't, I don't have a VCR. You know, my Walkman doesn't exist anymore. The video camera I had doesn't exist anymore. Why are we still using the same O-HIP billing system from the 80s?

That's just one problem that we have. Medical school expansion is falling short. we have insufficient clinical training capacity. It means Ontario is rolling out, and here's another lag here. We are rolling out 44% fewer family medicine training seats than planned. But hold on.

We do have spots in our medical schools. We're just selling them to Saudi Arabia. Selling them to Saudi Arabia. So at a parliamentary committee in Ottawa, a conservative MP was talking with someone from the University of Toronto Medical School about foreign doctors, and Canadian grads.

Dr. Houston, how many foreign doctors did the University of Toronto train last year through the visa trainee program? So last year, in total, we had 459 physicians in this program. How many returned to their home country after training? They are all expected to return to their home country. It is part of the contract that we have with their sponsor that the trainee also signs on to. Okay. And then how many Canadian medical students graduated from the University of Toronto last year? So the current cohort is 303 students that came in. And last year, I believe, we graduated 259 students.

Yeah. I mean, think about that. The 400 and some odd Saudi students and they have a contract with their government that when they're done training at the U of T, they go home and they practice there. And the question is, why are we doing this? Is there a financial incentive for the university? Well, let's listen. How much does a single Saudi-sponsored visa trainee pay to the University of Toronto per year of training? The trainee does not pay the University of Toronto any dollars. The sponsor pays us $100,000. They also provide the salary and the cost of living for accommodations for the job.

trainee. So the sponsor would be the Saudi Arabian government? It's either the government or there are individual institutions in Saudi Arabia or the other five Middle Eastern countries that send these funded trainees. So it's, listen, it sounds really good, right? Saudi Arabia or those institutions within Saudi will send medical students here. They will pay $100,000, I believe $100,000 a year to the school for the student to attend there. They pay for all of their living expenses as well and that money rises to the level I think of around

$50 million a year comes into the university because of these Saudi students but and then apparently that money goes into funding other programs and research at the university. I think that's a on paper. That's a great idea

except it feels like it's very short-sighted because like I said every I mean these universities are access to these universe is binary. For every student that gets in from Saudi, that's one spot that is not available to a Canadian student. And I appreciate the financial incentive.

But we are not training enough doctors here for the Canadian medical system. Saudi Arabia is coming over here. They are setting up shop. We are teaching their students. And then those people immediately decamp and go back to Saudi Arabia. feels like we are the training system for another country's successful health care system.

And so while I appreciate the short-term and immediate financial incentive for the University of Toronto, long-term for Canada's prospects of building out a successful and robust health care system, this doesn't flow into that. This only exacerbates the problems that we listed off the top of this. segment. So I I challenge the value of this long term.

Long term, this does not solve Ontario's health care problems. Long term, this only makes them worse. If we are not graduating, U of T grads from the medical school and turning them into doctors in Ontario because we are spending too much time accommodating for

very expensive Saudi students, that only helps Saudi Arabia. So sure, the University of Toronto is making 50 some odd million dollars a year but what's the value of those U of T trained Saudi doctors when they get back to Saudi Arabia?

How much value are they driving into their economy once they get home? Is it in the hundreds of millions of dollars of value? Probably could it be as high as billions of dollars? I mean, this is a really good investment for Saudi Arabia. They come here, they spend a few dollars and they bring back well-educated, dedicated Saudi doctors to help Saudi men, women, and children.

That's a heck of a thing. That's a great investment. When do we get that for Ontario students? And you hear these stories of Ontario students having to go elsewhere. They've got to go to the Caribbean. They've got to go to the states. They've got to go anywhere but Ontario because those slots are not available. So it's hard to argue with the numbers in the immediate term.

But ask yourselves, U of T, is this a long-term strategy for success? I struggle to see how it is. And you know, you got to show me I'm wrong because I listen. Now that being said, I don't know anything about this sort of thing. As you can tell, I called myself Guy Smiley in the first segment. So I'm going to bring on a good friend of this show. Somebody I used to talk to all the time when I did the weekend show. She knows more about this than anybody else.

We're talking with Dr. Nadia Allum. She's a former Ontario Medical Association president. So she's going to join us to make sense of this. Don't go anywhere. The Ben Mulroney Show continues. The holiday season is full of choices. Cranberry sauce or gravy, skip rent or skip Christmas. I'm Lieutenant Colonel John Murray of the Salvation Army.

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Visit Ancestry.com. and get started with an Ancestry DNA kit today. This is the Ben Mulroney show. Thank you so much for joining us. All right. In a previous segment, I sort of laid out the failings of the Ontario health care system as described by the auditor general. I gave you some of my takes on the issues with the University of Toronto's deal slash bargain

with the Saudi government to... educate and train Saudi medical students only for them to then go back to Saudi Arabia the second that they get their diploma. And to make sense of all of this, because I'm just one guy chirping into a microphone, let's bring somebody who's steeped in knowledge. Dr. Nadia Allum is joining us now. She's the former Ontario Medical Association president. Doc, welcome to the show.

Welcome back to the show. I've missed you. Good morning, Ben. I'm happy to be back. Okay, let's start with a high-level stuff. I think the one that is a real cause for concern. The fact that the O-HIP billing system dates back to the 80s. And because of that, we cannot flag abuses to the system as readily as we could if the system were a little more modern.

Correct. Now, the O-HIP has been around for a while now since the 1960s, right? It's the Ontario Health Insurance Plan, which makes sure that some of the medically necessary services are covered by through taxes. the computers that run the billing system are 30 years old. And in fact, they're so old, the system is based on cobalt for anyone who's familiar with tech. That system is so outdated now that there actually isn't tech support for it anymore. Oh, God. That's how outdated it is, which means, I mean, you recently may have seen articles or your listeners may have read articles about how there are surgeons and physicians who are trying to do.

innovative surgery or changing surgeries according to changing standards, the billing system can't be updated to accommodate that. So many of them are either going unpaid or they're caught in disputes with the Ministry of Health. Doc, how did we get here? How did we get to a point where an auditor general tells us this news? And we're like, honestly, I asked the listeners, name one piece of technology that you rely on today from the 80s.

The answer that everybody would give is I don't because I don't have any tech from the 80s. How is it that this cherished institution of health care in this province relies on a billing system from the 80s? This is the million dollar question. And I'm not from the government. My guess as someone who's on the other side of it who's experiencing the challenges of this billing system is that it's a cost savings issue and a time savings. issue, an effort-saving issue, which is very frustrating on this end. It should be easier than this. Doc, I was just talking, and we're going to get into that next.

We're going to talk about this U of T bargain with Saudi. Short-term, yes, it saves money to do nothing. Of course, short-term. Yeah, what costs more? Keeping the old system or buying an entire, overhauling the entire system with something more modern. Sure, on day one, the new system costs more. But don't tell me that over the course of time, with a new,

billing system that has AI abuse monitoring integrated into it. Don't tell me it's not going to save us money in the long run. 100% agree. It would actually pay for the new system itself in terms of the saving because by and large, right, when you read the report the Audre General makes note that 99.8%

of physicians bill appropriately. Sure. But there is that 0.2%. But that's that's the problem, could go towards creating a better system because they should be flagged. We all want our tax dollars used responsibly, whether it's by the government, whether it's by physicians, whether it's by any other public service organization. Yeah. I mean, the fact that it's a team of eight people who are looking for, you know, the needle in a haystack.

That's figuratively what we're doing. You just said that 99.8% are all good and just bad. billable, there's no, there's no, no, no one's trying to get away with any. No one's trying to pull a fast one, which means it's very difficult to parse through all that stuff to find the people who are trying to pull a fast one. Eight people to do that in a system as big as Ontario's, come on. Yeah, because remember, there's about 40 plus thousand physicians working in Ontario. All right.

That's a huge number to go through for those eight people. I know my heart went out to that big to them because I was like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. What a waste of those people's time and energy and probably skill. They must be data analysts, right? These are highly trained professionals who could be doing better things to move our billing system along. All right. Well, you just said 40,000 doctors out there. Well, let's talk about the training of the future doctors out there. We just, we heard from a person at the UFT medical school that says that we have a great deal with, with the Saudi government as well as institutions within

Saudi to train their students at the U of T, where the U of T gets a ton of money, about $100,000 a year per student, as well as they get their living expenses. And the second that they get their diploma, they ship back to Saudi to treat Saudi patients. And there's a lot of money in this for the university. And I get that. But these are publicly funded universities. They are funded by our tax dollars. I don't understand why something like this would be allowed to take hold.

in such an expansive way when we have a problem trying to fill slots within our own medical system. We should be training Ontario doctors first with a commitment for those doctors to stay in Ontario before we start training Saudi doctors to return to Saudi. I agree with you, but I also know the other side of it, which is that, yes, these are publicly funded institutions, but their funding has not kept pace with the costs of running the institutions. I mean, this is the same story you hear about schools, about physician offices, about hospitals, about pretty much every single thing, but it's also true of universities. And I do understand why they have this reciprocal agreement with the Saudi government.

It makes me uncomfortable, just like it's making you uncomfortable. We are in such a dire shortage of physicians of all stripes, and particularly family doctors, as well as other primary care health providers, right? Nurse practitioners, nurses, et cetera. We need our efforts focused on our needs. Listen, could we tweak this agreement and say, okay, you know, instead of accepting $100,000 a year, we'll take $70,000 a year,

but we want those doctors to do their residency in Ontario. They can go back after that, but we want them here as residents. How hard would that be? Like, can we get something more out of it besides being the farm system for the major leagues of Saudi Arabia? Again, that's up to the university to tweak that agreement. And from what I understand, there's a lot of challenges that they face. My hope is that they're working hard to create opportunities. And there are some universities that are, right?

U of T is setting up new campuses, Toronto Metropolitan. University started a new program, is the newest kid on the block as a med school and as a residency program, Queens University has a specific family medicine, residency focus as well, and med school focus as well. So there's changes coming. We just need them to be faster. Okay, we only have about a minute and a half left. There's only a minute and a half left. And I want to talk about this other information that came out of the order to general with large gaps in access that persist with 70% of Ontario health teams where at least one in 10 residents

lack primary care and the fact that the centralized tools to match patients to doctors are failing with 15% of users waiting over 260 days, some more than 520 days on a wait list. That's not a snapshot of a healthy system. No, it's not. And there are central intake.

So for your listeners, central intake systems work. they work when they're set up appropriately. Healthcare Connect, unfortunately, was not set up appropriately. Again, it's a very manual process that went into updating the list over the last couple of years where people were hired, coordinators were hired to call every single person on this list to make sure of two things. One, they still needed a doctor.

Two, they were still alive and needed a doctor. The reason why the list has the timelines have been updated because I have heard from patients that they've been on the list for five years with no word on doctors, is because of the updating that happened over the last couple of years, that said, central intake models where a physician or a patient apply, like put in a submission for something, right? Whether it's psychiatric health or whether it's hip and knee surgeries, those are the two big programs that are run in my region by Halton Health Care, they work so well. You get the name in.

You're able to put the referral through quickly to either the preferred surgeon, preferred hospital, or no preference whatsoever, first come, first serve. Doc, we got to leave it there. It's so great having you back on the show. Please come back again soon. Tell Mike Droulet that you want to come back more often. Mike, I would love to come back more often. Thanks, Doc. Talk to you soon.

You take care. Bye-bye. All right. Don't go anywhere. When we come back, we've got the Ontario Education Minister, Paul Calandra. Welcome back to the Ben Mo Rooney Show. Thank you so much for joining us. And look, the EQAO, the education quality and accountability office is so important as a benchmark for how our students are doing.

My kids who have been in a TDSB forever, they know how important those tests are, how important those benchmarking. are the results were just announced and we are so happy to have with us yet again on the Ben Mulroney show, Paul Calandra, the Ontario Minister of Education. Minister, thank you so much and welcome back to the show. Thanks. Good morning. Thanks for having me. Okay, so the results were just announced and you followed up with your own announcement. Tell us what you want Ontario families to know. Yeah, look, well, as we, you know, we took a deeper dive into this year's EQAO results

and not satisfied with what we're seeing. The improvements have been very slow, and in a lot of boards, we've seen the scores really fall back. And the overriding takeaway was that 50% of our grade 6 and grade 9 students aren't meeting the provincial requirements when it comes to math. So we've announced today that we're going to have a wholesale, more scale review of the EQAO. not only is on the test, but are we providing the appropriate resources for teachers? What can we do better to get those scores up? Does the test match what kids are learning? We just got to get to the bottom of this because I think parents want to have comfort to know

that their kids are getting the best they possibly can, and we keep hearing from teachers. You know, we may need some help in getting those test scores up. So that's what this review is about. They'll have four months to some preliminary results, but a full report back within nine months. Now, Minister, am I wrong to assume, based on what we heard earlier today, that the test results, the EQAO results are different from region to region across the province. There are certain places in the province that are doing quite well and others that are lagging behind. Yeah, and in certain regions where you'll have the Catholic Board in one region doing better, than the public board.

And by and large, across the province, the French boards, both Catholic and the public, are really doing much better than either the English public or the English Catholic. So is your deep dive going to try to understand why that is? And by the way, is there going to be a cross-referencing, a cross-indexing between sort of those school boards that we have been made aware of over the past year that have been given by your office? failing grades, the point that they've been taken over by the province, are we cross-referencing all of the school boards with these results and looking at the boards themselves? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, because you look, one of the boards that we have just taken over, the near-north school board ranks out as close to the bottom when it comes to their results. and the others really in the middle of the pack at best.

Yeah. And when you have 50% of your kids not meeting provincial standards, that is a huge problem. And you see it really in a lot of these boards, decisions that they're making, and I've said it over and over and over, decisions that they're making or decisions that they're failing to make are having an impact on student success.

And the board-to-board results show this. Yeah. And we just can't sit back any longer and say, okay, well, it's good enough. Let's let another year ago. You know, we've got a 1% improvement here or there. It's just not good enough. And that's what we're going to get to the bottom of. And then we're going to act on what we're hearing because one or two percent a year increases are...

It's a rounding error. Not what people expect. It's a rounding area. And when you're spending $43 billion out of our ministry, I think everybody expects a lot better. And they demand it, frankly, and that's what we're going to do. And I'm glad you brought up the provincial takeover of the near north. school board because you're assuming that responsibility at least temporarily when we when as the interim chief i don't know what the proper expression would be how long do you expect to be um

overseeing this because the the pushback from certain people was like you don't have a lot of time you got other stuff on your on your plate how long do you expect to be in charge uh until the end of the year frankly some of the most important short-term decisions uh i think we owe it to that community just given the challenges that they're facing. I think we were on, when I was on with you a few weeks ago, we highlighted some of it. But this board, the more you dig into it, this board is just a horrific mess. Yeah. A horrific mess. And it is the, I said a couple days ago, it's the poster child of why we brought in Bill 33. Yeah. You know, veneer looks great. They're running a surplus, but you scratch under the surface and you see nothing but rot. And this was allowed to continue

on and on. And who suffers? The students suffer and the teachers suffer because of the decisions. Really frankly, I have to categorize, there's nothing but gross. This is a gross inability of a board to put the best interests of students and teachers first. So until the end of the year, I want to get to the bottom of all. I want to get some decisions done. And then we'll look at more localized solutions for that board. Well, you know, I was watching that story pretty closely and some of the some of the people in the area who were critical of the takeover said you know one of the problems here is there's going to be no one to respond to the emails of parents and when I read that knowing what I know that you told us on our show was like whoever saying things like

that isn't getting it they are not putting themselves in the shoes of parents if I have to pick between having my emails replied to or having my kids in an environment where they are being their their needs are tended to, and it seems like it's an either-or situation. I'm picking my emails not getting replied to. Well, Ben, I read that too, and I was literally flabbergasted by that, because when you look at the report, it said that the trustees not only could care less, really, about what parents thought, they actively went into the community to sow dissension and divide the community against itself.

These trustees, and they admitted they could care less about conflict of interest rules, You know, don't care about conflict of interest. They didn't know what their job was. Admittedly, they said they didn't know what their job was. And they went into the community to sow dissension on decisions that they had made, to divide and bring the community against each other to the detriment of students, parents, and teachers. So when I read that, too, I was like, are you kidding me? That's the best you can do.

And I heard some of the union leadership in particular talk about that. I thought, like, come on, your teachers are teaching in a half the moment. building and that's the best you got. How about you work with us so that we can get these issues? And when I see these EQA results specifically in that board, say, all right, we've got a problem, work with us to fix this thing, and let's not get stupid. Let's get it together and do the best thing. And I won't, keep telling people, like, there's nothing that's going to push me off

of this mission. They can scream and holler all they like, but I know that teachers are with us. I know that parents and students are with us, and we're going to get things done for than once and for all. Last question for you, Minister, because I know you got a lot to get back to. You know, you referenced this near-North school board. You know, the more you peel the onion, the more it stinks. I wonder if we take a step back and look at the entire education system under your ministry

that you're responsible for is, are you finding that whatever plan you had for modernizing and improving the system, are you finding you've bitten off more and more? I mean, this feels like it could be one of the most comprehensive overhauls of the education system that we've ever seen in the province? I don't see any other way of getting the system back on track without a very comprehensive, and you're not wrong. The more we peel, the more we realize there's more work to do. And as I said, it's a system built around the one-room schoolhouse. At some point in time, it has to be modernized and update. And when you look at the results, our EQA results, EQAO results, you know that we're failing kits, right? We just are. So something has to

to change. And when you're investing $43 billion in getting the results that we're getting and getting the conflict that we're getting and the division that we're getting, like enough is enough. And it's, you know, it is a lot. But I don't think we can stop on the mission, frankly. Because, you know, our competitors will leave us behind. And nobody wants that. I'm so glad to have talked to you this morning. I know a lot of parents listening are glad to have heard this update from you. So thank you very much, Ontario Minister of Education, Paul Calandra.

Good luck to you, sir. Thank you. Thanks. Have a great day. Look, I am a proud parent of kids in the TDSB, and when I hear that these results, these EQAO results, are not going up, and when I hear time and time again of school boards

being run with no regard for the money that's being put in, or for the end result of students being educated properly, I think to myself, it's time that people like Paul Calandra do what he says he's going to do and sometimes rip it out from the roots and start again. TV. What you want when you want it. Action, comedy, drama, reality, all when you want it. Dive into Rick and Morty's latest season. Cast off with new seasons of Survivor and the Curse of Oak Island, or stream binge-worthy gems like the paper and all her fault. All when you want it. This fall, StackTV has what you want when you want it.

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