Open Letter to Doug Ford, Steve Clark, Stephen Lecce

Teach your children well

I am looking forward to the response that my letter to the three of you gets after it was published in last week’s NG-Times, here in North Grenville.

As Mr. Clark will tell you, dissenting, non-Conservative voices don’t matter much in Leeds/Grenville. The loyal agriculturalists vote for Tory, no matter what happens. (see how they ‘consulted’ Prior to Downloading a Prison in North Grenville)

I am so glad my parents encouraged their children to be intelligent, independent  thinkers…none of this ‘You must vote for The Party, just like I did, just like your grandparents did…just like everyone in this whole family has done for generations.’  ‘That’, as they say over at Eastern Breeder/EastGen, when they clean out the bulls’ pens, ‘Will help the roses grow.’

Who, in your room full of advisors, came up with the damnable/damaging idea to use the ‘Notwithstanding clause’ to take away the basic rights of the workers in the lowest-paid category of education workers? That backfired, didn’t it?  And now, with the so-called ‘generous offer’, you are looking at a resumption of an unwanted/easily-avoidable strike action.  

Are you going to table the same heavy-handed bill again?  When the Unions say, something rude and anatomically impossible, will you call out the police…the Swat Teams…the military?  It would be no more over-the-top and ridiculous than invoking the notwithstanding clause.  Meanwhile…

You wrap yourselves up in the mantle of purity and righteousness: ‘We want the kids to be in the classrooms.’  Hypocrites!  You kept kids out of school longer than most other provinces during the pandemic years.  And when parents started getting a bit antsy…you gave them cash payments to placate them.  Seems like your unethical bribery didn’t work as you had hoped it would.

The only reason why you decided to do an about-face was parental disapproval.  Not, ‘what’s best for the kids.’ That one has been used by every politician and upper echelon School Board administrator since the beginning of time. That too, ‘Will help the roses grow.’

In the whole/entire field of education, no one is more removed from the students and the day-to-day reality of children and their lives in education, than the Ministry of Education and any and all Provincial Governments. You are not the ‘experts’. You don’t know what goes on inside classrooms every day—the support workers do—they live it every—single—day! But obviously, you don’t care about the kids enough to give these people a fair, living wage. When were you last in a school?

You only go into a schools to make political announcements and get a photo ops. How do you guys live with yourselves?

Everything you say publicly is disingenuous.  You spin it all to make yourselves look good. Lecce does it every time he gets in front of a mic. Poor Mr. Lecce will soon be demoted. Perhaps, right out of Cabinet. The person Ford once called, ‘The Best Education Minister Ever! He will likely be moved out for being a non-effective communicator…perhaps he has a conscience and realizes being the propagator of Party lies and disinformation is not what he was looking forward to when he decided to give politics a try.

He is not as good at it–‘disingenuous speak’ as the representative for Leeds/Grenville…but that person has never done anything BUT be a politician. He has forgotten how to speak like a normal person.  And our illustrious Premier? Who knows what rattles around in the empty, not-so-hallowed-halls between his ears?

But, I have put in too many words. You guys don’t read this stuff anyway. Your staffers probably scan it quickly and check a box marked…’Supporter’ and the other, marked…’Non-Supporter/maniac’.  

I will submit it to the local paper if I want people to actually read it and think about it.

Peter Johnson
Upper Oxford Mills, On