Next Mag Editorial: Politicians are Lying Claiming No Cash for Kids’ Music

Music education should be as fundamental as heat in the classrooms -- politicians are lying when they say it has to be cut

COVID-19 — and wars — prove governments can find money for anything at any time if it is a priority.

Corrupt, and possibly criminally so, Premier Doug Ford has shown time and again the cash box is never empty when he wants to find bucks for pet projects like paving farmland to help his developer pals (Highway 413), to bail on a beer store contract ($225 million), or to destroy a lakeside treasure like Ontario Place, literally paving paradise to put up a parking lot, spending unknown hundreds of millions for his friends at Therme.

So, when politicians say there isn’t enough money for the Toronto School Board to pay a measly $5 million to keep music programs running in the-less-than 50 per cent of city schools that offer them, they’re full of shit!

This week the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) has been looking at cutting music funding in an effort to meet the tens of millions that the Tory provincial government is demanding be cut all in the name of the mythical creature — unicorn or dragon? — known as government waste. While there’s always a gotcha that can be found of idling civil servants, Ford and his family and friends have been chasing waste at city hall for decades and the only massive spending fraud ever uncovered was the MFP computer purchase scandal in the ’90s that conservative politicians had their grubby hands all over.

The money to pay for music teaching in our schools is there — just not the will. And why would there be any will for cash for the provincial public school system when the Progressive Conservative politicians who control the money have their kids and those of their backers safely ensconced in the gender-segregated scholastic sanctuaries of the lush private school system?