Tories defend EQAO chair appointment of defeated PC candidate
Education Minister Lisa Thompson is defending the $140,000-ayear patronage appointment of a defeated former Progressive Conservative candidate to chair the agency administering Ontario’s standardized testing.
The Tories rewarded Cameron Montgomery, who lost in OttawaOrleans last June, with the plum post to chair the board of the Education Quality and Accountability Office, previously a parttime job that paid less than $4,000 annually.
“After 15 years of mismanagement and plummeting math scores under (former Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne’s) watch — and, quite frankly, her ideology — we have seen students failing,” Thompson said Wednesday.
“So we need to address this. We’re taking a very serious approach and we are fixing it by way of working with EQAO and having them find within an opportunity to hire an expert,” she said. “Dr. Cameron Montgomery is an absolute perfect fit to be a permanent chair and help us get standardization right in Ontario.”
Thompson said Montgomery, a former assistant professor of education at the University of Ottawa, “has an amazing pedigree.”
But NDP Leader Andrea Horwath said Premier Doug Ford is just rewarding a political ally.
“He’s just been given a ticket to the Ford gravy train. Let’s face it, Mr. Ford keeps giving these tickets,” said Horwath. “If the government had its priorities right, any extra dollars wouldn’t be going to Ford’s friends and insiders, so that he can manipulate the decisions that they make in the future, but rather should be going to children who have autism, whose parents need the support,” she said. Indeed, the $140,000 to be paid annually to Montgomery, for example, is enough to cover treatment for “a couple of years” for a child with severe autism, Horwath added.
“The point is the government’s got its priorities wrong. If it’s somebody that Mr. Ford wants to do a favour for, somebody he wants to call on for favours in the future? Well, the bank is wide open,” the New Democrat said.
“If it’s parents struggling to find the supports they need for their children with autism, to try to help those kids to be able to connect with their parents and the rest of the world, well, those people are just not a priority for the premier.”
Interim Liberal leader John Fraser said “the optics are bad.”
“Doug Ford is bringing an old word back into the lexicon: patronage,” said Fraser. “I don’t think the qualification should be: ‘I was a Conservative candidate in the last election so someone needs to take care of me.’”