Investing in kids

I am one of those library technicians mentioned in your article who has had her position downsized to half-time due to the Ford education cuts (“Every child le behind,” Income equality, July 2019). Yes, the cut has hurt me personally but, more importantly, it has hurt the students of our small school located in a remote section of northwestern Ontario. The population of Geraldton Composite High School fluctuates between 160 and 200 students. Of those students, more than half are identified as “at risk” or “special needs” students. Most of our students self-identify as Indigenous. Our graduating class this year comprises 21 students, nine of whom are Indigenous. All through their high school careers, those indigenous graduates could be found in the library during their spares, lunch hours, before and a er school, and during their e-learning classes. The library offers them a haven from the mainstream of the school population, a quiet place that gives them respite from the busyness of the hallways. And it is not just the potential graduates who hang out in the library—it is a quiet place for any of our students. I am here to listen to them, assist them with research or projects and provide them with great reading material. My concern now is for those students who need the library for their quiet time: what will they do during the other half of the day when I am not here to help them? Where will they work on their e-learning classes? Perhaps in Ford’s eyes, the library is not necessary to student learning and student well-being, but in our school it is. I invite Ford to visit our school and see how much our library means to our kids. Frances Koning, Jellicoe, Ont.

Maclean’s is worth reading and yet sometimes falls short, such as the article on public-school spending and meritocracies. It implicitly criticizes the Ford Ontario government with a large image showing posters claiming it is imposing cuts to education and that these will “hurt kids.” The inevitable conclusion, this suggests, is to pour more (and more—is there any justified limit?) money into education. Surely you know that an issue such as this is not subject to such a simplistic solution, yet you make no mention of the many trade-offs. Should we continue the previous Liberal government’s path to provincial bankruptcy? Spend less on health care? Raise taxes? Limit public service unions’ power to extract ever higher wages and lower work hours? With regard to the underlying “risk factors to economic and political stability,” many do identify inequality as a major risk. In his excellent book

Prosperity, Colin Mayer describes how the current version of capitalism leads to severe inequality and also gives us a path to reversing this damaging trend. We need all economists to understand this and help our politicians determine the way forward. Until our laws defining corporations evolve, improvement is unlikely. Douglas Moffatt Leamington, Ont.