TORONTO – Comic relief. That is the literary term for the sequence of events introduced in a particularly serious or tragic moment in a staged narrative. As a poetic device, it has been used by poets and dramatists of various renown with varying degrees of success. I went to an all-boys school. Our teachers had to drill (forcibly) the humanness inherent in the need to exemplify the ability to appreciate that a narrative did not always have to be ruthless. 

That said, I could barely contain my laughter at the egregious display of “it’s not my fault” and “woe is me” that emerges from the whining lamentation put forward by four of the most pathetic educational organizations in Ontario. These school boards have had enough of the damage being perpetrated on our children before our very eyes … in our schools!

Just imagine, school boards, entrusted with the care and development of our children both “academically and socially”, given resources that amount to about $14,000 per student- all things considered, provided with teaching personnel that are among the best remunerated in the country (if not the world) in facilities that should typically cause everyone to blush with the embarrassment of riches, are suing the real culprits for the failure of their system.

Guess who that is. Oh, Oh: Social media giants… Meta, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tik Tok.

These are the same organizations being sued in Europe and elsewhere for plundering the advertising marketplace, transferring their revenues to off-shore subsidiaries and subcontracting design and content-creation to extraterritorial sources beyond the reach of “petty national authorities”, like France, Italy and other European states.

Ah…, Justin Trudeau’s government has been placing ads (directly) on their platforms to the tune of at least $7 million per annum. For all the Canadian newspapers combined, last year, it allocated $944,000.

Back to that later. Of the four school boards, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), in off-record conversations often referred to as ’woke central’, comes closest to resembling ”war zones”, minus the rubble residue seen post bombings in Ukraine or Gaza.

The behavioural standards in its schools are such that those in the Press and Media rarely suffer from “newsy items” due to dramatic “closures” and anti-social behavioural problems exhibited by rival factions of students. Peel District School Board (PDSB), despite the presence of some fine trustees and educators, is edging toward the same description. Carleton District School Board CDSB) … is close to the federal government.

The Director at TDSB served as interim Director at PDSB before returning to Toronto.

None of the school boards distinguish themselves for academic excellence, as a visit to the rankings (derived from government test results) by the Fraser Institute will attest. Of the four, the Toronto Catholic District School Board (TCDSB) is the only which has an oversight authority based on religious/moral values.

Its Director emerged from the TDSB. His “people” defy that moral oversight openly.

In fact, the TCDSB has been spending and authorizing legal expenditures to “attack” one of its “tradition-based trustees” for amounts that are necessarily taken from student-oriented programs.

Now these upstanding “stalwarts of doing what is good for parents and children” have agreed to take the cause of goodness and light to the Courts so that the perpetrators of all that is bad – mental disorders, increased social disfunction, academic malfunction, bullying, misinformation, propagation of hate and disruption – that is, social media can be held to account; to the tune of $4.5 Billion!!! Surely Minister Lecce approved.

Answering two simple questions may help me arise from the floor on which my laughter has pushed me.

Had anyone hired Meta to conjure up these “programs” for student consumption – without vetting them? Secondly, did anyone prohibit or limit the use of technology in the classroom through which Meta and others allegedly poison the minds of our children?

If Meta et al in some way did their dirty deed with some complicity by the Boards, parents or their surrogates should take the suit as an example of what to do with all for Boards, their Staff and Trustees.

We will give them free publicity in that event.