Anyone who has gone through the education system in Canada has had a mixed bag of teachers. My own public high school education in central Vancouver consisted of great math teachers, an incredible Physics teacher, and some very dedicated shop teachers. But I also experienced an English teacher who was drunk every morning and some Chemistry and French teachers who clearly should have never been teaching children.

Conrad Black pokes a few holes in the neverending union & media narrative that the Ontario education system is perfect, if only it weren’t for the stingy Ford government not giving them endless amounts of money:

The renewed agitation by teachers in Ontario highlights the debacle of the whole public teaching and school administration apparatus that is possibly the greatest and most universal public policy failing in modern Western civilization. It is one of the richest and most distressing ironies of our times that all of our Western societies consecrate more and more funding resources to education to produce steadily less educated and ostensibly less informed and less usefully intelligent graduates of secondary schools and graduate university programs. Not surprisingly, we are also focusing on fewer and fewer real subjects of authentic study. As my learned and much-harassed friend Jordan Peterson has often said, any course calling itself something that ends with the word “studies” is not a real subject. It is just a part of a larger subject and generally implies the exclusion of most of the real subject (and I write this as a former lecturer at McGill University in “French Canada Studies,” which was in fact the history of Quebec).

The Calgary Herald’s Licia Corbella points out some uncomfortable facts:

Let’s look at the difference in the tax burden between a Canadian child born in 2017 compared with their parent born in 1987.

Assuming that the parent makes the average Canadian salary of about $50,000 annually, the parent’s lifetime taxes paid are $586,726. But that parent is also expected to receive transfers or entitlements such as child benefits, EI, elderly benefits, social assistance, health and education, totalling $510,294, which results in a relatively low lifetime tax burden of $76,432.

The child, however, is expected to pay more than $3 million in lifetime taxes and receive $2.311 million back in transfers, for a tax burden of $735,919 — an almost 10-fold increase over their parents.