School Board Research

Toronto Sun torontosun.com/opinion/colum… 41% of Ontario school trustees were filled by acclamation. No vote. No choice. In the races that were contested, union- and labour-endorsed candidates won 69% of the time. Everyone else: 18%. In Toronto, 17 of 18 labour-endorsed candidates won. This isn't local democracy. This is capture. The elected trustee model is broken. 1/3

RESULTS of the 2026 TRUSTEE ELECTION IN ONTARIO: School Board Research @BoardReportCard has done another spectacular job of digging into school board data, this time as it relates to the results of the trustee election in Ontario. FINDINGS: 👇 Two in five of Ontario’s trustee seats (272 of the 657 seats - 41 per cent) were settled when nominations closed, without a vote. At the English public boards, 28 per cent of seats were settled without a vote; at the English Catholic boards, 45 per cent; at the French Catholic and French public boards, two in three. At six boards, every seat was acclaimed. Some of the races that were contested came down to a handful of votes. Where unions and labour councils endorsed candidates, their candidates and the winners were largely the same people. Candidates endorsed by unions and labour councils won 55 of 80 contested races (69 per cent); the other candidates in the same areas won 35 of 194 (18 per cent). The gap held for new candidates, 38 of 60 against 20 of 173, and outside Toronto. Endorsements from Parents as First Educators and ratings from Campaign Life Coalition showed no such gap within races, although more trustees with that backing were elected than had run as sitting trustees. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? ** Many families had no choice to make. ** A few votes can decide who sets a board’s policies. ** For the families in an acclaimed area, the trustee who will approve their board’s policies for the next four years was decided before anyone voted. ** Many boards will have new trustees. At least 285 of the 657 seats will be held by someone who was not a sitting trustee before the election (section 5). ** Endorsements are public, and some lined up closely with the results. Where a union or labour council endorsed, its candidates won far more often than the candidates they ran against. Every endorsement counted here was published by the endorser and is listed with its source in the References (section 6). ** School Board Research recorded 536 public endorsements and ratings of 347 candidates on 47 boards, each read on the endorser’s own website or public social media post, with the source and the date seen. ** Teachers’ and education workers’ unions, union coalitions and labour councils endorsed candidates in Toronto, York Region, Durham, Peel, Simcoe, Waterloo Region, Wellington-Dufferin, Ottawa, the Kawartha Pine Ridge area, Hastings and Prince Edward, Upper Canada and Brantford. ** Parents as First Educators (PAFE) published lists of endorsed candidates, mostly for Catholic boards. ** Campaign Life Coalition (CLC) published ratings of 279 candidates, favourable and unfavourable. Progress Toronto and the Armenian National Committee of Toronto each endorsed a small number of candidates in Toronto and York Region. ** The union and labour council result is large, and it holds for new candidates and outside Toronto (Figure 3). Endorsed new candidates won 63 per cent of their races; other new candidates in the same races won 12 per cent. In Toronto, the labour slate and the winners were nearly the same list: 17 of 18 endorsed candidates won, and 1 of 71 others. ** The Elementary Teachers of Toronto and the Ottawa-Carleton OSSTF district saw every endorsed candidate elected, while two of the eight endorsed by the OSSTF Simcoe teachers’ unit, and eight of the fifteen recommended by Together In Education in Waterloo Region, won. At the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board, one of the four candidates endorsed by the Dufferin-Peel secondary teachers’ unit was elected. ** Union-endorsed school board candidates win about 70 per cent of contested races in the U.S., a rate that has held roughly steady for two decades in the U.S. (Moe 2006 and Hartney 2022, cited in Hartney and Kogan 2025). ** In survey experiments, telling voters about a union endorsement increased support for the endorsed candidate, by an amount that can be as large as the effect of shared party affiliation; the same U. S. study found that unions’ decisions to back sitting trustees followed increases in teacher pay rather than gains in student achievement (Hartney and Kogan 2025). Accountability is one of the core requirements of any system that spends public money and shapes children’s lives. The question is not whether accountability matters, but which mechanisms actually deliver it in practice. In today’s environment—high public spending, measurable achievement gaps, intense scrutiny of institutions, and widespread skepticism about capture by organized interests—the demand for clearer lines of accountability is strong. Purely local electoral mechanisms that frequently produce acclamations and interest-group dominance have not always supplied that clarity. ARE THESE ELECTION RESULTS AND CLEAR PATTERNS ERODING DEMOCRATIC FEATURES OF ONTARIO ELECTIONS? AT WHAT POINT SHOULD WE ELIMINATE SCHOOL BOARD TRUSTEES COMPLETELY? INDIVIDUAL SCHOOL BOARD ELECTION RESULTS AND THE FULL REPORT CAN BE FOUND HERE 👇 schoolboardresearch.ca/2026/… @PaulCalandra @ShannonBDouglas @_MikeRamsay @krushowy @Educhatter @HeatheratLFP @NeedlesOnNews @kltwwhitnall @ColinDMello @HorsmanGeoff #onted #ONpoli @CrisBairosFern