The July 2025 commentary by Michael Zwaagstra for the Fraser Institute reveals a worldview that treats education as a commodity, care as inefficiency, and austerity as virtue. It celebrates scarcity as moral discipline and recasts underfunding as evidence of reform.
The article opens with an accounting exercise that pretends to be compassion. It translates a decade of human exhaustion into a tidy percentage—6.7 per cent—and declares progress complete. The number becomes a shield, a mathematical talisman warding off the unbearable truth that teachers are collapsing under invisible labour and children with disabilities are enduring their days without consistent support.
The logic of the piece rests on the belief that measurable performance defines learning. It reads achievement as test scores, learning as memorisation, and worth as compliance. Every child is rendered a data point; every teacher, a line item; every cry for help, an inefficiency. This ideology produces schools that appear orderly while concealing profound suffering.
Its call for “reform” resurrects a colonial vision of education built on obedience and uniformity. The nostalgia for provincial exams, rote instruction, and centralised control reflects an appetite for surveillance rather than curiosity. The essay imagines a classroom where silence equals success and where the purpose of education is to produce citizens who never question the logic of scarcity.
The admiration for independent schools exposes the hierarchy at the heart of the argument. It praises “innovation” while ensuring that only the privileged can afford to experience it. Public schools are framed as bloated systems requiring discipline, while private institutions are celebrated as lean laboratories of excellence. The distinction serves power by sanctifying inequality.
Every paragraph performs the same manoeuvre: replace social responsibility with fiscal vocabulary and call it reform. The writer speaks of efficiency, outcomes, and independence as if they were moral achievements. In this language, empathy disappears. Labour becomes cost, and cost becomes corruption.
The consequence of this reasoning is visible in every underfunded classroom in the province. A teacher improvises with broken supplies. A student with complex needs waits for an aide who never arrives. A parent writes another letter to a board that replies with percentages. The system absorbs the pain and calls it resilience.
The Fraser Institute’s ideology transforms moral failure into administrative elegance. It teaches that austerity is purity, that measurement is justice, and that a balanced budget outweighs a child’s right to belonging. It offers the state an alibi for abandonment and calls it reform.
Education thrives through presence—presence of care, of human attention, of sufficient time and hands to hold what learning requires. Democracy grows through the willingness to fund its future, not through the pretense that deprivation builds strength. The arithmetic of indifference dissolves when people refuse to participate in its logic.
CUPE’s call for investment in schools expresses an ethic of shared responsibility. It imagines classrooms where support is a given and learning unfolds within safety. It asserts that children and workers form the core of public good. The Fraser Institute’s article, in contrast, speaks the language of extraction and calls it freedom.
Public education deserves a vocabulary built on care, dignity, and collective abundance. Every dollar directed toward inclusion affirms that students are citizens, not cost centres. The moral project of education rests in that affirmation, and no ledger can contain its value.
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What would it really cost to fix the problem?
We talk so much about the cost of inclusion—as if it’s indulgent, optional, something that must be justified—but we rarely talk about the cost of exclusion. And those costs are everywhere: in emergency rooms, in overburdened case files, in classrooms where distress goes…
