‘A Toronto Public School Board Election Debate Where The Candidates Were Only Allowed To Say Nice Things’

Candidate Richard Klagsbrun’s first hand account:

Toronto’s Public School Board has been plagued by scandals, mismanagement, waste, and worse, and enforcing silence about matters of major public interest only enables the perpetuation of serious problems of which the TDSB has seen far too many.

In the case of Ausma Malik, The University of Toronto’s newspaper, The Varsity, published reports of how, when she was a union official there and was in charge of investigating a crooked student union election, Malik had colluded with the people she was investigating to produce a result they wanted.

The breach of trust was so blatant that the University’s Provost stepped in and withheld funds to that student union.

You might think that a candidate for public office, who has repeatedly called for more transparency and accountability, would want to explain something like that. But Ms Malik has only characterized drawing attention to that as “mean-spirited attacks” designed to keep people (i.e. her) from public service.