AODA Alliance
Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance Update
United for a Barrier-Free Ontario for All People with Disabilities
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Sign Up Fast for Public Hearings on the Ford Government’s Education Legislation Bill 101 and Submit Your Feedback Fast on the Bill – and – Preliminary Reflections on Bill 101
April 17, 2026
SUMMARY
Are you concerned about our school system’s future, especially for but certainly not limited to students with disabilities? Please read this important information.
On Monday April 13, 2026, the Ford Government Introduced Bill 101 into the Ontario legislature for First Reading. The Government calls it the “Putting Student Achievement First Act.” The Ford Government is rushing to pass this bill.
- The bill was referred to the Standing Committee on Social Policy. That Committee is only holding one day of hearings, on Monday, April 27, 2026 10:00am – 12:00pm and 1:00pm – 5:00pm.
- Anyone who wants to make a presentation to that Standing Committee must apply to the Standing committee by 4 pm on Wednesday April 22, 2026.
- It is likely that most people who want to speak at the Committee will not be given a chance to do so. Whether or not you speak to the Committee, you can always submit written submissions. Written submissions about the bill can be submitted up to 6 pm on Monday, April 27, 2026.
- Clause-by-clause debate on the bill will be limited to one day, Thursday April 30, 2026 from 10:00am – 12:00pm and 1:00pm – 6:00pm.
The AODA Alliance will be applying to speak at the hearings and will be submitting a written brief. We have a very busy few days ahead of us. Send us any feedback as we prepare that brief. Write us at aodafeedback@gmail.com
We strongly urge as many individuals and community organizations as possible to apply to speak at the hearings and/or to submit written feedback. You will find our brief a helpful source of ideas, but first we have to write it! In the meantime, you can get some help from the preliminary analysis of Bill 101 below. Please feel free to use any of the contents of our preliminary analysis. We’ll no doubt have more to say after further study of the bill under brutal time pressure. As well, check out the April 13, 2026 AODA Alliance news release.
All we found so far about where to sign up for these hearings and submit feedback is this general link at the Ontario legislature.
Here is a summary of our preliminary analysis of Bill 101:
- Despite its name, this bill has nothing to do with student achievement.
- This bill does nothing for vulnerable students with disabilities.
- This bill is a massive unnecessary provincial power grab creating costly red tape with no plan of action.
- This bill creates enormous burdensome new red tape and bureaucracy, draining money from classrooms.
- The Ford government announced no public and comprehensive plan of action for all these new provincial powers.
- Under this bill, what on earth will trustees have remaining authority to do?
- This bill reduces local democratic oversight of unelected senior school board officials.
- This bill creates a real risk of arbitrary abuse of provincial power.
- This bill’s new bureaucracy creates more barriers to school boards efficiently conducting their daily work of educating students than under the current system.
- This bill seriously reduces assistance to parents of students having unresolved problems with school officials.
- This bill makes it less likely that people would want to run for the position of trustee.
- This bill risks more harmful secrecy around school budgets.
- This bill targets the Ontario public school boards association in what could be an attempt to silence criticism of some provincial policies.
MORE DETAILS
AODA Alliance’s Preliminary Reflections on Bill 101
Despite Its Name, This Bill has Nothing to do with Student Achievement
The Ford Government’s Bill 101 is called the “Putting Student Achievement First Act.” Yet it provides virtually nothing for or about student achievement. The word “student” appears only a handful of times in the 75 pages of dense, hard-to-decode legislation, apart from references to the bill’s title. It provides no rights for students, nor any new educational programs, services or supports for students.
This Bill Does Nothing for Vulnerable Students with Disabilities
This bill does nothing to address the chronic disadvantage that vulnerable students with disabilities/special education needs face in Ontario schools. It does not require the Government or the Education Minister to include a focus on the needs of these students when exercising any of the many new powers that this bill gives him. The bill does not even include the word “disabilities or “special education.”
For example, this bill inexcusably misses a major and glaringly obvious opportunity to promote accessibility for students, staff and family members with disabilities. The bill gives the Education Minister sweeping authority over real estate dealings by school boards, including building construction and renovation. Nothing in the bill requires the Minister to act proactively to ensure that any such construction is fully accessible to students, staff and parents with disabilities. The Government has a long track record of spending public money on new construction with accessibility problems. See for example the mess the Government made of the new Toronto courthouse that was recently opened, which the AODA Alliance revealed in a widely viewed online video.
For well over four years, this Government has had a comprehensive, practical roadmap for removing the many disability barriers in the K-12 school system. It received the final report of the K-12 Education Standards Development Committee on January 28, 2022. For all this time, the Government has had full power to enact any or all of those recommendations with any variations it wishes under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. The Ford Government has enacted none of them. Instead, it’s now rushing to enact new legislation that doesn’t do anything for achievement at all for over a third of a million Ontario K-12 students with disabilities. To the contrary, it risks making things worse for them.
This Bill is a Massive Unnecessary Provincial Power Grab Creating Costly Red Tape but with No Plan of Action
This bill is a massive provincial power grab. The Education Minister had clearly wanted to abolish elected trustees altogether, based on what he’s been saying for months. There was ample public pressure against their abolition.
It looks like the Minister was forced to keep trustees in place in some form. His solution in this bill is to leave them and local school boards with much less power to actually do anything themselves without provincial approval.
This bill gives the Minister of Education enormous control over the fine details of the operations of school boards across Ontario, amounting potentially to provincial micromanagement of classes all over Ontario. Neither the bill nor the Minister’s news conference shows what the Minister needs or wants to do now, but cannot do under his many existing powers. The Minister has many such powers given to him by the Education Act, supplemented by the new powers the Ford Government gave him in 2023 under its Bill 98. He got even more powers in 2025 under the controversial Bill 33.
For years, the Ministry of Education has issued and updated a wide range of “Program and Policy Memos” to school boards. The Minister has not claimed that school boards are not following these, nor has it shown that they are an insufficient way to put student achievement first.
This Bill Creates Enormous Burdensome New Red Tape and Bureaucracy, Draining Money from Classrooms
The Ford Government has many times said it is committed to cutting red tape and eliminating bureaucracy. Yet Bill 101 creates enormous new and costly red tape and bureaucracy in the administration of schools and school boards across Ontario. The bill creates a dizzying maze of new regulations the Ford Cabinet can enact and yet more regulations the Education Minister can create. On top of that, it mandates a veritable blizzard of other new policies, directives and orders that the Minister can issue.
The Minister will need to widely expand his staff and/or his Ministry’s staff to draft all these regulations, orders and directives, to explain them all to 72 school boards, and then to make all the many decisions that this bill assigns to him over each board. Imagine school board officials having to fill out a blizzard of new provincial forms to seek the Minister’s approval for decision after decision that used to be made locally without all that red tape.
Someone in the Minister’s office has to review all those forms, ask for more information if they feel they need it, and then advise the Minister on how to respond to each request. The obvious predictable delays in getting through all this red tape will only work to the disadvantage of students.
A fiscally responsible Government insists on costing new programs and new bureaucracy before they decide whether to create it. Has the Ford Government costed all this new bureaucratic burden on the Ontario Government and on 72 school boards? Is it planning to allocate more budget to cover all these new costs? Otherwise, this new hefty cost burden will come out of classrooms. That is hardly putting student achievement first. “Putting student achievement first” would lead the Government to allocate more funds to the school system, and to require that this new money go into classrooms rather than mountains of new provincial bureaucracy at the Minister’s beck and call.
While the bill gives the Education Minister sweeping powers of minutia at school boards, he has not demonstrated that there have been any major improvements at the 8 school boards he now runs through his appointed supervisors. Those boards serve over one third of all Ontario students. The AODA Alliance and others have shown that for students with disabilities, things have gotten worse under provincial supervision, as was detailed at a January 28, 2026 Queen’s Park news conference.
The Ford Government Announced No Public and Comprehensive Plan of Action for All These New Provincial Powers
The Ford Government has not announced any comprehensive plans of what it plans to do with all these sweeping new powers. It has only made public statements about a few measures. A Government would not go to such lengths to grant itself so many new powers unless it had an agenda of what it plans to do with them. The public deserves to see those plans before any votes on this bill.
When he publicly announced the bill at an April 13, 2026 news conference, Education Minister Calandra stated that the bill substantially reduces the power of elected school board trustees. Yet the long, highly technical bill makes it very hard if not impossible to figure out what powers are left to school board trustees.
There is no provision in this long, complex bill that lists the powers of trustees. In his lengthy April 13, 2026 news conference, Education Minister Calandra never offered a clear and comprehensive description of what trustees can do if Bill 101 is enacted. It’s quite possible Mr. Calandra genuinely does not know.
It is very typical for legislation to spell out the powers and duties of a specific board, commission, office or public official. Bill 101 never does so for trustees in over 75 pages of detailed provisions. That is extremely bad legislative planning.
How is a member of the public to be able to decide whether it is worth their time and expense to run for a position of school board trustee? The first question they’d ask themselves is: “What can a school board trustee do?” Even if they paid a lawyer handsomely to wade through this legislative maze, they’d be left totally confused and uncertain.
From the Minister’s statements over the past months vilifying elected trustees as a whole, one would have thought that trustees up to now were granted a great deal of power under the Education Act. In fact, their mandate had been gradually whittled down over the years. The last Conservative Ontario Government under Premier Mike Harris reduced their powers.
In addition, school board senior staff have further whittled away at what trustees can do. It is not unusual for school board senior staff to tell trustees that they may not make decisions on “operational matters.” They can tell trustees that a concern that they are raising is an “operational matter.” This becomes a magic wand that senior staff can wave whenever they wish to try to block trustees from overriding something that the senior staff want to do.
However, nothing in the Education Act permits this massive incursion into what elected trustees may do. Of interest, Bill 101’s massive provincial power grab lets the Minister dictate a great deal about “operational matters” at school boards.
Even if Bill 101 leaves the trustees with presumptive authority to deal with an issue, the bill lets the school board chair or the unelected Director of Education override the trustees’ decision. Section 25 of Schedule 2 of the bill says this, in the following terms:
“283.0.3 (1) The Minister may make regulations prescribing,
- the circumstances in which a resolution or motion passed by an English-language district school board is required to be confirmed by the chair of the board, director of education or any other prescribed board official, and the circumstances in which such confirmation shall not be given;
- the rules and procedures for the confirmation of a resolution or motion;
- the form and manner of the confirmation of a resolution or motion and the records to be kept of the resolution or motion in the minute books of the board.
- If a regulation is made under subsection (1) requiring the confirmation of a resolution or motion passed by an English-language district school board, the board resolution or motion is not effective unless the confirmation has been made in accordance with the regulation.”
This Bill Reduces Local Democratic Oversight of Unelected Senior School Board Officials
Even before this bill, and despite the efforts of elected trustees, the unelected senior school board officials had disproportionate power over the education of our children without sufficient local democratic oversight. No matter how well-intentioned those officials may be, this produces a risk of arbitrary and unfair action.
Bill 101 makes this much worse. We have seen signs of this at some if not all of the 8 school boards that are now under provincial supervision. Because the provincial supervisor reports directly to the Education Minister, there appears to be a risk of a culture of fear among senior staff. If they do anything that might anger or displease the Minister, their job could be in jeopardy. This fear is a predictable result of the fact that at the TDSB and the Ottawa Carleton District School boards, the Minister-appointed Supervisors summarily fired the Directors of Education at those boards. This culture of fear risks putting student achievement last.
What this bill clearly does do is to give the Minister a vast amount of highly discretionary power. Yet there are few if any legislative guardrails limiting how these sweeping and arbitrary powers are to be used. In large government bureaucracies such power too often risks bad decisions and troubling abuses.
At the same time, this bill is replete with provisions that are designed to insulate Ontario Government officials and some others as much as possible from legal liability in the courts for their action. This substantially reduces the oversight of these sweeping public powers by the courts. Yet the bill aggressively protects the power of the Ontario Government to sue others.
This Bill’s New Bureaucracy Creates More Barriers to School Boards Efficiently Conducting Their Daily Work of Educating Students
Making the cost burdens of this bill on the taxpayer even higher, without a dime of added benefit in the classroom, school boards will have a nightmare figuring out what they need to get minister’s approval for and what rules or directions apply to any specific action they are considering. Just the training costs alone are worrisome. School boards will fear that they need to consult lawyers time and again to figure out what they can do, more than ever before.
If you want a law to change what people do and not to cause any adverse collateral damage, the law must be clear and easy to read, navigate and use. Bill 101 is an abject failure on that score.
This Bill Seriously Reduces Assistance to Parents of Students Having Unresolved Problems with School Officials
Targeting the Toronto District School Board, this bill reduces the number of trustees at that board from 22 to 12. This means that the remaining trustees will each have to be available to help almost twice the number of parents of the over 40,000 TDSB students with disabilities/special education needs than they do now.
The trustee position is part-time. That means in effect that there will be substantially less trustee time available to help these families battle the many disability and bureaucratic barriers at Canada’s largest school board. Dozens of parents recounted in painful detail how those barriers hurt their children at the TDSB Special Education Advisory Committee’s April 13, 2026 public forum.
This Bill Makes It Less Likely that People Would Want to Run for the Position of Trustee
At his April 13, 2026 news conference, Education Minister Calandra stated that people could run for school trustee in this fall’s elections. Yet at the 8 school boards that are now under provincial supervision, they may be elected as trustees but have no role at all to play in the governance of their school board. The board may still be under provincial supervision, with no publicly announced benchmarks or timelines for returning the trustees to office.
Why would anyone invest the time and cash in running for an office that is under indefinite provincial suspension? Minister Calandra summarily dismissed concerns about this at his news conference.
Minister Calandra stated that if no one runs for these positions, he can appoint trustees. Of course, he’d select those appointees on a politically partisan basis. One is left wondering if that is his plan. If so, it would just be more of what he has already been doing by other means. At 8 school boards, he ousted trustees whom the public elected and replaced them with far more powerful provincial Supervisors who report directly to him.
This Bill Risks More Harmful Secrecy Around School Budgets
The Education Minister’s arguments in favour of this legislation and his attacks on elected trustees over the past months have focused for the large part on school board budgets. He has blasted trustees for passing budgets that have deficits. These chronic deficits are, however, due to provincial underfunding of education.
That the Minister’s attacks are so dubious is proven overwhelmingly by the fact that at TDSB, the Provincial Supervisor has not altered the budget that the trustees passed last spring before they were ousted. It had a projected deficit. TDSB’s Special Education Advisory Committee was publicly told at its January 2026 meeting by TDSB’s senior budget official that TDSB was still operating under the trustees’ latest budget. In other words, after many months in office, the provincially appointed Supervisor had not re-written the trustees’ budget – a budget that was supposedly so problematic that it led the Minister to oust the trustees from office.
It is essential for the school board budgeting process to be as public as possible. From this bill, it would seem that the Ford Government thinks that the problems with school board budget processes is that there was just not enough secrecy around them. This bill will drive the budget process further from public scrutiny. At the 8 school boards that the Education Minister now runs, the school board budget process is shrouded in secrecy. The budget process at school boards was much more public before the Ford Government took over those 8 boards.
This Bill Targets the Ontario Public School Boards Association, in What Could be an Attempt to Silence Criticism of Some Provincial Policies
This bill guts the Ontario Public School Boards Association. That Association has been outspoken in raising concerns about the Ford Government’s recent plans. This reflects a gradual dimming of the lights in our democratic system at a time when we need those lights brightly shining.