It’s now been more than two months since Mike Ramsay, a duly elected trustee in the Waterloo Region District School Board (WRDSB), was effectively fired. However, he wasn’t removed by the voters, but rather by six of his fellow trustees. This was very strange, to say the least.
Ramsay is certainly not a political novice. In fact, he has been a trustee since 1989. Ramsay is a former police officer and a military veteran with a distinguished career. He also happens to be the WRDSB’s only non-white trustee. However, none of these things mattered to the six colleagues who voted to suspend him until the end of September.
Ramsay’s “crime” was that he spoke out against the board chair and refused to go along with decisions that he thought were wrong. Not only did he publicly challenge the chair’s decision to kick a teacher out of a board meeting for raising concerns about the sexualized content found in two school library books, but he also used his Twitter account to share articles written by journalists who were critical of the board’s decision.
The reality is that elected officials do not always agree with each other and they will often use the media to get their message across. Thus, it makes no sense to suspend Ramsay for doing something that other politicians do. The trustees who suspended him need to grow a thicker skin. Just because public debates get heated does not mean that trustees should be able to effectively remove their political opponents from office.
In Ramsay’s case, his colleagues used the WRDSB Code of Conduct to silence him. Citing the requirement for trustees to “uphold the implementation of any board resolution after it is passed by the board,” one trustee alleged that Ramsay’s public disagreement with the board chair amounted to a code of conduct violation. This led to a resolution to suspend Ramsay from attending board meetings or receiving confidential information.
What WRDSB trustees need to recognize is that expressing public disagreement with the board chair and blocking the implementation of a board resolution are not the same thing. Trustees are elected officials and, as such, they have a duty to represent the people who voted them in. Sometimes this means voicing opposition to the positions taken by their fellow trustees.
When publicly criticizing the board chair and/or other trustees becomes grounds for suspension, dissenting trustees quickly lose the ability to express their constituents’ concerns. School boards are not corporate boards accountable only to shareholders. Rather, they are elected bodies that must represent the public interest. The notion that trustees should speak in lockstep might make sense if they were serving in a corporate board setting, but it certainly doesn’t work for elected officials.
Unfortunately, WRDSB is not the only school board that has used bylaws to silence dissent. Former Calgary school trustee Lisa Davis resigned her position in 2020 when her fellow trustees kept calling one closed-door meeting after another. Since trustees are legally forbidden from sharing information from closed meetings with the public, Davis could not properly communicate what was happening in the board’s schools with her constituents. Davis wanted to improve governance practices in her school board, but she was stymied at every turn by trustees who were determined to maintain the status quo.
By clamping down on public dissent, school boards have diminished the important role played by individual trustees. No other group of politicians at any level of government allows itself to be neutered in this way. Imagine what would happen if the federal House of Commons started suspending Members of Parliament who publicly criticized the prime minister. It would be widely decried as an assault on democracy.
It’s time that we clarify the role of trustees. If these positions continue to be elected, then we need to make it clear that trustees have the right to express their views and to dissent from decisions made by a majority of the board. This doesn’t mean giving dissenting trustees the power to completely derail the wishes of the majority or the wishes of citizens, but it does mean allowing them to speak freely, even if they say things that make the board chair uncomfortable.
School trustees are elected by the public. Thus, only the public should have the power to remove trustees from their position.
