It was the end of our shift. The boss, the owner of the restaurant, called a staff meeting. There were waiters, waitresses, cooks and the busboy staff – about a dozen of us. For several weeks we’d known that the head busboy was leaving the diner. So, we were looking to the boss for some kind of announcement about who would become the next head busboy. His decision was not unexpected. He gave the job to Denny.
“Denny’s been with us the longest,” the boss said. “He has the most experience. He has the trust of everybody on staff and all our customers. He’s the right choice for the position.”
Nobody, not a single person on our staff, disagreed. Everybody could see that the promotion had gone to exactly the right person. Denny met all criteria. So, he got the job. That’s the way it was done at a restaurant staff meeting I attended in the summer of 1966.
Last Friday, the province watched Premier Doug Ford introduce a new cast of ministers appointed to his cabinet – the equivalent of the right busboys receiving promotions for the positions they can/should fill. However, for all his claims of bringing his strong sense of business acumen to the running of Ontario’s public service, the Premier (or those in the Progressive Conservative inner circle advising him) has made abominable choices.
Last Christmas, you’ll remember, at the height of the second wave and province-wide lockdown (i.e. discouraging non-essential travel) because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rod Phillips, then Ontario’s finance minister, chose to travel to St. Barts, a luxury vacation destination in the eastern Caribbean. Bad enough given the deadly situation back home. But then to cover his tracks, he posted a pre-recorded Christmas greeting on Twitter, showing him isolating at home in Ajax.
“I want to thank each and every one of you for what we are doing to protect our most vulnerable,” he said, posing next to his glass of eggnog and a crackling fire. When found out, Phillips resigned his porfolio on New Year’s Eve.
Meanwhile, his colleague, MPP Merilee Fullerton, minister of long-term care – a year into the marauding pandemic – received a massive Commission report on the horrific state of Ontario’s long-term care facilities, condemning the Ford Tories for not having a plan to deal it. And when questioned about reported deaths by neglect, the minister walked out of a media conference. She apparently had no solution for a system that saw nearly 4,000 elderly residents die in its care.
Enter the Premier’s cabinet shuffle. And who emerges to lead long-term care, a portfolio that desperately needs honesty for its constituency? The one who misled his own leader, his own electorate, and the social media universe that thought he was abiding by the rules but wasn’t.
Meet Rod Phillips, the new minister of long-term care. Meanwhile, the outgoing long-term care minister, who appeared to be in over her head, moves to – in the Premier’s estimation – an appropriate new responsibility.
Meet Dr. Merilee Fullerton, the new minister of children, community and social services.
Remarkably, others in the Ford cabinet have stayed put. No doubt, Stephen Lecce, the minister of education, will view his leading Ontario’s education system into full-time online learning as genius. From the beginning of his tenure, Lecce proclaimed remote teaching/learning as the panacea to Ontario’s curriculum delivery.
Meanwhile, critics – from OISE academics to front-line teachers not to mention beleaguered parents – have called education cooped up in bedrooms, endless hours in front of computers and lack of face-to-face instruction short-sighted, unfair to underprivileged communities, and a poor substitute for in-class instruction.
The disarray of Minister Lecce’s stay-at-home alternative during COVID-19 has illustrated all the faults its critics predicted, and one the minister completely underestimated – the detrimental impact of soulless, daily, digital learning on the mental health of two million Ontario students. Meanwhile, the minister never saw improved ventilation inside Ontario school buildings, early vaccination of teachers and janitorial staff as front-line workers, nor increased testing/tracing as a means of keeping classrooms open.
Meet the continuing Minister of Education Stephen Lecce!
Haven’t any of the Premier’s advisors read the learned narratives of Canadian-born educator Dr. Laurence J. Peter? Over 50 years ago, the author of The Peter Principle, assessed the upwardly mobile hierarchy in which people are promoted to positions requiring different skills and because they lack those new skills they become incompetent at that new level of responsibility. In other words, in a hierarchy (a.k.a. a cabinet pyramid), they rise to their level of incompetence.
Elevating a member of restaurant staff to head busboy seemed pretty harmless back in 1966. In nearly post-pandemic 2021, the Premier’s elevating this cast of MPPs to portfolios governing the health, social services and education of Ontarians, simply looks like rewarding incompetence with responsibility.