Having worked for a school board for over 16 years early in my career, I’ve attended many board meetings and witnessed a very high-functioning board, the Ottawa-Carleton Catholic School Board.

However, like the member from Ottawa–Vanier, I think we can do better, governance-wise.

To have a standard of care like the minister has in his bill and the training to ensure that that standard can be maintained is very important. I’m wondering if you could tell me the components of that training that you think would be most important for a school board.

I was coming there.

I think we can all agree that disputes among school board trustees are costly and time-consuming. I think we’ve seen examples of that across the province, haven’t we? They erode public confidence and deflect attention away from their primary duties of promoting student achievement. Moreover, considering that approximately 700 trustees provide governance over a high-profile, high-impact $27-billion education system, it’s a little surprising to hear that trustees lack a consistent set of qualifications, training and, importantly, even a standard code of conduct.

Elected trustees perform an incredibly valuable service to parents and taxpayers by holding school boards accountable and ensuring that tax dollars are well spent. For that reason, we need to ensure that all trustees within the province of Ontario have the knowledge and skills required to perform their duties and that their conduct is held to provincial standards.

The vast majority of elected trustees are diligent, dedicated and altruistic public servants who care about education and the people they serve. But in recent years, the media has reported numerous incidents of trustees who treated parents less than respectfully and even said things that were completely unacceptable.

To quote from the 1994 Royal Commission on Learning that was established by Bob Rae’s NDP government and co-chaired by a former federal Liberal cabinet minister—I’m going to interrupt the quote, Speaker, by saying I move that the question now be put.