Who Gets the Pencil — and Who Gets Erased?
Updated: Sep 4
Ontario says it wants to help teachers.
Beginning this school year, eligible elementary teachers have access to $750 annually for classroom supplies through the province’s new Classroom Supplies Fund. The government has committed $66 million per school year to the program and says it will reduce teachers’ out-of-pocket spending while giving students more consistent access to classroom materials.
That sounds good.
It sounds especially good to anyone who has watched teachers spend their own money on pencils, paper, tissues, art supplies and the thousand little things children need in a classroom.
But Grandma has a question.
Why can’t the teacher simply use that $750 where it gets the best value for the children?
Because Ontario did not hand teachers $750 and tell them to shop wisely.
The province created a controlled purchasing system.
Teachers must use a dedicated Staples Professional ordering portal. They cannot take the program money into a Staples store. They cannot use it on the regular Staples website. The provincial allowance exists inside the approved purchasing system.
And within hours of teachers gaining access to that system, some began asking uncomfortable questions.
$49.85 became $84.49
Teachers supplied reporters with screenshots comparing prices on the new portal with prices they previously paid through the Toronto District School Board’s catalogue.
A case of paper previously listed at $49.85 was listed for $84.49 on the Staples portal.
Duotangs that had cost 38 cents each were listed at 96 cents.
Twenty notebooks that previously cost $17.25 were listed at $35.63.
Several teachers independently supplied the same pricing information to The Trillium.
Stop there for a moment.
We are talking about paper.
Not some innovative educational technology.
Not specialized laboratory equipment.
Paper.
And when the money is supposedly being put directly into classrooms, every extra dollar spent buying the same basic item is a dollar that does not become something else a child needs.
That makes the headline number — $750 — less interesting than the question underneath it:
What can $750 actually buy?
Government says teachers are looking at the wrong products
Education Minister Paul Calandra disputes the suggestion that the whole program is overpriced.
He says there are more than 200 priority products that have been specially discounted and that those products offer extremely competitive prices. According to Calandra, part of the problem is that teachers can also see other Staples products within the portal, including items outside that discounted group.
The government says it is working to make those cheaper products easier to identify and plans to make adjustments as teachers report problems.
That matters.
It would be unfair to claim that every product in the system is overpriced when the evidence does not establish that.
But it does not answer the larger question.
Why create a purchasing system in which teachers have to navigate around products that may represent considerably worse value in order to find the government-approved bargains?
And why should teachers discovering those discrepancies be treated as though they are inconveniencing the government by talking about them?
Calandra told teachers who find mistakes to report them through their principals and school boards rather than simply posting complaints on social media.
But perhaps social media is doing exactly what public scrutiny is supposed to do.
Teachers noticed. Teachers compared. Teachers talked. Reporters investigated. And suddenly the government is explaining.
There is a lesson in that too.
Follow the money
Supply Ontario says Staples Canada ULC was selected for the classroom-products category following a competitive procurement process.
But here is something worth noticing.
Ontario’s broader office-products Vendor of Record arrangement includes multiple companies. The current list includes businesses such as Grand & Toy, Office Central, Manleys Basics, Novexco and others.
For the newly created Classroom Products category, however, Supply Ontario lists Staples Canada ULC alone.
Supply Ontario says these purchasing arrangements are supposed to leverage the enormous buying power of Ontario’s public sector to obtain discounts, increase efficiency and deliver value for money.
That is exactly why these price comparisons deserve scrutiny.
If government is aggregating purchasing power across Ontario, ordinary people might reasonably expect that buying in enormous volume would make basic supplies cheaper, not leave teachers finding examples where familiar items cost substantially more.
Perhaps the government will fix those discrepancies.
Perhaps the specially priced 200 products will ultimately prove to be excellent value.
Perhaps this is simply a poorly organized launch.
All of those possibilities remain open.
But we should not have to assume them.
‘For the children’ is not an exemption from scrutiny
Governments have learned that almost anything sounds benevolent when the sentence contains the words children, teachers, education, or student success.
Ontario describes this program as putting funding ‘directly into the classroom.’
But public money does not teleport from Queen’s Park into a child’s pencil case.
There are people and institutions between those two points.
Government officials design the program. Procurement officials establish the purchasing arrangement. A corporation supplies the products. School boards administer accounts. Teachers place orders. And finally — at the very end of that chain — a child gets paper, pencils, glue or whatever else remains affordable inside the allowance.
That is why I keep coming back to one question:
Who gets paid before the child gets the pencil?
Because that is how public policy should be examined.
Not just: How much did government announce?
But: How much reached the person the announcement was supposedly about?
There is an enormous difference.
A government can spend $66 million and truthfully announce that it spent $66 million.
That does not automatically mean Ontario children received $66 million worth of additional classroom resources.
The purchasing power of that money matters. The prices matter. The administrative structure matters. The contract matters. And who profits along the way matters.
Children do not make these decisions
Children did not choose Staples.
Children did not design the portal.
Children did not negotiate the procurement arrangement.
Teachers did not choose where the provincial allowance could be spent.
Adults with institutional power made those decisions.
That sounds obvious, but we have a strange habit of talking about government as though policies materialize by themselves.
They do not.
People make them.
People decide what gets funded. People decide who receives contracts. People decide what constitutes value. People decide whether complaints are taken seriously.
And when those decisions affect children, saying that something was done for the children should invite more scrutiny, not less.
We have seen this story before
This is where the story becomes larger than Staples.
History repeatedly teaches us that people with power do not necessarily surrender money, control or advantage simply because doing so would be fair.
Child-labour protections were needed because children were being exploited.
Workplace safety regulations were needed because employers did not universally protect workers voluntarily.
Civil-rights protections were necessary because discrimination did not disappear merely because its victims could explain that it was wrong.
Human-rights legislation exists because good intentions were never enough.
The existence of regulation itself tells us something uncomfortable:
Societies create laws when experience has demonstrated that people cannot always be trusted to choose humanity over advantage.
So when public officials tell us that a new arrangement will benefit children, questioning the structure is not cynicism.
It is citizenship.
And perhaps that is the real lesson
Maybe Ontario’s classroom portal will improve.
Maybe teachers will identify the discounted products more easily next month.
Maybe pricing discrepancies will be corrected.
Good.
They should be.
But that does not make the questions disappear.
It proves why the questions were necessary.
Teachers had to look. They had to compare. They had to speak.
Someone had to notice that $750 on paper and $750 in purchasing power are not necessarily the same thing.
And perhaps we should stop teaching ourselves to feel rude for noticing.
When governments control public money intended for children, we should follow that money from announcement to classroom.
Every time.
Not because everyone involved must be corrupt.
Not because every contract conceals wrongdoing.
But because power without scrutiny has never earned the benefit of our historical amnesia.
So yes, Ontario.
Give teachers the $750.
Help them stop reaching into their own pockets.
Make sure children have what they need.
But while you are doing it, Canadians are entitled to ask:
Why this vendor? Why this purchasing model? Are teachers truly receiving the lowest available prices? How much of the $66 million becomes actual classroom material?
And most importantly:
Who gets the pencil — and who gets erased?
Every public dollar tells a story. Someone gets the contract. Someone gets paid. Someone gets the pencil. And somewhere along that chain, somebody can also get erased.
Erased from the budget. Erased from the decision-making. Erased from the conversation about what children actually need.
That is not an offensive question.
It is exactly the question taxpayers should be asking.
Continue with the questions of power, erasure and who gets remembered.
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