Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce must really want to be a magician: making elephants disappear, then reappear behind you. Maybe that explains his tactic of making cuts to education, then announcing the addition of nearly 2,000 more educators all while introducing new legislation that will further centralize education and enable his Tories to make school properties available to their developer friends.

The Tories set off a bomb. But they were really just following the neoliberal agenda they brought with them to Queen’s Park in 2018: privatizing or diminishing everything that supports the public good—not building it up or making it last. Good neoliberals don’t want to pay proper wages, or ensure that governments meet basic needs like health care, food security, housing and education.

Given the current crisis of politics, agency, history, and memory, educators need a new political and pedagogical language for addressing the changing contexts and issues facing a world in which anti-democratic forces draw upon an unprecedented convergence of resources to exercise powerful and diverse forms of control.