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Ontario Schools Are Getting More Violent. Don’t Blame the Kids

Ford’s Conservatives have spent the last eight years stripping the education system of resources

Nearly two decades ago, when a teenager named Jordan Manners was shot and killed at C W Jefferys Collegiate Institute in northwestern Toronto, it sparked broad public condemnation. Something had to be done to address the scourge of youth violence. No one else should die or get hurt going to school. Fast-forward to the present. A fourteen-year-old is charged with murdering two men outside of his school in Etobicoke; a group of teens in Hamilton fatally stab a classmate; in Scarborough, eighteen-year-old Jahiem Robinson is shot by a classmate four years his junior.

The number of violent events reported by Ontario school boards has increased 77 percent since 2018

Funding cuts to education contribute to fewer resources and more violent incidents

Addressing social issues as root causes for youth violence is recommended as a path toward improvement

It would be impossible to write about violence in schools without acknowledging the recent mass shooting in British Columbia. In February, an eighteen-year-old in the town of Tumbler Ridge killed an education assistant and five students at a local high school, as well as two members of her own family. Mass casualties at Canadian schools are devastating but extremely rare. In Ontario, the problem involves smaller but still alarming attacks.

By all counts, Ontario’s schools have never been more violent. According to the province’s own numbers, acquired by Global News last year through Freedom of Information requests, the number of violent events reported by school boards has increased by 77 percent since Doug Ford’s Conservatives took office in 2018. Meanwhile, in a 2024 survey by the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, 75 percent of members surveyed said they had seen violence increase over the course of their careers. Episodes included kicking, hitting, and biting. Another survey of more than 12,000 education workers across the province revealed that three out of four had experienced violent or disruptive incidents at work—with a third of them reporting facing them daily.

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It might be easy to blame the students, the pandemic, social media, and even parents. (When asked about the issue in 2023, the premier suggested violence-prone children weren’t getting beaten enough at home, saying if he’d ever hit a teacher, his parents would have given him “twice the hit” when he got home.) But........

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