Representing Downtown!
Andrew Massey
TDSB Trustee Candidate for Ward 5
I’m running for all downtown families. We deserve better!
Hey downtown parents,
Andrew here. I’m one of you! I’m a renter and long-time resident of the Grange Park neighbourhood in downtown Toronto. I’m active in our local community and a proud TDSB parent to a son in Grade 2.
I’m running for Trustee because we deserve truly local representation from someone who understands what it’s like to raise a family downtown. I want to be that person, and it would be my honour to represent your family at the TDSB.
I’m running so that my son, and all TDSB kids, can grow up to love school, dream big, and live their best lives in a downtown Toronto that loves them back.
Downtown families face many different challenges. We choose to live here for the culture, the community, and the many amazing opportunities for our kids. Yes, the cost is high and the struggle is real, but this is a home worth struggling for! I still believe in the promise of a better Toronto for all and wouldn’t choose to raise my family anywhere else.
Right now, our public education is under attack! We need to fight back while we still can. As a trustee with shared progressive values, I will always prioritize justice and fairness for all. I will be your trusted partner and represent the interests of our families with unwavering resolve.
Raising kids in downtown is hard! Downtown families need support and deserve better!
Let’s make it happen together.
Your TDSB Ward 5 Trustee Candidate,
Andrew Massey.
Guiding Principles
A vote for Andrew Massey means supporting economic justice, democratic fairness, and local belonging.
Justice through properly funded public education, fairness through respecting families’ voices, and belonging through community care. As your Trustee, I will always act with these guiding principles in mind:
Fund Schools
Respect Families
Build Community
Fund Our Schools
Under provincial supervision, our TDSB is being forced to cut $6.4 million to special education funding, drop funding for 150 model schools across the board, and eliminate ~900 TDSB positions.
The cuts include hundreds of teachers serving low-income areas and 95 ESL teachers, which disproportionately punishes our downtown communities. This is on top of the $5 billion repair backlog that the province continues to ignore.
Budgets are moral documents. Their allocations reveal our values. The province has decided to cut well-paying jobs for the highly educated workers, actively widening the gap between kids who have options and kids who don’t.
Our kids, our education workers, and our downtown communities deserve so much better.
Problem
As your elected Trustee, I will use the office to apply maximum pressure on Education Minister Paul Calandra and his provincial supervisor appointee, Rohit Gupta, urging them to consider the morality of their proposed budget cuts.
At the board level, I will advocate for the following:
Reverse the cuts to special education and model school funding
Modernize the funding formula to reflect students’ needs, not the bare minimum.
Oppose school closures, sales, and provincial attempts to privatize education.
Challenge the province to address the TDSB’s extensive repair backlog.
The role of trustee is severely reduced, but that doesn’t mean we’re powerless. We must make education an election issues. Our future depends on it.
Promise
I attended a family gathering last year. My older cousin, a well-to-do consultant, talked at length about his kids’ recent academic successes. I asked, “TDSB?” and he physically recoiled at the very mention. “Nooo, no, no, --we’re private. Been for years now.”
“It’s hopeless”, he said to my defence of the public system, and mentioned anecdotally that he knew principals and other administrators whose kids attended the same school. I felt anger in that moment. “Must be nice,” I said to him, “But what does that mean for the rest of us?” He shrugged and said nothing.
This is unacceptable. Most of us cannot afford private school, and we should not feel like we need to! We need strong public education. Let’s force this government to spend the money and Fund Our Schools!
Point
Respect Our Families
The Province openly disrespects the voices of downtown families.
Last year, they used Bill 33 to take over the TDSB and severely limit all Trustee powers. Now, instead of a local policymaker, your trustees have been downgraded to customer-service representatives. They took it further this year with Bill 101, reducing the number of trustees from 22 to 12 and severely restricting public communications from the board.
Budgetary and bargaining power now belongs exclusively to an appointed CEO. The province can directly veto all decisions and even bypass the TDSB entirely to hand capital projects to third-party managers.
This means that your democratic voice has effectively evaporated. Outside of a provincial election, you no longer have a say in how the school board is run.
This open assault on our local democracy cannot continue!
Problem
They may have limited our power, but that doesn’t mean we give up!
As your Ward 5 Trustee, I will use the office to bring in more transparency and accountability. I will regularly call for a full repeal of Bill 33 to restore democratic integrity.
As a professional writer and communicator, I will keep Ward 5 parents informed by:
Holding monthly town hall meetings.
Publishing clear, plain-language materials.
Clearly explaining major budget and board decisions.
Trustees may have lost voting rights, but we can still organize and communicate directly to parents!
Promise
I was the same age my son is now when Mike Harris was elected Premier of Ontario. I lived through his “Common Sense Revolution” during my primary and middle school years, and was in the first Grade 3 year to endure EQAO testing.
Once I was old enough to understand what that meant, I wanted answers. How did this happen? How could so many seemingly reasonable adults have let this happen to their own children?
Well, now we’re the seemingly reasonable adults. Ford is squeezing the system that Harris built while his ministers and supervisors continue to manage the decline of our public education into the ground. Bill 33 has silenced our voices as parents.
We cannot allow this abuse to happen to yet another generation of students. We must stand up and demand that this government Respect Our Families!
Point
Build Our Community
We all want safe learning environments in which both students and teachers can do their best work, but today’s classrooms are at a breaking point. Conditions have deteriorated, resources are stretched thin, and schools are being told to do more with less.
The result is clear: behavioural issues, escalating student violence, and teacher burnout at all-time highs. To make matters worse, class sizes for Grades 4 to 8 are no longer capped at 32 students. The province’s appointee, Rohit Gupta, scrapped the cap previously set by our elected trustees.
This is creating a negative spiral that damages community and belonging. When students feel unwelcome or unsafe, they will resent school, and teachers must try to win them back with limited resources and dwindling supports. The province has set them up for failure, and thus, the spiral continues.
Problem
As parents, we need trustees who really understand the situation on the ground, and who actively want to improve it. The answer is not to police the problem children, but to improve conditions and foster a sense of belonging.
We need to build back better from what we lost during the pandemic. We need more community care, more social supports, and more resources for both students and teachers.
As your trustee, I will advocate for the following:
Dedicated, on-site school administrators. No more sharing VPs.
Reinstate class size caps. No more overflowing classrooms.
More educational assistants and special needs support staff.
Provide community-wide training on restorative practices.
Separate, low-sensory spaces to deescalate behavioural issues.
Open school spaces for childcare and community recreation programs.
Repeal the mandatory uniformed School Resource Officer program, like we did in 2017. No cops in the classroom.
A strong community is the answer to the problems our schools face. We just need the resources to build it.
Promise
We’ve seen a lot of negative changes to public education over the past year. Bill 33, Bill 101, funding cuts, and dwindling supports. There’s a lot of bad that needs to be stopped.
But we must remember that stopping the bad is not the same as building the good.
Stopping the bad is reactive. It stops the damage, which is necessary, but simply preserves the status quo. Building the good is proactive. It creates systemic change and sets us up for future success.
In these dark times, let’s focus on building the good. We need to listen to each other and act in a way that bring about material change to those in need. We must start from the roots up to support our schools and Build Our Community.
Point
About Andrew
Andrew is a proud TDSB parent, a long-time renter, and an active community member of the Grange Park neighbourhood in downtown Toronto.
He is a voting member of the School Council at Ogden Junior Public School and serves as an elected member of the Board of Directors for University Settlement.
Formerly a high school English teacher in Japan, he now works in the construction and engineering world as a Technical Writer on public rail infrastructure projects.
Andrew is uncompromisingly optimistic. In his view, “it’s simply too late to be a pessimist.”
He champions a more straightforward and accessible kind of politics; one that is focused on positive local change for the things that really matter. Andrew has run in previous federal and provincial elections as a candidate for the Green Party. He wants a greener future and remains hopeful while advocating for more action on the core issues that affect all Canadians.