17 Nov Unholy angels

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That schools in the Cape Breton-Victoria School District will close is obvious. Enrolment here has dropped 22 percent over eight years, with no end to the decline in sight, while costs have risen 25 percent over the same period.

That Holy Angels High tops the list of candidates for closure is equally obvious. The geriatric Catholic order that owns the school wants to unload it, and has offered it to the board for $750,000. The board estimates it would need another $8 to $10 million in repairs, while newer schools nearby have lots of space.

The prospect of closure has provoked the usual outcry from students, grads, and parents, but the province faces a budgetary crisis brought on by previous governments, and made worse by its own senseless campaign promises. Reality requires deep cuts to P-12 school budgets, not new spending to keep decrepit surplus buildings in service.

That’s the factual background to last week’s visit by Holy Angels students to the legislature to protest against closure. Here is what the students encountered:

• Manning MacDonald, a Liberal on the verge of retirement, who represents the school’s catchment area and seems bent on a scorched earth campaign to ensure his replacement will not be a New Democrat.
• Cecil Clarke, a neighboring Conservative MLA openly embarked on a quixotic campaign for the federal seat that encompasses Holy Angels.
• Marilyn More, the Education Minister, whose party knows MacDonald’s seat will be up for grabs in two years and harbors the illusion that a New Democrat might take it.

It was a recipe for pandering on a grand scale.

“Keep them there, buy the school, and let them continue with the excellent programs they’ve had there since 1885,” thundered MacDonald, who knows perfectly well this would be lunacy.

“The NDP’s abysmal failure to support excellent young women and the Sydney community [is just another example of] this failed NDP socialist experiment,” railed Clarke, trying out the Tea Party rhetoric that will be expected of him as a Harper flag-bearer. (Clarke did not explain how resisting political pressure for reckless spending constitutes socialism.)

Minister More spoke vaguely of innovative solutions, and hinted that the school might be kept together as an administrative unit sharing premises with another school.

When Nova Scotians complain about a lack of leadership, this is the sort of thing they mean. MacDonald, Clarke, More, and the other 49 MLAs all know keeping Holy Angels open would be foolhardy, but they perceive a short-term interest in pretending otherwise, so pretence is all they offered.

The students got a dishonest display of faux outrage before going home to a school the glad-hands of province house know will close, as well they know it should.