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NDP leader Andrea Horwath spoke to a mostly rapturous crowd of roughly 1,000 educators at the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario annual meeting in Toronto on Tuesday. The latest election the NDP didn’t win was more than two months ago, but the self-congratulation came thick and fast — for its many female and ethnically diverse MPPs, for having “the largest official opposition in nearly two decades,” and for how much help ETFO members were in making it all happen.

Finally, though, Horwath acknowledged reality: right now, all that is useless. “In four years’ time we can elect a government that Ontarians want — the one that people voted for,” she said. (She thinks that because the majority of voters didn’t vote PC, they kinda sorta voted NDP.)

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For now, however, she conceded it’s the pits.

“Doug Ford wants to drag our schools backwards,” Horwath intoned. “He started with sex-ed: he’s taking our curriculum back to the last century, and he’s hurting the most vulnerable youth in the process.”

“Doug Ford isn’t going to stop there,” she warned. “He’s doubling down on cuts. Already we’ve lost $100 million in urgently needed school repair funds. And you and I know he’s only going to cut more.”

Ontario teachers might not be able to pay for school repairs. But on sex-ed, they’re not necessarily waiting for a new government. At lunchtime the ETFO crowd marched up University Avenue to Queen’s Park and more or less declared the province can stuff its 1998 curriculum where the sun don’t shine.