Premier Doug Ford's government spent nearly a million dollars on last year's education consultations and hired an external public relations firm to sift through the feedback.
Ontario Education Minister Lisa Thompson confirmed the government spent $973,000 in the fall of 2018 to conduct 37 telephone town halls, develop online surveys and to translate the results into both official languages.
An undisclosed portion of the costs were spent on hiring public relations firm Enterprise to assist the government, although neither the firm nor the minister's office would confirm the company's scope of work.
"We actually had a combination of an outside firm, so we had an unbiased approach as well as analytics were done, actually in a very effective way, in house," Thompson told reporters on Wednesday.
NDP education critic Marit Stiles expressed concern over the fact that the government went more than 300 per cent over budget in executing the consultations.
"The ministry's initial contract for service cited a max cost of $200,000," Stiles said during Question Period. "Now, we've obtained government estimates showing that the total cost came in at $973,000."
Thompson defended the cost, saying it resulted in 72,000 responses from parents, students, educators and employers.
"And I tell you the data and information and data that we mined through that consultation is absolutely invaluable and will inform education policy for years to come," Thompson said.
The government held a series of telephone town halls last summer in which parents across the province weighed in on a variety of topics, including the controversial sex-ed curriculum, math test scores and the education system as a whole.
The consultations resulted in wide ranging changes to education policy including expanded classroom sizes in high schools, mandatory online course credits for secondary students and the elimination of over 3,400 teaching positions over four years through attrition.
"Given the cost of this consultation the premier should be able to tell us how many people asked for their kids to be jammed into larger classrooms, how many asked for fewer adults inside classromms and fewer course options for students," Stiles said in the legislature.
Neither Ford nor Thompson answered the question directly.
The minister's office has yet to respond to a request from CTV News Toronto on how much money was spent on the public relations firm and why the contract is still open.
