Anyone who managed to escape the pandemic with some faith in humanity intact might have assumed that by the summer of 2024 we would be busy mitigating the damage done to Canadian children by keeping them out of school for so long — especially in Ontario and Quebec, where school closures were longest.

One might have hoped, as the Ontario Liberals proposed under otherwise-hapless leader Steven Del Duca, that kids would be offered an extra year of high school to make up the losses — not just academically but socially. Instead, in Ontario at least, we have essentially just waved the COVID cohort through to their next grades, to the trades, to university, to community college, to wherever they wind up, and hoped for the best.