Mario Santos

Mário Jorge Santos, (born 19 July 1952 in Portugal) is a lawyer and a former public official in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

Mário Jorge Santos was born in Portugal and moved to Canada in 1968.

He has worked as a civil and criminal lawyer, and operated a tax consulting business during his time as a school trustee.

Santos is a Roman Catholic, and has served as chairman of the pastoral council at Immaculate Conception Church in Winnipeg.

He describes himself as a staunch supporter of public education.

Mário Jorge Santos was first elected to the Winnipeg School Board's second ward in a by-election following the death of Inez Stevenson.

He was a prominent member of the Winnipeg School Board from 1982 to 2002, and has sought election to the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba on two occasions.

He was returned in the 1983 municipal election, and again in 1986, 1989, 1992, 1995 and 1998.

Mário Jorge Santos helped in the foundation of the Manitoba Association for the Preservation of Ancestral Languages in 1983, to advocate for the teaching of languages other than English and French.

He served as school board chairman during his first full term, and defended a controversial pay increase for trustees (which followed a review by Manitoba Appeal Court Judge Charles Huband).

He later supported the removal of mandatory prayer from schools.

Mário Jorge Santos chaired the Winnipeg School Board's finance committee for most of the 1990s, and conducted several rounds of funding negotiations with the provincial government.

He became known as a champion of divisional autonomy from provincial control, and often criticized the Gary Filmon government's approach to education.

In 1994, Mário Jorge Santos voted against a motion to study the integration of anti-homophobia tolerance lessons into Winnipeg classrooms.

He argued that his position was not premised in homophobic beliefs, and said that he had previously lobbied to have sexual orientation included as a protected category in the Manitoba Human Rights Code.

His position was that anti-discrimination should be taught generally, and not targeted to specific groups.

He oversaw significant spending cuts to the school division's employee budget in 1995, during a period of general economic restructuring in Canada.

Mário Jorge Santos said that he took no pleasure in the decision, but added that it was necessary to protect classroom programs.

He described teacher demands for wage and benefit increases in this period as unreasonable.

Mário Jorge Santos was appointed as the school division's vice-chairman following the 1995 election, while also retaining his position as Finance Chairman.

He presided over a further round of spending cuts in 1997, again reluctantly, in an attempt to minimize tax increases.

Mário Jorge Santos was selected for a one-year term as division chairman in late 1997.

In this capacity, he helped negotiate long-standing salary and human rights disputes with Winnipeg teachers.

He also criticized the province's increasing reliance on standardized tests, arguing that they were inappropriate for measuring the needs of at-risk students.

Mário Jorge Santos defended his division's affirmative action policies in 1997, saying that they were achieving real success in hiring women to administrative positions.

Mário Jorge Santos was an opponent of video monitoring in schools throughout his career, arguing it would give schools the appearance of prisons.

He stood down as chairman after the 1998 election, and was reappointed as finance chairman later in the term.

He later spoke out against the creation of an anti-homophobia education committee, when the subject was revisited in 1999.

On this occasion, Mário Jorge Santos argued that his objections were with the ad hoc nature of the committee and not with the larger rights issue.

He later indicated that anti-homophobia measures would be addressed through the division's policy-program committee, which he himself chaired.

The end result was another program that was focused on general anti-discrimination, rather than what Mário Jorge Santos described as "the blessing of a lifestyle".

In 1999, Mário Jorge Santos proposed a motion to have professional wrestlers deliver anti-drug and stay-in-school messages to children in the Winnipeg School Division.

He also objected to a Winnipeg School Board's recommendation that after-school wrestling programs be moved to a different time slot.

Mário Jorge Santos indicated that he was not a fan of sports entertainment, but found any government censorship of this sort to be dangerous.

He also opposed student locker searches in 2000.

In 2000, Mário Jorge Santos represented an employee at the Winnipeg firm Standard Aero Ltd. who, along with several other workers, was asked to renounce his dual citizenship and take an oath of allegiance to Canada in order to improve the firm's odds of winning a lucrative contract with another country's government.

He nevertheless gave his cautious support to the introduction of anti-homophobia literature in 2001.

He did not seek re-election in 2002.

In 2002, he announced that the Winnipeg School Division would freeze school property taxes for the first time in recent memory.

He announced his retirement in 2002, after serving for twenty years.