Your Huffington Post article is spot-on, as usual.  I will take the liberty of quoting from it:

“The Conference Board of Canada in its recent report The Cost of Ontario’s Skills Gap identifies 25 occupations experiencing skill shortages in Canada—mostly engineering, skilled labour and trades, computing, accounting, and health services. Virtually all of the occupations experiencing skill shortages require math proficiency.

Unfortunately, very few Ontario citizens are very good at math. According to the OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of International Competencies, only about 16 per cent of Ontario’s citizens demonstrate the level of math proficiency needed to even consider a STEM career.

Even more worrisome, the math scores of Ontario students have been dropping for the past five years, such that last year only two-thirds of grade three students even passed the provincial test, with only 12 per cent of students being judged proficient in math.”

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But here’s the thing.  Merely stopping the decline in math won’t staunch the bleeding.  Stem jobs today are more technically demanding than they used to be. 

We need to be getting BETTER just to stay even.  And we need to keep improving, better year after year, or we will still fall behind.

Other countries recognize that.  The reason that Canada had dropped from 3rd to 13th in PISA math isn’t because we slipped some huge amount (we slipped a bit).  The others ran past us on their way to take our STEM jobs.

STEM courses need to be taught by teachers with undergraduate degrees or higher in the appropriate field.

That is the elephant in the room.  That is the fight worth fighting.  The ministry, the union, the principals treat teachers as interchangeable widgets.  Teachers want to teach in their area of expertise.  Make that happen and then watch the math scores!