All five of Ontario’s major teachers and education workers’ unions will be voting on whether to strike next month after contracts for more than 255,000 members expired on August 31.
So far, no new terms have been proposed, and the presidents of the federations have said the province has been unwilling to come to the bargaining table.
The education workers’ grievances are diverse and multi-faceted, and they have been vocal about them for years: over-crowded classes, lack of staff support, failing infrastructure, growing threats of violence in the classroom, and an anti-democratic provincial takeover of the province’s local school boards.
But all of this also centers around an ideological disagreement, between education workers and the provincial government, which is about the core values of Ontario’s public education system, as much as it is about education workers constantly being pushed to do more with less.
The strike votes will come as Ontario is set to elect new school board trustees in municipal elections this Monday, October 26, even though the province has so diminished the power of school boards over the past two years, that it’s not even clear people are voting for positions that hold any power whatsoever.
While the strike votes next month do not necessarily mean a strike will take place, it does, however, mean that the unions of educators are aiming to send a message to Premier Doug Ford and the province’s education minister, Paul Calandra.
“After $6.5 billion in cuts by the Ford government, our kids are in larger classes, without the mental health and special education support they deserve, in crumbling, and unsafe schools. Teachers and education workers are coming to the table demanding better for our kids, but the Ford government has refused to bargain in good faith all summer,” wrote MPP Chandra Pasma, the Opposition Critic for Education in Ontario recently in an email to rabble.ca.
“That unwillingness to negotiate better learning and working conditions is what has led to all five major education unions scheduling strike votes for this November.”
So how exactly did we get here?
“Create a crisis”
In 1995, Ontario’s education minister John Snobelen, who had dropped out of high-school himself, was caught on camera saying that the government should “create a crisis” in order to manufacture support for the province to take over the school system.
Snoblen and Mike Harris, who was premier at the time, then proceeded, over the following year, to cut $400 million from Ontario’s $13-billion education budget. They slashed salaries to the school board trustees, as part of the province’s decades-long mission to cut and consolidate the boards.
Fast forward 30 years to the future and today, according to three presidents of education workers federations that spoke with rabble.ca, the current conservative provincial government is still trying to create crises in order to wrest whatever control is left from local school boards and further centralize education provincially.
“Unprecedented,” said Martha Hradowy, President of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation (OSSTF), “a takeover of eight Ontario school boards in Ontario over the last year, including the TDSB, Toronto Catholic, Peel, London, all under the guise [that] trustees don’t have the ability to manage school boards, but to me, it was just more a centralization of power at Queens Park, she said, “to be able to do one thing, and that’s the implementation of the privatization playbook, underfund, create a crisis, outsource to the lowest bidder.”
Over the past eight years, the province has cut a cumulative $6.5 billion in funding from Ontario’s $42.5 billion school budget. There remain only 72 school boards left from the 168 that ran the Ontario school system in 1995, which is 98 per cent fewer than the 3,800 school boards the province had in the 1960s.
Last year, the province began to claim, again, that school boards had been misallocating resources and wasting money, and has since used that as an excuse to place eight of Ontario’s remaining school boards under provincial supervision.
This means it has transferred the decision-making powers from trustees, who are elected representatives, to supervisors, which the province appointed directly. And the education minister has said this week that he’s in no rush to swear in new board trustees, even after they are elected on the 26th.
Pushing the system toward failure
When minister Paul Calandra took over the education ministry in 2018, Queen’s Park immediately set up a “tip line” for parents to file complaints against educators.
“The first week this government got hired, they started a snitch line, right?” said René Jansen in de Wal, president of the Ontario English Catholic Teacher’s Association (OECTA), as he described the early signs that the province was seeking to draw even more control away from school boards.
“It’s significant because it tries to pit teachers and parents as watchdogs rather than partners, and it tries to sow division and distrust, which is a hallmark of this government.”
Earlier this year, the Ford government was also planning to run ads attacking teachers. This is after having passed Bill 33 last year, which expanded its ability to place school boards under provincial supervision, and passing Bill 101 last month, which caps the number of trustees and further limits the school board’s power over budgets, controls their communication, and removes them from collective bargaining, instead replacing them with CEOs from a newly-created Council of Ontario Directors of Education.
According to Jansen in de Wal, this does not amount to school improvements.
“This government inherited a world-class education system and they have eroded it to the point where kids are genuinely suffering and parents are emotionally concerned,” he said.
Joe Tigani, the President of the Ontario School Board Council of Unions (OSBCU), agreed.
“The province will 1,000% try and blame educators, education workers, teachers, if there’s a labor disruption,” he said. “I think the people of Ontario need to remember that this group [of education workers] asked to bargain in March, well in advance to try and avoid a strike because we see the underfunding, we see what that looks like in schools.”
“There’s almost 275,000 people now that are all sort of in the same boat, fighting the same fight, talking about public education in this province, defending public education and trying to ensure that this government doesn’t mess it up,” he said.
“Consequences”
The effects of a 15 per cent funding cut over eight years has had some obvious and some not-so obvious effects on the Ontario public school system.
Among the clear results are dilapidated infrastructure, overburdened teachers, and a lack of support staff for children with special needs.
Perhaps the most emblematic example of the cuts to disability programs is the devastating story of Max Simao, a seven-year-old boy from Hamilton whose special-needs program was cut back because of provincial budget cuts last year. As a result, his school days were reduced by half and he was tragically hit by a city bus while he was on his way home last year in the middle of the afternoon.
But even more subtle effects on the school system with a perennial lack of funding have had wide-reaching consequences on teachers, students and education workers alike.
“Reorganizations,” or “reorgs,” have long been common in schools. They happen when a student joins class late and the rest of the classes need to adjust to accommodate them. But with funding cuts, and late payments, said Jansen in de Wal, a simple reorganization can upend vastly more students than normal.
“When you give money late to school boards and school boards don’t have any leeway with their teachers and you get to September and you’ve pushed all your class sizes up. So let’s say the maximum class size is like 32 and all your classes are 32,” he said.
“Now when a new student shows up, you can’t put them in a class over 32. I was talking to a teacher last week, they had a couple of new students at the school, they had to reorganize like 12 classes in order to make it work.”
Erika Shaker, at the center for Policy Alternatives, has been studying Ontario’s public education
System for the past 30 years, and in 2000 she also became editor of Our Schools/ Our Selves.
She said the scenario of teachers striking would be a long time coming.
“I mean, there were a number of school boards that were taken over at the time during the Mike Harris government. So this isn’t a new strategy, it’s just ramped up. It builds on years of underfunding. It builds on a system that is drastically under-resourced. And it happens at a time when inequality is on the increase where affordability is a major concern.”
“A strike vote doesn’t necessarily mean that a strike is imminent, she said. “But there are indications that a real battle is ramping up for the soul of public education.”
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