Teachers and education workers across Ontario are escalating their campaign for better-funded public schools as a new round of collective bargaining with the Doug Ford government appears stalled.
On September 16, education workers represented by unions across the province participated in a workplace day of action, wearing red and purple and organizing collectively in schools. The action followed province-wide rallies on August 29, when education workers, parents and supporters demonstrated in communities across Ontario in defence of public education.
The mobilizations are part of the unions’ broader “Together for Publicly Funded Education” campaign, which has brought teachers and other education workers together to demand increased staffing, improved student supports, and better working and learning conditions. The co-ordinated campaign brings all Ontario education unions currently in bargaining together.
The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO), the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF/FEESO), the Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association (OECTA), L’Association des enseignantes et des enseignants franco-ontariens (AEFO) and the Canadian Union of Public Employees’ Ontario School Board Council of Unions (CUPE-OSBCU) served notice to bargain on June 3, representing more than 255,000 teachers and education workers. Other education unions, including the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU/SEFPO), have subsequently joined the broader coalition.
The unions had asked the province to begin negotiations earlier, to no avail. In March, they warned that schools were already struggling with staffing shortages, inadequate special education resources and increasingly complex student needs. Education Minister Paul Calandra rejected the request for early bargaining while publicly expressing optimism that agreements could nevertheless be reached before Labour Day. That deadline came and went.
For education unions, the bargaining agenda extends well beyond wages. Their stated priorities include smaller classes, increased staffing, adequate special education funding, improved working conditions and sufficient resources to address increasingly complex classrooms.
OPSEU/SEFPO bargaining chair Kelly Martin summarized some of these pressures in June: “We are facing understaffing, unsustainable workloads, program cuts, and rising violence in our classrooms,” noting further that students are “sitting at home rather than in schools because there is not enough funding for Educational Assistants.”
But bargaining has barely progressed to the substantive issues. Negotiations have instead become bogged down in a dispute over which matters should be negotiated centrally and which should remain at local bargaining tables.
CUPE-OSBCU says the government wants issues historically negotiated locally — including union leave, layoff and recall provisions, unpaid leaves, and some allowances — transferred to the central table. The union has characterized that proposal as an attempt to reduce local bargaining autonomy. After the parties failed to agree, the dispute was referred to the Ontario Labour Relations Board. Mediation failed to resolve it, and a case-management meeting was scheduled for September 17. OPSEU/SEFPO and other unions have encountered similar disputes over bargaining scope.
The disagreement also arrives amid a broader centralization of provincial authority over education.
Ontario’s Supporting Children and Students Act, passed in 2025, substantially expanded the education minister’s authority over school boards. The legislation allows the minister to order investigations when there are concerns involving broadly defined “matters of public interest,” issue binding directions to boards and, under specified circumstances, take “control and charge” of their administration. That authority can extend to board staffing, revenues, expenditures and assets.
The province argues these powers strengthen accountability and ensure education dollars support student achievement. It has already placed several boards under provincial supervision, including Peel, where the government said intervention was necessary because of governance and financial problems.
Unions strongly condemned the legislation as a politically motivated overreach that distracted from meeting the needs of students and restoring adequate levels of education funding in the province.
In a jointly issued statement, the education unions said: “This legislation sidelines democratically elected local trustees — disempowering families, weakening transparency, and clearing the path for politically driven decisions that ignore student needs and community voices. It empowers ministry-appointed supervisors who often have no background in education, no ties to local communities, possibly no understanding of the mission of French-language schools, and no commitment to equity or human rights. These supervisors answer only to the Ford government, not to the people our schools are meant to serve. And to date, their actions speak volumes: cuts to special education, reductions in English and French Language Learner supports, and centralized arts funding that limits access. Their mission is clear: cut costs, no matter the consequences for student outcomes and well-being.”
For the unions, the dispute over bargaining scope is part of the same trend toward concentrating decision making at Queen’s Park and obscuring the fiscal austerity that is putting school boards and education workers alike under strain. CUPE-OSBCU has explicitly connected the two, accusing the government of simultaneously reducing the authority of elected trustees and attempting to shift locally negotiated issues to centralized bargaining.
Projected spending figures buttress the unions’ case.
Ontario’s Financial Accountability Office (FAO) found that real, inflation-adjusted provincial operating funding to school boards was $14,504 per student in 2024-25. The FAO projects an increase to $14,521 in 2025-26, followed by declines to $14,685 in 2026-27 and $14,111 by 2027-28. More broadly, the FAO estimates that the government’s education spending plan will be about $900 million below the amount required to maintain existing programs and commitments by 2027-28.
As the FAO notes, under this scenario the provincial government would need to “implement education program efficiencies (i.e., provide the same level of services with less resources) and/or commit additional funding” even to maintain 2024-25 levels. This funding shortfall is longstanding and compounding. During the 34-year period from 1990-91 to 2023-24, spending grew by an annual average of 3.1 per cent, compared to 2.5 per cent in the government’s current spending plan.
The deterioration of conditions in Ontario schools is not simply an unfortunate backdrop to union negotiations. It is the predictable result of political choices about the size and quality of the public sector.
Since taking office, the Ford government has repeatedly pursued spending restraint while schools have confronted inflation, enrolment pressures, staffing shortages, repair backlogs and increasingly complex student needs. Though the government has consistently described its education budgets as record investments, nominal spending increases tell us little if the money available does not keep pace with the actual cost of maintaining services.
Ricardo Tranjan at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, for example, finds that Ontario’s “cumulative school funding gap” — the difference between spending allotments and the amount needed to meet inflation and enrolment growth — has reached $6.5 billion since 2018. Consequently, the share of schools in a state of “disrepair” rose from 29 to 37 per cent between 2020 and 2024. Critically, the funding gap has also meant that staffing levels — from teachers to custodians — has not kept pace with school needs.
This is what contemporary public-sector austerity often looks like in practice. Not dramatic, across-the-board cuts, but the small erosion of vital services through systematic neglect.
The deteriorating conditions eventually arrive at the bargaining table. Governments can then characterize union demands for additional staff, smaller classes and adequate supports as unaffordable, when the shortages themselves are inseparable from previous decisions to restrain public spending. In this sense, austerity does double work: it degrades the service and then transforms the resulting crisis into an argument for further restraint, restructuring, or privatization.
The Ford government’s current confrontation with Ontario education workers should be understood in this wider context. The immediate disputes revolve around contracts, staffing and whether particular issues will be negotiated centrally or locally. But the underlying conflict concerns the future of public education following years of fiscal restraint.
Teachers and education workers are bargaining not only over their own conditions of employment, but over access to the resources that determine students’ conditions of learning.
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