More than 10,000 full-time college support staff at Ontario’s 24 public colleges began a strike on September 11 amid underfunding woes.
Represented by the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), college workers are demanding job security. The union said the sector has already seen 10,000 job cuts across the system in the last year.
“With our colleges plunged into chaos, job security is key to stabilizing the system – because the future of our work is the future of student support,” said Christine Kelsey, Chair of OPSEU’s college support bargaining team.
OPSEU highlighted that Ontario’s Skills Development Fund uses taxpayer money to bankroll non-college training providers and projects. Ontario premier Doug Ford has committed $2.5 billion of taxpayer money since 2020 to the Skills Development Fund, meaning the money available to this project is now more than the operating funding gap facing colleges.
“It’s no longer a question of if there is money. It’s a question of where it’s going,” said OPSEU president JP Hornick. “As this fight heats up, there are going to be a lot of questions Ontario taxpayers need answered – especially as jobs disappear and options for students shrink before our eyes.”
The issues of underfunding are not only affecting students at colleges, but at universities as well.
Faculty at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia were locked out by their employer from August 20 until a tentative agreement was reached on September 16. The deal has yet to be voted on by the Dalhousie Faculty Association (DFA) membership and dates for a ratification vote have not been made public.
While there is now a tentative agreement for members to vote on at Dalhousie, the labour dispute in Nova Scotia highlights a larger issue facing post secondary education across Canada. David Robinson, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), highlighted that provincial governments across the country have been underfunding post-secondary education which has fueled deteriorating labour conditions for professors and instructors.
The Dalhousie board of governors said they initiated the lockout because they couldn’t accommodate the wage demands of the faculty association.
“DFA is asking for wages that keep up with inflation and make up for the 9 per cent loss in real wages we have incurred over the past 10 years,” said David Westwood, president of the DFA, in an August press release. “We are also fighting to keep full-time jobs from being converted to sessional contracts. If our members had not pushed back, the Board would have pressed forward with their proposal to make 76 of our Members vulnerable to conversion to sessional contracts.”
Robinson noted that the issues of wages and increasing contractualization are harming university faculty all over Canada and are a result of the chronic underfunding of post-secondary education.
“It’s the old story of austerity. Faculty are being asked to do more and more with less and less,” Rodinson said. “Ultimately, this is jeopardizing the quality of education that students are receiving.”
LISTEN: Academic freedom and the changing landscape of post-secondary education
Funding issues at colleges and universities were able to evade the spotlight while provinces relied on enrolling and exploiting international students, Robinson said. But last year’s cap on international students has revealed the real issue in post-secondary education.
“Now that that tap has been turned off, we’re faced with what the underlying problem was: governments simply were not sufficiently funding public post secondary education,” Robinson said.
As colleges and universities in Canada face the same underfunding problem, CAUT has released a statement of support for OPSEU college workers.
“What’s happening at Dalhousie, what’s happening in contract negotiations at other universities across the country and colleges, is that faculty are trying as best they can to raise concerns about how the quality of education has really suffered because of lack of public funding,” Robinson said.
As the struggle for a public post-secondary education continues in Nova Scotia, Ontario and across Canada, Robinson urges people to stand in solidarity with faculty and students. In the midst of a trade war, a continuing genocide in Gaza and a worsening climate crisis, Robinson maintains that an educated population will facilitate progress.
“There is a strong economic argument to be made that a robust, independent, autonomous, well funded post secondary education system is absolutely vital to helping us,” he said. “Not just economically, it will also solve some of the major crises we’re facing right now.”
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