Ontario Locked 255,000 Education Workers Out of Bargaining. It Learned That Trick From Itself.

Contracts for more than 255,000 Ontario teachers and education support workers expired on August 31. Four of the five unions — ETFO, OSSTF, AEFO and CUPE's OSBCU — aren't even bargaining right now. They're stuck at the Ontario Labour Relations Board arguing over which issues the Ford government is allowed to drag from local tables onto the central one, a scope fight the government itself picked. The fifth, OECTA, has a strike vote scheduled for mid-November. None of that is an accident. It's the second act of a fight the Doug Ford government already lost once and is determined not to lose the same way twice.

The first act was November 2022, when 55,000 OSBCU education support staff — some of the lowest-paid workers in the province — walked out in defiance of Bill 28, a law that invoked the constitution's notwithstanding clause to pre-emptively criminalize their strike and impose a contract by decree. It was one of the starkest uses of that clause against a labour dispute in Canadian history, and it backfired: wildcat solidarity spread across the province within a weekend, and rank-and-file workers were openly talking about a general strike. Ford rescinded the bill within days. Then the union leadership that had just watched the rank and file force a government retreat turned around and called the strike off unilaterally, with no vote, and months later signed a four-year deal with raises of 3.6 percent a year against inflation that ran hotter than that for most of the contract. The lesson Queen's Park drew wasn't "don't attack workers." It was "don't attack them with a law loud enough to be noticed."

This time the attack is procedural instead of legislative, which makes it harder to organize against but no less deliberate. Since 2018 the government has cut $1,500 per student from education funding — over $6.4 billion across eight years — while placing eight school boards covering 750,000 students under direct provincial trusteeship and stripping elected trustees of power under Bill 101. Ontario's own Auditor General reported in May that education assistants are absent 18 percent of school days, with the majority of those absences going unfilled, and that two-thirds of special-education placement decisions carry no written rationale at all. That's what "efficiency" looks like when it's been running for eight years: a hollowed-out system where the workers holding it together can't get a bargaining table, let alone a raise that keeps pace with rent.

Tying the dispute up in an OLRB scope fight is a slower version of what Bill 28 did in 2022 — deny workers a legal strike position for as long as possible while the government's own preferred venue, a board with no deadline to rule, sits on the question. There's no dramatic villain moment for headlines to seize on, no notwithstanding clause to make international news. Just months of "the parties met and did not reach agreement" while contracts lapse and understaffed classrooms absorb the cost. Slow procedural strangulation is still strangulation; it's just built to not look like a fight.

The 2022 strike proved the province's education workers can force a government to blink inside a single weekend when they act without waiting for permission from their own leadership. The open question for this round isn't whether Ford can be beaten — it's whether OSBCU, ETFO, OSSTF, OECTA and AEFO will let the scope dispute run out the clock the way their own leadership ran out the momentum three years ago, or whether 255,000 workers decide procedural delay is itself the provocation that ends bargaining and starts a walkout.

Sources

WSWS: Over 250,000 Ontario education workers on collision course with right-wing Ford government
End the Wait Ontario: Ontario Teacher Strike & Bargaining Tracker 2026
Common Dreams: 55,000 Ontario Education Workers Strike Despite 'Draconian' New Anti-Labor Law (2022)
Wikipedia: Keeping Students in Class Act, 2022 (Bill 28)