Ontario Used an Illegal Law to Beat Education Workers Once. It Never Fixed What Made Them Strike.

In November 2022, Doug Ford's government did something no Canadian province had tried in decades: it used the notwithstanding clause to make a legal strike illegal before it started. Bill 28, the Keeping Students in Class Act, threatened 55,000 CUPE education workers with fines of up to $4,000 a day for walking out over poverty wages and chronic understaffing. The workers walked out anyway. Ontario's other education unions and the province's largest public-sector union, OPSEU, moved to join them. Within days, facing a province-wide shutdown it had manufactured itself, Ford's government repealed the law and settled.

That was the lesson: legality was never really the obstacle. The obstacle was funding, and funding is exactly what the Ford government still hasn't touched. Four years later, the Ontario School Board Council of Unions — now representing over 57,000 education workers, from educational assistants to custodians to library staff — is back at the same table, because the same conditions never left. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives calculates the province has cut public education funding by $6.3 billion since Ford took office in 2018. The union's own math puts the 2025-2026 per-pupil cut alone at $1.4 billion, and a further $56.2 million is being stripped from the Classroom Staffing Fund for 2026-2027, the line that pays for the adults actually in the room with students.

The numbers that should embarrass a wealthy province aren't abstractions to the workers absorbing them. CUPE reports its education members are collectively doing 1,355.5 full-time-equivalent jobs' worth of unpaid overtime just to keep schools functioning. Ninety-six percent of educational assistants and child and youth workers say they've experienced violent or disruptive incidents on the job; 55 percent say it happens daily. Student-to-staff ratios have not improved since 2018 — for some job classifications, they're worse. This is what "doing more with less" looks like when the less has been arriving for eight straight years.

None of this is happening in isolation. It's arriving alongside an OPSEU strike of Ontario's broader public service now past two months, and a government whose approval ratings have reportedly hit new lows while it still holds three consecutive majorities — proof that electoral arithmetic alone won't fix this. What broke Bill 28 in 2022 wasn't a court, it was solidarity: parents adopting schools, unions coordinating pickets, workers outside CUPE walking anyway. The current round of bargaining, with the collective agreement expiring at the end of August and school boards already warning of September layoffs, is a test of whether that coalition still holds without needing an emergency law to provoke it.

The through-line from 2022 to now isn't a labour dispute that keeps flaring up by coincidence. It's a government that treats the education workforce as the place to find savings and treats the resulting crises as negotiable only under maximum pressure. Ford didn't fund the schools after 2022; he waited out the news cycle. The workers cleaning, feeding, and supporting Ontario's students didn't get a raise commensurate with what they absorbed — they got a government that learned repression doesn't work and quietly went back to attrition instead. That's not a settlement. That's a pause.

Sources

CUPE: Ontario education workers call for early bargaining to resolve underfunding and staffing crisis

Spring Magazine: Education workers can create political crisis for Doug Ford

Reuters: Ontario schools shut as 55,000 education workers strike (Nov 2022)

Wikipedia: Keeping Students in Class Act (Bill 28)