The Old Guardian
Ontario’s teachers are back in their buildings this week, prepping classrooms before students return. Their contracts expire tomorrow. How they got here matters more than the deadline itself.
Contracts for every major education union, ETFO, OSSTF, OECTA, AEFO, and CUPE’s OSBCU, expire August 31. Education contracts have run on this cycle for at least a decade, under governments of both major parties, since the agreements cover the full employment year rather than just the months students spend in class. Nobody picked this date to make a point.
The fight so far has nothing to do with wages, class sizes, or any of the issues that normally define a round of education bargaining. All five unions are stuck arguing over which issues get negotiated centrally, at the provincial table, and which stay local, board by board. That question has gone to the Ontario Labour Relations Board, and nobody involved can say when a ruling will come. Talks on everything else sit frozen in the meantime.
A Tool That Sat Unused
Under the School Boards Collective Bargaining Act, the Minister of Education can open central bargaining up to 180 days before contracts expire. All five unions asked the government, publicly and months in advance, to use that window. They named the exact risk that’s now playing out at the start of the school year.
Nothing came of the request. Bargaining only started after unions formally served notice in June, well inside the stretch that would have given both sides real time to settle before September.
Decades of precedent set the August 31 deadline. Declining a six-month head start the unions asked for directly was a decision made this year, by this government, and nobody else.
Public Money, Private Firm, Attack Ads
While talks sat stalled, The Trillium obtained a leaked draft script for government-produced advertisements targeting teacher unions, built around actors playing “concerned parents.” One line reads: “I read that Ontario teachers are already the highest paid in Canada.” Another responds: “I hope that teacher unions don’t walk out on students over salaries.”
ETFO president David Mastin called the ads “a deliberate distraction” and said the government is spending public money, through a public relations firm, to produce them. A reporter asked Calandra directly why he chose ads over the bargaining table. His answer: “I will use every means at my disposal to ensure that students, parents and teachers understand what my position is.”
Read that quote again. A government with a strong hand at the table rarely needs to hire a PR firm to win the argument outside it.
The Union Response Has Escalated Sharply
OSSTF has now called for the outright repeal of the School Boards Collective Bargaining Act itself, the 2014 law that governs the entire central and local bargaining structure. Union president Martha Hradowy said members are “waiting for a legal process to tell us which table is even permitted” to discuss workload and class sizes, the issues that actually affect students day to day.
Unions rarely ask to tear down the framework itself. When they do, it usually means they’ve stopped believing the problem is just who’s sitting across the table this round.
Rallies were held in dozens of Ontario municipalities on August 29. At one, in Toronto’s east end, MPP Peter Tabuns summed up the mood: “The failure of the government to do that, to me is a sign that they’re not serious about actually trying to find a resolution.”
This Has a Precedent, and It’s Worth Knowing
In 2012, Ontario’s government imposed contracts directly on teachers through Bill 115, freezing wages and restricting the right to strike. Courts later ruled the law violated collective bargaining rights protected under the Charter. A separate strike by CUPE education workers ended only once the government promised to repeal a law that had imposed contracts on its members, banned them from striking, and invoked the notwithstanding clause to override those Charter rights.
Real standoffs put both sides at equal risk if neither one moves. This one hasn’t worked that way in the recent past. When bargaining stalled or a strike hit, Ontario’s government had an option unions never had: legislate a settlement into being, Charter objections included.
Maybe this round breaks that pattern. Maybe it doesn’t. Either way, judging who wins a drawn-out fight only makes sense once you account for the side that’s historically had a way to end it without losing.
What This Actually Is
Strip away the framing on both sides. A government with the legal tools to shorten this standoff chose not to use them, then spent public money on ads aimed at the people it wasn’t reaching through those tools. Where this lands, a real settlement, a strike, an imposed contract, is still open. “Nobody’s negotiating” and “the process is broken by design” sound similar but claim different things. Right now the evidence backs the first one solidly. Whether it backs the second is the question worth watching this fall.
Sources: The Trillium, CBC News, CP24, CTV News, Global News, and public statements from ETFO, OSSTF, and the Ministry of Education.