PV Ontario Bureau
The current strike by 10,000 college support staff, members of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), is a struggle that brings together the workplace-based fight for wages with the political fight for stronger public services and institutions.
Years of government underfunding, compounded by the Ford Conservatives’ deliberate diversion of funding from public system to private institutions, have brought the college system in Ontario to the brink of collapse. Since 2013-14 provincial funding for Ontario colleges has dropped 30 percent. These policies – continued by successive Liberal and Conservative governments – have led to the loss of 600 college programs and estimated 10,000 layoffs of vital support staff.
Throughout the post-secondary education sector, deliberate and ongoing government underfunding has reduced per-student funding in Ontario colleges to the lowest in the country, and facilitated the increased privatization of funding. This privatization has taken several forms, but has overwhelmingly been manifested in the form of higher tuition fees. As with universities, this underfunding policy has driven colleges to increasingly rely on shockingly high tuition fees for international students.
It is a funding model which is both inadequate and racist, and which has brought us to the current situation, in which Ontario’s public colleges are on the brink of total failure.
But rather than addressing this problem through adequate funding based on student and college need, the Ontario government of Doug Ford has exacerbated the crisis by shifting public funding even further away from college campuses, towards subsidizing duplicate programs offered by private companies.
Since 2020 alone, funding for these private companies – who are not compelled to publicly report on spending or other aspects of their operations – has soared by 800 percent through the Ontario Skills Development Fund. The provincial government has committed another $1 billion in funding for the education profiteers, over the next three years.
As OPSEU has stated, “This isn’t even mismanagement – this is a blatant attempt to gut our public education system.”
The college support staff are taking a principled and courageous stance in the face of this sustained attack – they are fighting for both a good contract that recognizes their work and for government policies that support the maintenance and growth of Ontario’s colleges as a vital public service.
Their struggle demands maximum solidarity and engagement from all labour, progressive and community organizations. A strong mobilization is needed to force the provincial government to immediately change its funding policies to support public colleges with sufficient funding that programs are maintained and tuition fees can be reduced and eliminated. In addition, there must be a full public inquiry into the government’s misuse of the Ontario Skills Development Fund to deliberately gut funding for public colleges and funnel public money into private providers.
[Photo: OPSEU]
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