Adam Riggio: The People Support Educators Amid Doug Ford’s Assault
Teachers were out in force to protest the Ford government's cuts to education (Raphael Tremblay/CBC)
Written by: Adam Riggio
As Doug Ford’s agenda of ignorance-fueled condescending austerity continues rolling over opportunities for the people of Ontario, educators are once again targets of the Conservative government.
Massive cuts to our province’s education system have already hammered schools, teachers, education assistants, and students. School programs have been slashed, jobs for educators have disappeared, and buildings continue to crumble so that the Ford government can fund tax cuts for the mega-rich, oversee predatory industries profiting off the suffering of the poor, and funnel subsidies to the undeserving connected.
A Union Leads Resistance
Teachers and other education professionals throughout Ontario have begun organizing resistance to this austerity regime that is already making victims of our children. Their union, the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, is leading the organization of this fight against the callous Ford and his government.
The first strike came on Dec. 4 , a single day when high school teachers picketed their workplaces throughout the Greater Toronto Area. That includes every high school in Toronto itself, Halton, Peel, Durham, and York region. Notable to see is that the strikes already had public support, even at this early stage in the conflict.
A second strike day was the following Dec. 11, when teachers and education workers on strike included Toronto again, but now also Prince Edward County, towns and small cities all over Lake Simcoe region, Muskoka, and other areas north of Lake Ontario. The Canada Files was there to document some of the picket lines in Toronto. Even though the strike day inconvenienced parents, there was yet no popular resistance to the educators’ labour actions.
Government’s Indifference to Critical Thought
Ford’s government, speaking largely through ineffectual new Education Minister Stephen Lecce, has repeated clear talking points that the unionized teaching workforce demands salaries higher than the province can afford. Ford’s cabinet ultimately wants us to believe that teachers want to cripple the education system by being paid more for the same work.
Lecce’s public announcements about the subject are blatant lies, such as ridiculously exaggerating the size of the cost of living increase that the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation has brought to the table. Adding a yearly cost of living adjustment to the salaries of teachers and education assistants would cost about $33-million in pay raises each year. Lecce centres his public remarks around a nonsensical number, $1.5-billion.
Such a large number sounds terrible, and if repeated enough, will often believed. This was the case for Ford’s own “For the People” campaign slogan, an empty phrase to be repeated on command, reducing people in a democratic society to Pavlovian parrots. The goal of Ford’s policy marketers is to make hundreds of thousands of people enraged at their children’s teachers, spitting “$1.5-billion!” into educators’ faces.
Government’s Indifference to the Conditions of Education
The real causes and issues at the heart of the OSSTF’s negotiations with government should be laid out, if only to keep people informed about what this labour conflict is actually about.
The cost of living expense is a proposal to build a regular, non-negotiable pay raise throughout the education sector to keep the currency value of their salaries at pace with inflation throughout the Canadian economy. So a high school teacher earning $84,000 in 2021 would, if that year’s inflation in Canada is 2%, rise to $85,680 in 2022.
That way, how much a salary can actually purchase will not change year to year. An educator’s salary will rise in money to maintain its real worth. The Ford government wants to cap all teacher and education assistant salary increases at no more than 1% annually. Their proposal shrinks the purchasing power of educators’ salaries over time, slowly impoverishing them as their experience, productivity, and knowledge grows.
As for the actual issues on the educators’ agendas, their union is asking for the following. They want lower maximums on average class size targets than the Ford government demands, which would mean fewer job cuts and attrition losses among staff at schools. Such a commitment to ensuring that there is adequate staff in the province’s schools to educate our children properly is more than Ford’s austerity agenda can permit.
They are blocking Ford’s policy mandating online-only courses, a policy that, if you want it to make sense, requires your total ignorance of the material conditions of internet access throughout all of Ontario. Mandating online courses to earn a basic high school education prevents many rural Ontarians in regions with poor broadband access from easily accessing education.
Such a proposal would make more sense if it were joined with a massive government investment in rural broadband infrastructure expansion. But I doubt we will see this from Ford or his leadership.
If You Believe in Freedom, You Won’t Give Up
While the struggle to protect our educators and school systems from the Ford government’s witless will to destruction continues,
That people continue to support teachers against a government who would take them all for fools, that is not only a sign of hope, it is a path to real victory for democracy and the empowerment of people in freedom.