Ontario secondary school teachers urge province to come to the table with good-faith deal

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The president of Ontario’s secondary schools’ teachers’ union is urging the provincial government to come to the bargaining table with a better deal to avoid a strike, while assuring parents that students will be in school come September.

Karen Littlewood said in an interview Tuesday that the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF) is considering its next steps in negotiations with Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government, which “most likely would be to apply some pressure and that would come in the form of a strike vote.”

On Monday, the OSSTF sent a memo to its members that said it would plan strike votes this fall if negotiations failed. The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO) announced Monday that it was preparing to hold strike votes next month.

Ms. Littlewood said the memo was meant to express the union’s frustration but the current position on holding strike votes is not as “definitive” as the ETFO. She said the government has the funds to “make sure that education workers, teachers are shown the respect that they deserve.”

“It is absolutely something that I think we’re considering, but we want to make sure parents know that no vote has been taken and that we will be in the school,” Ms. Littlewood said.

“We’ve had enough. We should be looking at education as an investment and making sure that students have all of the supports they need going forward into the school year.”

Teachers’ unions have been negotiating with the province since contracts expired last August.

The Opposition NDP’s education critic, Chandra Pasma, said the decision for the ETFO to move forward with strike votes is not surprising, but unfortunate.

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“If the government respected the work that they were doing, they would be coming to the table to negotiate a fair deal,” Ms. Pasma said. “They would be at least keeping up with inflation and investments in education so that we could bring down class sizes and they would be making sure that every child had the supports that they need.”

President of the ETFO, Karen Brown, said the ETFO has presented proposals to the government to ensure supports around special education, decreasing class sizes and violence in school and making sure its members’ contracts keep up with inflation while working on teacher recruitment and retention of education staff. Ms. Littlewood said while they are not publicly bargaining, salaries are on the table.

Education Minister Stephen Lecce wasn’t available for an interview Tuesday. A day earlier, he issued a statement that said the government is “focused on securing a deal that keeps kids in class, provides parents with stability and treats educators fairly.”

The other public education unions in Ontario, the Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association (OECTA) and the Association des enseignantes et des enseignants franco-ontariens (AEFO), have both said in statements to The Globe and Mail that they are continuing with collective bargaining with the province at this time.

OECTA president René Jansen in de Wal said in a statement that the government has only agreed to a few bargaining dates a month, demonstrating “a seeming unwillingness to engage in meaningful conversations about the critical issues facing Ontario’s publicly funded education system.”

AEFO president Anne Vinet-Roy said in a statement that the union also finds the pace of negotiations unacceptable as they head into their second year without a contract and they are “constantly evaluating all possible options to move negotiations forward more quickly.”

The OECTA currently has three bargaining dates set for August and is confirming dates for September while the AEFO has bargaining dates set for Aug. 30 and Sept. 1.

The OSSTF’s next bargaining date is set for Thursday.