The new school year is only a week away, and in many of Canada’s provinces there will be a shortage of teachers to greet the students.
Quebec is by far the worst off. The numbers are hard to fathom. Last week, the province’s education minister, Bernard Drainville, said Quebec will start the year with a shortage of 1,859 full-time and 6,699 part-time elementary and secondary school teachers, for a total of 8,558.
The province has about 114,000 full- and part-time school teachers on staff, which puts the numbers in some context. But the shortage is still stunning, and it has forced Mr. Drainville to admit that there will be a lot of makeshift teaching in classrooms this year.
“The first priority is to have a legally qualified teacher in the class – that’s No. 1,” he said earlier this month. “If we are not able to have a legally qualified teacher, then we have to accept an unqualified teacher. In certain cases … we hope to have one adult.”
The notion of an untrained person trying to herd two dozen Grade 1 students into some semblance of educational order is upsetting to every parent that contemplates it.
But Quebec is not alone. A number of other provinces, most notably British Columbia, are going through years-long teacher shortages of lesser severity that have sometimes resulted in uncertified teachers at the blackboard.
This was especially true during the pandemic, when absenteeism was high and certified substitutes were hard to come by. Quebec’s auditor-general reported in May that more than 30,000 teachers who worked during the 2020-21 school year weren’t legally qualified.
The odd thing about it, though, is that 10 years ago most of the country was struggling with a glut of teachers. As recently as 2013, teachers colleges were producing far more graduates than the school systems in some provinces could absorb.
Ontario was a case in point. An oversupply that began to make itself noticed as early as 2008 led the province in 2013 to halve the number of new teachers that graduated each year, and to also double the time it took to earn a degree, from one year to two.
The average annual number of newly licensed teachers in the province plummeted from 12,138 to 5,795 between 2011 and 2022, according to the Ontario College of Teachers.
By 2018, there were already growing concerns of a teacher shortage in Ontario, and a worry that the province had overcorrected.
Other factors have contributed to the current shortages, such as the rise in enrolments as Canada’s population surges, and the fact the education workforce is among the oldest in Canada and also has among the lowest retirement ages.
A 2016 Supreme Court of Canada ruling about class sizes in B.C. that forced the province to hire 3,700 teachers overnight didn’t help.
And then there’s Quebec’s self-inflicted misery. Until recently, the starting annual salary for teachers there was $10,000 less than the next lowest province. Bill 21, the discriminatory law that bans teachers from wearing hijabs, kippahs, crosses or turbans, has by definition further cut the pool of prospective teachers.
But what is most telling, perhaps, is that the glut of teachers that peaked a decade ago was the result of a surge in numbers that came in response to a looming shortage in 1998, which in turn was brought about by the retirement of a glut of teachers who had been hired to respond to shortages in the 1960s caused by the Baby Boom.
This leads to the conclusion that the system responsible for producing a reliable supply of teachers in Canada – a provincial jurisdiction – is in need of a rethink. And that rethink should start with the fact that teachers certified in one province are supposed to be able to work in another without taking additional courses under the Canadian Free Trade Agreement of 2017.
For that agreement to prove to be a benefit to Canadians, the provincial bodies that certify teachers, the unions that represent them and the colleges that teach them need to share information about labour markets, enrolment numbers, retirement projections and other critical data.
The reactive and siloed policies of the past aren’t providing the country with enough trained teachers to educate our children every fall. A solution that supports teachers’ labour mobility is the answer.