What’s behind Ontario education union strike votes?

Throughout the month of November, over 250,000 teachers across Ontario are voting on whether or not to give their unions a mandate to strike. They come from every major school board in the province—English and French, public and Catholic—and are voting over the course of the month.

The stakes for Ontario education are high. The teachers are demanding that the province invest more in education, as funding has dropped significantly over decades, particularly over the last 10 years. In addition to key issues like wages—which are, of course, essential for attracting and retaining a capable workforce—education workers are demanding to address longstanding issues around class size and underinvestment.

Let’s take a look at how we got to this mess—and how teachers are proposing to get us out of it.

The long-simmering crisis

When the Mike Harris Conservatives were elected in 1995, the battle lines with public education  were drawn even before the ballots were counted. Shortly after, Minister of Education and Training John Snobelen was famously recorded in a closed meeting explaining that the provincial government needed to create a crisis in public education to justify its overhaul with the intention of cutting well over a billion dollars from its budget.

So when we talk about the crisis in Ontario education today, the seeds were sown over 30 years ago, through multiple mandates—a template for the managed decline and systematic underfunding, undermining and underresourcing of a system that, while by no means perfect, was a world leader. 

This crisis looks like crowded classrooms, overworked and undersupported educators, unmet student needs, crumbling buildings, concerns for staff and student safety, parents with means compensating for more and more of what the public system once provided, and increasing standardization. It looks like the provincial government taking over elected school boards, implementing 1-800 help lines (and an estimated wait time of 2-5 business days for a response) and sidelining democratically elected trustees. The crisis looks like persistent deficit budgets, in spite of provincial takeovers and “finding efficiencies” and the constant refrain of “back to basics.” 

The CCPA’s data and analysis underscores the disconnect between provincial policymakers’ grand funding announcements against their tendency to blame teachers, administrators and trustees for the harsh reality faced by educators, students and their families across the province. 

By the numbers

Public education isn’t only about buildings and people (whether learners or staff), of course. But it is absolutely about that too. So, what do the numbers tell us? 

Even though the province has increased education funding since its low point in 2022-23, per student funding has still declined since 2018-19 by $220 per student per year. That’s a $453 million budget shortfall for this school year alone.  

Nor has the province kept school board funding up at pace with enrolment or inflation, resulting in a $6.5 billion accumulated shortfall for Ontario schools since 2018-19. 

Schools are literally crumbling. The Financial Accountability Office of Ontario estimates that the Ontario government needs to spend $21.7 billion over 10 years to address the repair backlog and maintain schools in good repair. The current plan is to spend $12.5 billion, only 58 per cent of the Financial Accountability Office’s projected needs. It doesn’t take an engineer or architect to know that the longer repairs are postponed, the more expensive it becomes to fix them.

This means that in 2020, 29 per cent of schools were in a state of disrepair. By 2024, it was at 37 per cent—over 1,800 schools total, 423 more than in 2020. And that does not include the estimated 7,000 portable classrooms for which data is unavailable. 

Every year, school boards spend more on special education than they receive in funding. That’s $2.3 billion that boards have redirected to special education out of general funding since 2018. In the 2025-26 school year, nearly 10 per cent of the amount spent on special education—$367 million—came from other funding envelopes. Special education is not fully funded even with the measures boards are taking—there simply isn’t enough money for all the programs schools are tasked to provide, let alone meet more complex needs. And even with reallocation, the recent Auditor General report shows unacceptable levels of unmet needs. 

Class sizes continue to be a problem. The required average class size is 24.5 students, but there are no hard caps for Grades 4-8. In the 2025-26 school year, 3.4 per cent—or 1,054—of Grade 4-8 classes had 30 students or more. And these numbers don’t account for class complexity.

In the 2024-25 school year, enrolment in online learning reached 288,330, more than five times what it was a decade earlier. The Ministry of Education funds online courses at a 30:1 student-to-teacher ratio, compared to a 23:1 ratio in in-person courses. So why the push for online learning? Because online learning is cheaper. 

Since 2018-19, total enrolment in Ontario’s public schools increased by three per cent while the number of classroom educators grew by less than one per cent. That’s over 2,500 fewer teachers in schools today than if their numbers had simply kept pace with enrolment—assuming there were enough teachers in 2018-19. And other staffing categories have not kept pace with enrolment, namely library and guidance staff, lunchroom and recess monitors, custodians and maintenance staff.

Ontario has an estimated 48,000 certified teachers who completed their training but are not currently working in the province’s education system. And chronic underfunding, in addition to the concerns about teaching conditions – which are of course learning conditions—may also impact the employment decisions of future educators.

In 2018-19, around 10 per cent of Ontario’s 72 school boards ended the year in a deficit. That number has since tripled. The combined accumulated surplus for all boards has declined since 2021-2022, and reserves have decreased in inflation adjusted terms by 19%. This is what chronic underfunding looks like.  

We hear about administrative bloat, but since 2018-19, administrative expenses as a share of total expenses haven’t budged (under three per cent). And in 2025-26, 6 of the eight boards under administrative supervision had a ratio below the provincial average.  

The fight for public education

November strike votes do not mean a strike is imminent. But the issues outlined above need to be top of mind for all of us. The stakes for public education—for students, educators and education workers, parents and school communities – could not be higher. 

How we think of, support, and ensure that public education doesn’t just survive in some form, but actually thrives, along with the staff and students in those schools – is not just about the money, obviously. But budgets and budgeting provide the evidence of where and whether political rhetoric and policy priorities intersect or diverge.

Part of the challenge in defending and advocating for public education in the face of a decidedly anti-public narrative is its vastness and its complexity. Layered on top of this complexity is the blame game targeting unions, school boards, so-called absenteeism, and the spectre of “culture wars” or “sex ed wars” that have proven to be very effective at distracting from the reality on the ground that the numbers clearly illuminate and that staff, students and their families experience daily. And let’s not forget the increasing susceptibility of decisionmakers to the panacea of AI or privatization – all evidence to the contrary. 

Are we a society that is committed to meeting and addressing the needs of the present – with the funding and the resources required to do that – while preparing and educating for the future? Or are we not? Because continuing to ask those tasked with carrying out that commitment to do more with less is not an option. 

About the author

Erika Shaker

Erika (she/her) became Director of the National Office in 2020, but began her career at the CCPA in 1997 as director of the Education Project. Originally established to monitor corporate intrusion in public education, the project broadened its focus to include standardized testing, social justice and anti-racism education in schools, educational equity, school finance, child care and early childhood education, tuition and user fees, technology, surveillance and privacy, the arts, and community-based education. In 2000 she also became editor of Our Schools/Our Selves, the popular education journal founded in 1988. It provides commentary and analysis on a wide variety of education-related topics. Erika has a BA in History from McGill University and an MA in English (critical literary analysis) from the University of Guelph. Prior to coming to the CCPA, she worked in Washington DC researching the corporatization of childhood, and was one of the founders of UNPLUG (which became the now-defunct Center for Commercial-Free Public Education). She spends far too much time on social media.