Social Policy in Ontario

It’s not just penny-pinching premiers that teachers are up against

Posted on October 31, 2025 in Education Debates

Source: TheStar.com — Authors: Janice Kennedy

TheStar.com – Opinion/Contributors
Oct. 31, 2025.   By Janice Kennedy, Contributor

In an earlier life, before two decades in journalism, I spent weekdays teaching and the rest of my time prepping lessons and correcting papers. From the fall of 1967, I did this for 18 years at two large Montreal high schools, entering the lives of more than 2,000 human beings I wouldn’t have met otherwise.

With a smile, I recall enthusiastic classroom discussions of Leonard Cohen (or “Lord of the Flies” or “Macbeth” or any number of irresistible stimuli). I remember sympathetically the troubled personal tales kids would sometimes share with me after class. I think fondly of the notes of appreciation I’ve received out of the blue from long-ago students.

And I remember the strikes: walking the picket lines, being demonized by columnists who believed our work began and ended at the classroom door, marching on the Quebec legislature, being ordered back to work.

So my heart goes out to Alberta’s teachers.

The fight has never been fair. When teachers go on strike, they’re invariably allowed to stay out for a neatly calibrated period — that is to say, until parents are deemed sufficiently fed up with the inconvenience. Their employer, the government, then hammers them over the head and tells them to get back to work. Such is labour justice for public and para-public employees.

Weeks on the picket line, loss of income (teachers’ unions are almost never rich enough to offer strike pay), worry, stress, dislocation: all for nothing.

Be it in Alberta or Ontario or anywhere else across the country, striking teachers are regularly mowed down by a mindset that undervalues them, embracing the pernicious old lie that teachers are underworked, overpaid whiners.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who opted for the notwithstanding sledgehammer, essentially crushed teachers’ calls for more enlightened classrooms and better learning environments. In Ontario, Doug Ford’s government has doubled down on its regressive approach: having cut $6.3 billion from public education since 2018 (according to the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario), it recently introduced Bill 33, which would take meaningful decision-making away from local boards and generally sour the mood for next year’s contract negotiations.

If you didn’t know better, you might think little Danielle and young Dougie had been sent to the principal’s office one too many times and were now out for revenge. But no. The real reason for the antipathy toward teachers demonstrated by Smith, Ford and governments stretching back decades is much simpler. The reason is ignorance.

Contract negotiations are always about two things: salary and working conditions. Salary considerations should be simple, especially for MPPs at Queen’s Park. (After a recent 35 per cent increase, their base salary is more than $157,000; unkind critics might observe that this is for an average of 90 days a year in the legislature.) Ford, Smith or any member of their caucuses should try teaching 35 kids in a classroom for just a single week — and then try justifying salaries that insult educated professionals.

Working conditions? That’s easy, too, as working conditions for teachers are learning conditions for kids. Most parents do not want their children in classes where the teacher, explaining principles of physics to 35 teenagers, also has to contend with smartasses passing comments, students obviously checking their phones below desk level (TikTok? texting?), the troubled kid who’s been suspended twice for violent behaviour, the youngster who needs a lot of individualized extra help, the trio in the corner who got high at lunchtime. And so on.

If teaching was a challenge in the 1970s and ’80s — and it was — today it can be an ordeal.

In our fractured world, there are heroes and saints around us who offer hope, paths to a tomorrow that is not entirely dark. The teaching profession has not cornered the market on such people, but teachers do operate in a sphere that stubbornly demands selflessness and a degree of heroism not often seen in other workplaces — including the backrooms of provincial legislatures.

When teachers call for reduced class sizes, more support and better teaching conditions — better learning conditions — they’re not being self-serving. They’re thinking about every kid in every classroom. They’re thinking about the collective future we want those kids to create.

Too bad the politics of narrow ignorance keeps getting in the way.

Janice Kennedy is a retired journalist. She lives in Ottawa.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/its-not-just-penny-pinching-premiers-that-teachers-are-up-against/article_911a04a7-feba-4c7f-a3ea-6c5d827ae622.html?source=newsletter&utm_content=a05&utm_source=ts_nl&utm_medium=email&utm_email=0C810E7AE4E7C3CEB3816076F6F9881B&utm_campaign=top_24327

Tags: budget, Education, ideology, jurisdiction, standard of living

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