Ontario education workers approved a tentative deal with their employer, the union representing them said Monday, pledging to keep up the fight for more investment in schools after wrestling with the Ford government last month.
“We won. They backed down,” Sharron Flynn-Bennett, a union organizer and special education worker in the Toronto Catholic District School Board, said outside Queen’s Park on Monday.
The Ontario government ordered the province’s lowest-paid education workers back to work Monday, setting up a legislative and operational standoff ahead of a planned Friday strike.
As students and staff navigate a new school year with rising costs of living and without COVID-19 public health restrictions, Ontario education unions are back at the bargaining table to negotiate new deals with Premier Doug Ford's Progressive Conservative government.
The Ford government will give parents in Ontario cash for tutoring to help students recover from learning lost to more than two years of COVID-19 pandemic disruptions. Critics say they should adequately fund public education instead.
Ontario’s education minister says the province wants to help its students deal with two years of learning loss by keeping its classrooms open and offering all extracurriculars, insisting education workers awaiting a new contract provide the voluntary time required.
Ontario will require its school boards to keep an online learning option for the upcoming 2022-23 academic year and any student who needs tutoring help will receive it, the provincial government said as it laid out its school spending plan ahead of a summer election.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Wednesday, January 12, 2022, he needs more information before he can say whether he supports Quebec’s anti-vaccination tax, as Ottawa struggled to make good on its promise to deliver COVID-19 rapid tests.
Ontario’s Liberals are calling on the Ford government to send out many more COVID-19 rapid test kits to schools, especially in hard-hit neighbourhoods, as children make up a growing portion of the province's overall case count.
