The Communist Party of Canada (Ontario) extends its full and active solidarity with 10,000 support staff, members of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), who are on strike at public colleges across Ontario.
The CPC (Ontario) recognizes that years of government underfunding, compounded by the Ford Conservatives’ deliberate diversion of funding from public system to private institutions, have brought the college system in Ontario to the brink of collapse. Since 2013-14 provincial funding for Ontario colleges has dropped 30 percent. These policies – continued by successive Liberal and Conservative governments – have led to the loss of 600 college programs and estimated 10,000 layoffs of vital support staff.
Throughout the post-secondary education sector, deliberate and ongoing government underfunding has reduced per-student funding in Ontario colleges to the lowest in the country, and facilitated the increased privatization of funding. This privatization has taken several forms, but has overwhelmingly been manifested in the form of higher tuition fees. As with universities, this underfunding policy has driven colleges to increasingly rely on shockingly high tuition fees for international students.
It is a funding model which is both inadequate and racist, and which has brought us to the current situation, in which Ontario’s public colleges are on the brink of total failure.
Rather than addressing this problem through adequate funding based on student and college need, the Ontario government of Doug Ford has exacerbated the crisis by shifting public funding even further away from college campuses, towards subsidizing duplicate programs offered by private companies.
Since 2020 alone, funding for these private companies – who are not compelled to publicly report on spending or other aspects of their operations – has soared by 800 percent through the Ontario Skills Development Fund. The provincial government has committed another $1 billion in funding for the education profiteers, over the next three years.
As OPSEU has stated, “This isn’t even mismanagement – this is a blatant attempt to gut our public education system.”
The CPC (Ontario) acknowledges the principled and courageous stance of college support staff who are fighting for both a good contract that recognizes their work and for government policies that support the maintenance and growth of Ontario’s colleges as a vital public service.
We are directing all of our Party organizations to actively support the college strike. In addition, we call on the provincial government to immediately change its funding policies to support public colleges with sufficient funding that programs are maintained and tuition fees can be reduced and eliminated. Furthermore, we call for a full public inquiry into the government’s misuse of the Ontario Skills Development Fund to deliberately gut funding for public colleges and funnel public money into private providers.
