Updated September 11, 2025 @ 2:50pm
Support staff at Ontario's publicly funded colleges walked off the job Thursday, striking over not just better wages and benefits, they said, but for the future of the college system.
The 10,000 full-time college support staff, including library technologists, facilities and trades workers, and staff in financial aid and registrar offices, went on strike after failing to reach a new contract deal. Classes are continuing, colleges said.
The workers' top priority in this round of bargaining is job security, their union said.
The Ontario Public Service Employees Union has said that nearly 10,000 college faculty and staff have either been laid off or are projected to lose their jobs amid hundreds of program cancellations and suspensions at colleges across Ontario since last year.
Colleges have been increasingly relying on tuition from international students for several years due to low levels of provincial government funding and a years-long tuition freeze, and have been struggling since the federal government enacted a cap on international students.
The provincial government is not a direct party to these negotiations, but the onus to better fund the college system lands squarely on Premier Doug Ford's shoulders, said OPSEU president JP Hornick.
"It's been in his hands, the decline of our beloved colleges that we have given years to, even decades of our lives to, and Ford's had eight years and has done nothing more than drive the system more into the ground," Hornick said.
A spokesperson for Colleges and Universities Minister Nolan Quinn noted that the province is not at the table.
"We are monitoring the situation closely and remain hopeful that all parties reach a fair deal that puts students first," Bianca Giacoboni wrote in a statement.
The support staff are bargaining with the College Employer Council, which said that OPSEU's demands of a moratorium on campus closures and layoffs is unrealistic.
"At a time when college enrollments and revenues are down by as much as 50 per cent, OPSEU continues to insist on demands that are fiscally impossible," the council wrote in a statement.
It said colleges have offered wage increases of two per cent per year, increases to on-call and shift premiums, enhancements to severance and paid leave for domestic and sexual violence.
The College Employer Council has said the union's demands would expose colleges to more than $900 million in additional costs, although the union disputes this figure.
A government-commissioned report found in 2023 that Ontario's college funding per student is just 44 per cent of the level of the rest of the country.
The province earlier this year announced $750 million for science, technology, engineering and math programs at colleges and universities, on top of a previously announced $1.3-billion package for the post-secondary sector, but the institutions say more is needed.
Jay Timms, an assistive technologist in the Algonquin College Centre for Accessible Learning, said layoffs are gutting the college system.
"Support staff need support, and right now, because of budget cuts from the Ford government, we're understaffed, and we're still cutting positions," Timms said on the picket line.
"There's hundreds of my colleagues been laid off since January, whole schools cut, and we're still having to do a high level of work. There's still thousands of students in there, and we just can't keep up with the work."
— With files from Catherine Morrison in Ottawa.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2025.
