On August 29, another round of “Fight Ford” protests took place across Ontario. These protests have been taking place monthly since February in response to a deeply unpopular Progressive Conservative government led by Premier Doug Ford that has been plagued by corruption scandals, misuses of public funds, and more.
However, what set the most recent set of protests apart from the others was that this time, they occurred under the banner of “Fight for Education.” With 255,000 education workers across Ontario in collective bargaining with the province and a potential mass strike on the horizon, Saturday’s rallies helped build momentum for what could be a key moment in the fight against Ford.
What’s at stake
Since taking office in 2018, Ford has made enemies of school boards, teachers, parents, and students across Ontario. During his eight-year tenure, he has cut over $6 billion in funding from public education. Last year, the province took control of school boards, removing elected trustees and replacing them with Ford-appointed supervisors. The forecast for the upcoming school year shows similar bleakness, with a $56.4 million cut to the Classroom Staffing Fund (used for most of the in-classroom staffing costs) and a mere 0.1 percent increase to the Special Education Fund.
As education workers’ unions are bargaining for more jobs and increased funding, they are also bargaining to push back against the gutting of public education. Their working conditions are students’ learning conditions. More robust funding, smaller class sizes, and more staff in schools mean more supports and resources for students.
Education workers in Ontario are uniquely positioned to take on the fight against Ford in a way that many other community supporters are not: they can force concessions through negotiations, or they can withdraw their labour (i.e. go on strike) and shut down schools altogether. The struggle for public education runs through the fight that education workers are waging right now.
The protests
The Fight Ford protests are the culmination of a growing frustration with Doug Ford’s provincial mismanagement. The Fight Ford protests have been a space where people organizing in different movements (from the Greenbelt to bike lanes to housing to healthcare) and people without roots in any particular movement who are just sick and tired of Ford can come together to make their displeasure known. By meeting under the banner of public education during education worker bargaining, the most recent protests took another step forwards: instead of merely expressing malaise, people were able to build on a key campaign that has the power to advance our common struggles against the Ford government.
Across the province, thousands of people met with signs and banners supporting education workers, building solidarity with the workers who are taking Ford head-on this fall. Nearly every protest featured the lawn signs that a coalition of education workers’ unions put together, reading, “Together for publicly funded education.” One particular protest sign summed up the stakes: a child in a stroller held a sign that read, “Your cuts, our consequences.”
While Ford is trying to curry favour with the public by playing “Captain Canada” against Donald Trump in the ongoing tariff war (laughable considering how much of Canada’s infrastructure Ford wants to sell off to the highest bidder), we must not be fooled by his political posturing. All over Ontario, people seeing what has happened to education in the province know that the future of our public services depends on defeating Doug Ford — not in a couple of years at the ballot box, but on the streets and at the bargaining table. By throwing our support behind education workers, we can help build a real crisis for this government and force Ford’s hand on education and more.
Their fight is our fight
The struggle against Ford extends far beyond public education, of course. But as we saw in November 2022 when Ontario’s education workers brought the province to the brink of a general strike, the education sector has the ability to shut down the province, force major concessions, and bring the government to its knees.
A win for education workers will be a huge blow to Ford and will give other movements (labour or otherwise) the confidence to take on Ford as well. That’s why seeing thousands of people, both education workers and community supporters, united behind a single fight is so important for us — and scary for Ford.
Defeating Ford means harnessing this momentum and using it to keep building the education worker struggle. Talk to your neighbours and local parents, show your support for education workers, and let’s keep building the movement to defeat this government.
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