EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared on The Trillium, a new Village Media website devoted exclusively to covering provincial politics at Queen’s Park.
The union representing public elementary school teachers and the provincial government have reached a tentative deal after more than a year of negotiations. There are still outstanding issues, however, which the government said will go to arbitration if the deal is ratified.
The tentative central deal covers 80,000 teachers and occasional teachers with the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO). This is the second agreement for ETFO, which reached a tentative deal for its 3,500 education workers on Sept. 22 and announced on Oct. 23 that the deal had been ratified with 80 per cent support.
ETFO President Karen Brown said the latest deal "protects their collective agreement entitlements and also addresses key bargaining goals."
"With the assistance of the conciliator appointed by the Minister of Labour, ETFO was able to reach a tentative agreement that, we believe, meets the needs of our teacher and occasional teacher members. We’re pleased with the improvements that we were able to secure during negotiations," said Brown.
She said this round of negotiations was the longest in the union's history, telling The Trillium the deal comes after "over 14 months of persistence."
"We really had to pressure this government and to move in a strategic way to achieve our goals," Brown said.
At Queen's Park on Tuesday morning, Education Minister Stephen Lecce touted the agreement, saying it would "provide stability for families in the province of Ontario."
"For 950,000 children in our publicly-funded elementary schools, they will benefit from this predictability and the ability to stay in school for three years, that allows them to get back to basics and strengthen their reading, writing and math scores," Lecce said.
Ontario's education minister confirmed "there will be items going to binding interest arbitration," but wouldn't provide specifics, including whether or not one of the outstanding issues is wages.
He said it will be a similar process to what will occur with the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation (OSSTF).
The OSSTF, whose members include more than 60,000 high school teachers and education workers in elementary and secondary schools, agreed to negotiate with the province until Oct. 27 and then enter binding interest arbitration to resolve any outstanding issues. One of these is retroactive salary increases for "wages lost under Bill 124," legislation the government passed in 2019 that limited wage increases in the public sector to one per cent a year for a maximum of three years.
ETFO said at the end of October that its education workers would be joining OSSTF during the binding arbitration process on this specific issue. The two unions are seeking an arbitrator's assistance to determine a retroactive wage increase for the third year of their previous collective agreements. The parties have already agreed on amounts for the first two years.
On Tuesday, Brown said the Bill 124 issue for ETFO's teachers was addressed at the table, but that she couldn't provide detail or confirm if it was resolved during the negotiations or will also go to arbitration.
Lecce said he thinks the overall arbitration deal with OSSTF, which was a little different in that it didn't include an announcement of a tentative central agreement, helped push things along with ETFO.
"I think (the OSSTF) really demonstrated in a very sombering way to the other unions that you know, the time is now to get a deal," he said. "I think their recognition that we're hearing from the public, from parents, public opinion is strong on this."
But ETFO pinned movement in the negotiations on its strike mandate. The union announced more than a month ago that its teacher members had voted 95 per cent in favour of strike action, though ETFO did not indicate it had plans of going ahead with job action.
Brown said she thinks the strike mandate and the view from members that the province's offers were "not sufficient, that they're not addressing our key issues, and it gave us a good foundation to pressure this government to actually make the significant moves for us to get to the place where we are now."
Key issues concerned "significant improvements around working conditions that our members demanded," said Brown, adding that this included violence within the schools and issues around special education. She said a "substantive amount" of the deal has been negotiated at the table.
Members of the Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association (OECTA), which represents 45,000 teachers in English Catholic elementary and high schools, also voted 97 per cent in favour of job action if considered necessary.
OECTA and the province are still negotiating, as is the Association des enseignantes et des enseignants franco-ontariens (AEFO).
While speaking with reporters, Lecce urged these two unions to reach some sort of a deal with the province.
"Let's get this done, let's end the delay, let's get a deal," he said. "We now have two large education union teacher unions that have signed deals with this government."
The unions have so far rejected the province's appeals to enter into a binding interest arbitration deal.
ETFO said the details of the tentative deal for teachers will be shared with members on Nov. 23 and that a ratification vote will be scheduled after that. Brown said the voting will likely take a few weeks.
"We know that the parties have worked very hard for more than a year to reach this agreement and are grateful for their efforts,” Cathy Abraham, president of the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association (OPSBA), said in a statement on Tuesday.
