It was a bright and sunny morning at the entrance to Canadore College and Nipissing University.
On this day, the Canadore teachers were not in the classroom, they were on the picket line after the union and the Ontario Colleges failed to come up with an agreement by the midnight deadline today.
Faculty stopped vehicles coming to the schools for a brief time explaining what they are doing on the picket line today.
John Patterson, Canadore College’s Faculty Union President, says he hates what this does to students.
“Here at Canadore we’ve got about 3,000 students now they are without class and across the province about five hundred thousand,” said Patterson.
“And as I said, I’m not just a faculty member I’m a parent. I certainly appreciate it from a teacher’s point of view but also from the parent’s point of view, we don’t like to see these kinds of disruptions.”
More than 12,000 professors, counsellors and librarians are on strike today at the 24 Ontario colleges, including 108 full-time faculty here at Canadore College.
Patterson says money and governance are key issues in the work stoppage. During late negotiations, the union asked for the number of full-time faculty to match the number of faculty members on contract, which is a big problem at Canadore, according to Patterson.
“We’ve seen over the last decade, and particularly in the last few years a real erosion of the number of full-time faculty in the classroom, and kind of an explosion of contracts, part-time, sessional folks,” he said.
“These people are precarious workers, they tend to have very heavy workloads, they’re certainly over-worked and underpaid. To us, this has become a real issue. I feel like we’re kind of at a breaking point here and we need to change directions.”
George Burton, the Canadore College President, is disappointed that it has come to a strike. He says the idea of collegial governance, or giving faculty more power to make academic decisions, is not a discussion point.
“What we are looking for is a settlement that is fair, to both sides, management and the faculty because we do value them of course, but it has to be affordable from our perspective as a college so we can sustain ourselves. And again we have been very clear with the faculty from day one that governance in the college is a non-bargaining issue, we aren’t even going there, we can’t, it’s not within our mandate and we will not,” said Burton.
That response does not surprise Patterson.
“Six years ago we did have a form of collegial governance, we had an academic council,” said Patterson.
“We had all interested parties sitting around a table and discussed all academic decisions. This was one of the first things that Mr. Burton disbanded when he showed up. He did that and then increased the number of managers at the college. I’ve certainly seen a big change in the amount of input the faculty has about how programs are run.”
Classes were obviously canceled, but there is some breathing room for negotiations with reading week to start next week.
Still, both sides seem to agree on one thing, they hope the strike ends soon.
"I think we are in the strike situation because I think deep down, nobody wants a strike. Again we are hoping that it ends quickly and we want to just again reassure everyone that we want a quick end to this, re-assure the students they will not lose their academic year and while we are on strike, that everyone is safe on those picket lines because when this is all over we have to come back and work together as a single entity here in North Bay as Canadore College and I just want to remind everybody of that,” said Burton.
