OPSEU, one of the province’s largest public sector unions with 180,000 members, may have snatched a kind of victory from a very real defeat. The union has been bargaining with Ontario’s colleges on behalf of faculty and recently received an arbitration award that was disappointing from the union’s perspective — the arbitrator rejected many of the union’s arguments and wasn’t persuaded that now was the time to make major changes to other aspects of workplace rules in Ontario’s colleges.
But in losing, OPSEU managed to land some blows against the Ford government, getting some eye-popping numbers about the ongoing crisis in the post-secondary education sector into the public domain. Perhaps the one that’s ringing the loudest alarms with the union is that 10,000 college staff will have been laid off before the start of the next academic year, so far as the flow of foreign students has been halted by federal fiat.
(OPSEU’s president JP Hornick said the union had to fight “tooth and nail” simply to get this information into the public domain; the colleges deny that they’ve tried to hide anything.)
But the entire arbitration decision (online, here) makes for fascinating reading about the state of Ontario’s college system in 2025, and how we arrived at the current crisis. Arbitrator William Kaplan doesn’t start the clock with the federal government’s restriction on foreign students; instead, he effectively starts the story with the 2019 decision by the newly-elected Ford government to cut tuition by 10 per cent and then freeze domestic tuition (but crucially, not foreign tuition) thereafter. The results were predictable, with Kaplan reiterating a previous finding by the auditor general: “between 2012/2013 and 2020/2021, Ontario’s colleges experienced a 15 per cent decline in domestic students and a 342 per cent growth in international student enrolment.”
By 2023, foreign students were paying more than three-quarters of tuition revenues to Ontario colleges, Kaplan notes, thanks to the combination of their swelling numbers and unregulated tuition fees. When Ottawa announced an end to the foreign student windfall in January 2024, it set off an earthquake in the finances of the post-secondary sector generally but most acutely in colleges — and more precisely in the colleges that had most mortgaged their financial future to the idea that nobody would ever take the punch bowl away from the party.
It's the financial fallout that Kaplan’s arbitration has to contend with. OPSEU wants to protect the interests of its members, and fair enough, but Kaplan rejected the union’s assertion that college finances are actually in better shape than they appear — and that, by implication, OPSEU members are being forced to bear financial costs for decisions largely made by management (or political leaders above them.)
“The present fiscal situation is volatile. There is no reason to believe that it will improve in the short or medium term,” Kaplan writes. The colleges are collectively projecting that the sector will face deficits between $500 million to $900 million by the 2026-27 fiscal year.
Kaplan’s award gives OPSEU workers some enhanced guarantees regarding severance and job security, but even this is a grim kind of victory, as their value primarily comes from a context where layoffs are going to be part of the work environment for the foreseeable future. Sometimes there’s no good news, just different flavours of bad.
Which brings us back to the conduct of the provincial government so far. Foreign admissions exploded in Ontario’s colleges after the Ford government was elected and implemented its tuition freeze, and the Progressive Conservatives were happy to close their eyes to this distortion in the college system since it didn’t show up on the provincial tax bill. It was always unsustainable, and the thing about things that can’t go on forever is that they eventually stop.
The province convened an expert panel that recommended more than $2.5 billion in new, stable provincial funding, but responded instead with a one-time $1.3 billion grant over three years. The end of that funding is already in sight: the budget introduced this spring shows spending on colleges and universities falling in coming years, with no announced plans to fill the financial hole.
The layoffs already being implemented or planned at Ontario’s colleges are a serious economic hit, particularly in communities where those colleges are primary employers. As Hornick says, those 10,000 lost jobs already exceed the jobs lost from the collapse of Hudson’s Bay Company — and it’s 10 times as many jobs as was optimistically projected to be created at Honda’s EV plant in Alliston.
When tariffs reportedly imperiled that Honda plant, Premier Ford promised to hold the automaker accountable and protect good-paying union jobs in Ontario. The college sector is already seeing real people lose real jobs, and the effects of that are going to reverberate across the economy far more directly than still-theoretical EV plants. Prime Minister Carney is signaling that there’s going to be substantial spending cuts coming from Ottawa, so nobody is coming to save Queen’s Park this time. The question the government will need to answer is: how much worse will it let things get?
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