It would appear I’m now old enough to have seen some public-policy issues come full circle. Consider the ongoing shortage of teachers in Ontario. It wasn’t that long ago that we had literally the opposite problem. And it was probably what we did then that created the problem we have today.
The reader should know, both as a matter of disclosure and as helpful context, that I am married to a teacher. My wife has been an elementary-school teacher for about 15 years now. We were dating when she was just beginning her career, and I remember well her concern that she might not get a job close to where our families lived and where we planned to settle down. The problem was the sheer number of teachers graduating both in Ontario teachers colleges and at colleges in western New York. Supply was far outstripping demand.
We ended up doing just fine. My wife was a French specialist, and those were in demand, so she had no problem landing a job in a location that suited her and us. But we knew that many people at the time did not have an in-demand specialization and struggled to find work. Many of them eventually did. But not all of them. Some spent a few years trying to scrape by on short-term fill-in contracts or as supply teachers and eventually moved on to other careers, because they quite simply had to. There was no work for them as teachers in Ontario.
This eventually resulted in a public-policy response by the government. In a blunt but effective move, the Kathleen Wynne government doubled the length of time it took students to complete teachers college before being eligible to teach in Ontario. The required time went from a single year to two years. In effect, the pipeline for new teachers was cut in half with the stroke of the proverbial pen (there was a period of warning before the change, though: announced in 2013, it took effect in 2015, giving those students already enrolled a fair shot to finish their studies and land a job). The numbers didn’t work out that neatly, of course, since we still had certified teachers applying for jobs after getting certified in New York or other jurisdictions. But in blunt aggregate terms, it did what it was supposed to do: from 2011 to 2021, the number of new teachers licensed each year in Ontario fell by more than half. The job market came into balance.
And then it went out of balance again. Today, Ontario is short teachers. According to the Ontario College of Teachers, the Wynne-era changes, combined with population growth, accelerated retirements and the departure of trained teachers for other careers. There also aren’t enough supply teachers willing to pick up the phone and show up when a teacher falls ill or is otherwise unavailable for a day or two. Education Minister Stephen Lecce has been asked about this issue several times recently and has said that his government is aware of the problem and working on solutions. More teaching assistants will be hired, and supply teachers will be able to take on more shifts (a cap in the annual number of shifts was another policy change implemented during the teacher glut of a decade ago — there were so many teachers willing to take shifts that new teachers scrambling to find experience through supplying weren’t having much luck).
Okay, so we’ll see how that goes. I don’t really have much more to say about the substance of the issue. We need more teachers. The government is going to do some things that will help address that in the short term, and it will obviously need to do more to address that in the long-term. Although there would be absolutely no political appetite for this, and I suspect not much public appetite for it, either, the government could simply turn to higher wages or perhaps even some kind of retention bonus for teachers who defer retirement, as a way of keeping more trained and qualified teachers in the system longer. (I would benefit from that. Hence my disclosure above.)
Imagine if Doug Ford ends up being the guy to significantly increase the wages of educators. I know, I know — it won’t happen. But that would sure run counter to a narrative or two, eh?
The broader point I would make is that we should not be surprised that teachers are in short supply, no pun intended. We are experiencing significant labour-market problems across the country. This is well established and understood.
What is maybe less well appreciated is the role public policy plays in these decisions and problems. A decade ago, slashing the number of teachers we’d graduate each year made sense. It stopped making sense between now and then, but no one in power seemed to notice or feel moved to do anything about it. Readers of mine will know that I’ve been spending a lot of time lately speaking with health-care-system participants. We face massive staffing challenges in our health-care sector, too. And the teacher shortage today makes me wonder about how we are responding to the medical-professional shortage of today.
We urgently need more health-care workers, and we should obviously do everything we can to train and recruit them. But I cannot help but wonder how long it will be until some future government looks at all the money we’re spending to recruit and train doctors, nurses, technicians, and all the rest and decides that it can probably spend a little bit less (or maybe a lot less) because the short-term needs have been met — thus setting up another staffing crisis that will hit us a decade or a generation down the way.
From the perspective of today, that’d be a nice problem to have. And given the disaster that is our health-care system, it might be decades — I’d rather not even consider a longer timeframe — before we’d find ourselves with too many doctors and nurses. But our current shortage of both teachers and medical professionals, and just about every other damn thing that you can imagine, forces me to wonder whether we are going to constantly be subjected to public-sector-employee boom-and-bust cycles. The labour market works on a timescale of decades, and governments think in terms of a single mandate, at best.
It would be nice if we could figure out a way to do better at this. I’ve already lived through one full cycle for educators. Assuming I enjoy a fairly normal life expectancy, that probably means I’ll see two or three, maybe even four, more. Fewer would be better. Here’s hoping.
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