When eight colleagues in my department alone have left in two years, some on stress leave and others transferring out, you know something is fundamentally broken.
But the College Employer Council wants you to believe this strike is about the union being unreasonable. Instead of negotiating, they've spent the last weeks trying to convince the public that "no layoffs and no closures" is impossible. The reality is far more complex.
I work at Canadore College in North Bay and live in Sudbury. I've witnessed the human cost of management overreach firsthand. These weren't isolated departures. They were the cumulative effect of relentless management pressure that pushed people beyond what was sustainable.
As someone who works with international students, I see how this crisis cuts especially deep. By 2021, colleges had become dangerously dependent on international students, who provided 68 per cent of all tuition revenue. When the federal government capped study permits in 2024, some institutions saw international enrollment plummet by 62 per cent.
But this crisis isn't new. It's part of a pattern that spans generations, rooted in decades of government abandonment of public education.
My father taught at Sir Sandford Fleming College for 30 years, walking picket lines in 1984 and 1989 during the historic faculty strikes. I was 13 the first time I stood beside him, fighting to protect jobs and defend public education.
Decades later, here I am on a picket line for the very same reasons. The continuity is sobering, and it tells us these fights matter across generations.
While colleges struggle to survive, the Ontario government has systematically starved public education of resources. Ontario now contributes less than 25 per cent of college operating revenue, a stark contrast to other provinces where governments fund 60 per cent of operations.
This chronic underfunding forced colleges to chase international student fees just to keep their doors open, creating the dangerous dependency that's now threatening the entire system.
Meanwhile, recent revelations expose how the government has been diverting funding meant for colleges like ours to private training companies. This is theft from the people of Northern Ontario — and we know something about theft up here.
For generations, mining and forestry giants stripped our resources while profits flowed south, leaving our communities with empty mines, clear-cuts and unemployment lines. Now they're doing it again with our education dollars. It's the same colonial extraction, just with a different resource.
Here in the North, we know what happens when governments abandon working people. Our colleges — Canadore, Cambrian, Northern, Collège Boréal, Confederation — aren't just schools. They're lifelines. They're what kept communities like North Bay, Sudbury, Timmins, Sault Ste. Marie, and Thunder Bay alive when other industries failed us.
College graduates in smaller communities like ours generate 40 per cent of total earnings and sustain entire local economies. When they starve our colleges, they're condemning entire communities to decline.
The CEC wants you to believe we're being unreasonable, that we're holding up progress — they're lying. What's truly unreasonable is dismissing our concerns about job security while spouting about “stability” for a system they've helped destabilize. The CEC preaches stability while meekly accepting chronic government underfunding and choosing to gamble everything on volatile international student fees.
Where is their fight for adequate provincial funding? True stability requires demanding provincial investment in workers and infrastructure — not just accepting whatever crumbs the government offers.
Without that fight, what's really at stake goes far beyond any single proposal. The relentless push toward privatization, combined with government abandonment and the CEC's failure to fight for adequate funding, erodes the foundation that students and communities depend on. Every program cut removes opportunities from communities that may never return. Every refusal to invest in stable, full-time work weakens the institutions that serve as economic anchors across Northern Ontario. That's not stability. That's collapse.
This strike wasn't our first choice but faced with an employer unwilling to bargain fairly and a government that has abandoned its responsibility to public education, we have no alternative. The picket lines you see aren't just about wages and benefits. They're about defending Ontario's public colleges from being stripped of the resources that made them strong.
I stood with my father on a picket line 40 years ago. Today, I stand with my colleagues for the same cause: protecting good jobs, defending our students, and preserving public education in this province.
The question isn't whether we can afford to strike. It's whether we can afford not to — whether we can afford to watch programs disappear, colleges close and communities lose their economic anchors. Whether we'll hand our children a college system worthy of their potential, or one diminished by decades of cuts and government neglect.
That choice is before us now, and it's a fight worth having.
Christopher J. Duncanson-Hales works in international student services at Canadore College in North Bay. He is a member of OPSEU/SEFPO Local 658 and lives in Sudbury. He is currently on the picket line in Little Current and Sudbury as part of the ongoing college support staff strike.