Premier Doug Ford says that Ontario’s education unions need to “step up” and “get with the program” ahead of the resumption of school next month.
Ford made the comment to reporters as he toured a manufacturing facility in the Ottawa area on Thursday afternoon.
He said that while he respects and appreciates Ontario’s public school teachers, his “patience is running low” with unions that he claims have fought his government’s efforts to reopen schools for in-person instruction.
“The teachers unions have to get with the program right now and do what everyone else is doing across the country and that is all pulling in the same direction,” he said.
Ontario’s public schools have been closed since March but will reopen in early September with strict new measures to ensure physical distancing, including daily symptom checks.
Elementary school students will attend classes in-person five days a week but secondary school students will only do so on alternating days in order to reduce class sizes.
On Thursday Ford initially said that it is time for teachers to “step up” but he quickly clarified his remarks to make it clear that his problem is with the teachers unions who he says “have wanted to replace every government for the last 50 years.”
In a message posted to Twitter on Thursday afternoon, Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation President Harvey Bischof said Ford’s rhetoric “does nothing to inspire confidence for a safe return” and is more geared toward “belittling teachers.”
He said that teachers and education workers are “absolutely prepared to step up” but want “the same safeguards” as other frontline workers, such as two metres of physical distancing.
Liberal Leader Steven Del Duca also weighed in on Twitter, taking issue with a comment from Ford suggesting that “everyone else has sacrificed.”
“What is Doug Ford asking them to sacrifice? Their lives?” he wrote. “PSWs [personal support workers] caught COVID and died because Ford didn’t give them PPE [personal protective equipment]. Now he won’t give students and teachers a safe reopening.”
The Ford government has provided school boards with a total of $30 million to be directed towards hiring more teachers to help reduce class sizes. They have also allowed boards to dip into their reserve funds to hire more teachers.
The government, however, has faced criticism from teacher unions who have said that it has not done enough to keep its members safe, with several of them previously indicating that they were considering legal action over the back-to-school plans.
During a subsequent news conference on Thursday afternoon, Ford did not repeat his criticism of the unions. He added that he has “all the confidence in the world that the teachers are going to step up” and help ensure a safe return to school for Ontario’s two million public school students.
