Ontario Election 2025
Send an email to four Ontario election leadership candidates asking them to show their support for strong sectoral funding, long-term investments for Northern universities, removing barriers to domestic student enrolment, fairness for contract faculty, and increased student aid at all Ontario’s universities.
OCUFA is a strong advocate for accessible, high-quality postsecondary education delivered through secure academic jobs, by publicly funded, autonomous universities that are governed collegially through shared governance. This vision has been mobilized through several policies and OCUFA’s broader advocacy work and informs the organization’s political lobbying.
2025 Ontario Provincial Election:
On January 28, 2025, Premier Doug Ford announced his intentions to dissolve government and proceed with a snap election call. The election will be held February 27, 2025. OCUFA has developed an advocacy platform to guide the work ahead and mobilize our key election priorities.
Here are OCUFA’s solutions for stronger universities, and a stronger Ontario:
- Ontario provides its universities with the lowest level of funding in Canada. This low funding has negative impacts on the quality of education, affordability, and puts at risk Ontario universities’ ability to meet the growing demand for university education in the future.
- Inadequate public funding has caused Ontario’s postsecondary institutions to rely on the enrolment of international students. In lieu of additional funding, international tuition fees have become an incredibly important source of revenue for Ontario’s universities, owing to the higher rates that these students pay. This is coming to an end with changes coming to international student visa rules in Canada.
- The solution to the funding crisis facing Ontario’s universities requires both improved funding and a better funding model that acknowledges how much Ontario universities already do, for the lowest amount of financial support in the country.
Election Priorities:
- Increase total provincial university funding by 11.75 percent annually for a five-year period to bring Ontario close to the Canadian average in per-domestic student funding. This would include a $511.8 million funding commitment in year one.
- This approach is consistent with the government’s own Blue-Ribbon panel recommendations and would cost $700 million less than the $3.2 billion required to issue cheques to all Ontarians.
- University graduates have lower unemployment rates and enhanced resilience to recover from economic downturns, such as those experienced in 2008 and 2020.
- The higher salaries associated with a university education are significant and transformative. On average, for Ontarians aged 35 to 44:
- high school graduates made $46,960;
- college graduates made $56,550;
- university graduates with bachelor’s degrees made $80,100; and
- university graduates with master’s degrees made $90,700.
- Higher university wages circulate in the economy and promote economic activity, benefiting even those without a university education.
- The Ontario government is rightly concerned about the crisis of affordability. Higher earnings will help make life more affordable, and a university education can help Ontarians realize these benefits.
Election Priorities:
- Convert more loans into grants to ensure postsecondary education is accessible and affordable for domestic students and their families.
- Introduce an updated funding model that doesn’t cap and/or penalize universities for the enrolment of domestic students.
- Ontario’s universities benefit the entire province, but their impact is especially felt in Ontario’s North.
- Northern universities are committed to serving their local communities. They deliver programming and services that directly address identified community needs.
- In the North, universities aren’t just schools, they are economic hubs that have a transformational effect on their ability to innovate or even become a more diverse society.
Election Priorities:
- Double and make permanent the Northern Ontario Grant for Universities over its 2024-25 total to reflect the immense contributions of Ontario’s Northern universities and their unique costs, with annual increases thereafter tied to inflation.
- According to Statistics Canada, Ontario is experiencing a demographic swell of youth aged populations, which will only increase the need for postsecondary education options in the province. The caps on funded domestic students made sense in a time of demographic decline, however, in the context of a boom in the population of young Ontarians, this approach is no longer relevant.
- Without greater public funding, 100,000 qualified domestic students will soon be unfunded due to domestic enrolment caps introduced through the Ministry of Colleges and Universities’ corridor funding model.
- These prospective students are at risk of not finding a spot in any Ontario university. Because of this, Ontario is at risk of a brain drain that takes young Ontario talent – and the economic benefits they entail – elsewhere.
Election Priorities:
- Introduce an updated funding model that doesn’t cap and penalize universities for the enrolment of domestic students.
- Convert more loans into grants to provide incentives for prospective students from Ontario to ensure we don’t lose our best and brightest talent.
- Low provincial funding means that Ontario’s universities are relying more than ever on contract faculty.
- Contract faculty are hired by individual course, or on limited-term appointments. Despite many teaching the same course for many years and this being their only source of income, many must reapply for their jobs every term, earn less pay than their full-time colleagues and lack access to employer-paid benefits.
- Hiring contract faculty into permanent positions will create more good jobs on our campuses and allow them to invest in their local economies.
Election Priorities:
- The Ontario Government can help to end this precarious work crisis by introducing an updated funding model that allows universities to commit long-term to stable and permanent employment for a higher proportion of contract faculty members.
- Increase total provincial university funding by 11.75 percent annually for a five-year period to bring Ontario close to the Canadian average in per-domestic student funding.
- Reform Employment Standards Act language to include equal pay for work of equivalent value for workers in the province, including contract faculty, using a pro-rata system.
The lead-up to the February 27, 2025 Ontario election is a crucial time to mobilize your membership to elect MPPs committed to championing sufficiently funded, public postsecondary education and fairness for contract faculty. Planning education and engagement opportunities over the winter semester will mean you and your members are ready for election day (with materials, an organizing plan, and commitments from allies).
Potential member engagement activities:
Election time is a great opportunity for associations to engage their members on political issues. This toolkit offers ways to engage your members and allies in various events, actions, and activities, as well as materials and resources. This includes:
All candidate events can be a great opportunity to hear from political candidates about your members’ key issues and to ask questions about how they plan to deal with the big issues facing our sector. Communications directly to members or staff at associations around key issues is not considered political advertising.
We recommend inviting candidates from all political parties to your event to provide the widest breadth of perspective.
Why organize an all-candidates event?
⮞ They are excellent opportunities to discuss issues in the university sector with the public.
⮞ They place candidates in a situation where they must make statements on faculty and academic librarian issues for which they can later be held accountable.
⮞ All-candidates events provide a forum where faculty association members can make important personal contact with candidates.
⮞ The events provide faculty associations with increased visibility to the candidates, the media, and the public.
Types of all-candidate events
All-candidate events can take several forms.
1. All-candidate debates (these can only be hosted during the election period):
- Invite the candidates to participate in a debate on campus or online about postsecondary issues and other matters of concern to the university community.
- The format is usually series of short 5–7 minute speeches by the candidates, followed by questions from the floor. It is also good to give candidates 2–3 minutes at the end for to make closing remarks.
2. All-candidate meet and greets:
- Organize a social event on campus or virtually and invite the candidates and your members.
- Let the candidates know that your members want to hear specifically about issues in the university sector so they can prepare properly.
- Give each candidate 5–7 minutes to speak.
- Provide time for your members and the candidates to mingle.
3. If your institution or association is already hosting an event, consider inviting the candidates.
- If candidates do attend, consider giving them time to introduce themselves and/or speak briefly to members.
Planning an all-candidates event
Consider organizing the event in cooperation with the students’ association, the administration, and other campus groups and unions. If practical, work with other faculty associations in your area. This will allow the work of organizing the event to be shared more broadly and provide a larger pool of potential event attendees.
In person:
✓ Choose a venue that is accessible to people from the university and the community. Public parking should be nearby, public transit should be available, and the venue should be equipped to accommodate people with disabilities.
✓ Make sure you are following health and safety guidelines for your region and that you are clearly communicating these precautions to attendees.
✓ Book a room early. Choose a space that you can fill with people. You will have a much more energetic and livelier event if the room is filled to capacity. Arrange for refreshments if possible.
✓ Arrange for A/V (microphones, a sound system, and a technician to operate the system). You may wish to set up a podium for candidates to use.
✓ Select a moderator and agree on a format. Typically, you should use a moderator familiar with both the rules of order and university funding issues.
Here are some sample moderator questions:
- What distinguishes your party’s higher education platform from those of the other parties?
- What will your party do to ensure our universities have the funding they need to provide a high-quality education to every student?
- How does your party plan to address the full-time faculty shortage in the province and the need for faculty renewal?
- Will you commit to improving Ontario labour laws to ensure contract faculty have job security, and fair pay?
- What are your party’s plans for addressing the high tuition fees and the student debt crisis in the province?
✓ Have your association president welcome everyone with opening remarks.
✓ Have some people prepared to ask questions to get things going. If possible, record the event to post on your website.
✓ Consider holding a reception or a coffee hour, either before or after the event, for the candidates and the key event organizers. This provides an opportunity to informally discuss issues and meet the candidates.
✓ Have a registration table where attendees sign-in so you have a way to gauge participation, and follow up with people after the event with more information such as OCUFA election materials and association swag (pens, hats, posters, stickers, buttons, etc.).
✓ Assign someone to take photos during the event to post on social media and share with your members afterwards.
Online:
✓ When creating the online event, be sure to include a registration link so you can get a sense of attendance and use that list to follow up with attendees afterwards.
✓ Accessibility: Virtual meeting platforms, like Zoom, often have closed captioning options that can make your event more accessible. The transcript can also be saved which makes it easy to pull quotes for your news release. Taking a few minutes at the beginning of the event to walk attendees through the raise hand, how to ask for help in the chat, and the un/mute functions will make sure everyone can participate.
✓ Security: online spaces can be a forum for trolls who want to attack candidates. To mitigate the chances of this happening consider:
-
- Making a registration link mandatory.
- Using a webinar format on zoom.
- If using webinar format, ensure the zoom permissions for sharing screen and
- Turn on the function that only allows participants to unmute if they are invited to do so by the host. Or they can submit questions and have a designated person ask them.
✓ Have two moderators, one to monitor the chat who can pass questions along to the speakers and mute/unmute speakers, and one who is posing questions and inviting participants to ask questions.
Publicity:
✓ A few days before the event, email a media advisory to all the local media outlets informing them of the details. Follow up with media on the day of the event. OCUFA staff can help you generate a list of media contacts for your region.
✓ Invite faculty association members and other campus and community groups in your area.
✓ Assign someone to meet and greet media. Have your key messages ready.
✓ Post the event to your website, include it in faculty email newsletters, and use social media channels (Facebook, X/Twitter, Instagram, YouTube) to publicize the event.
Follow up:
✓ Send “Thank you” emails to any campus union or community group allies who attended. Consider attaching some of the photos you took.
✓ Post the event photos to your website and social media channels (Facebook, X/Twitter, Instagram, YouTube), and tag the candidates.
Op-eds can be a great way to raise public awareness around a particular issue. Today, many of these articles are written by journalists. However, op-eds from members of the public and subject matter experts are also common and are usually welcomed by most print and online media. To increase the chances of your content being published, be sure to frame your issue in the context of the upcoming election and other related current events.
Pitching an op-ed
To place an op-ed, you will need to contact the op-ed editor at your target publication by email or phone.
Once you have submitted an op-ed, be prepared to see editing changes from the editor. Be sure to amplify on social media if your piece gets published.
⮞ Tone: Like media releases, op-eds should be conversational and avoid complicated statistics or technical language.
⮞ Length: A good length for an op-ed is usually 600–700 words, but each publication has its own guidelines around op-ed word counts, so make sure to check ahead of time.
⮞ Structure: Op-eds should use the “inverted pyramid.” Put the most important information and messages first.
⮞ Pitching: Only pitch to one publication at a time—you don’t want to get in an awkward situation where your article is accepted by more than one outlet. Editors want unique and exclusive content. If you are turned down by your target publication, it is acceptable to pitch your article to another magazine or newspaper. Monitor the editorial page of your targeted publication closely. This will give you an idea of what they’re focusing on and will allow you to pitch your article more effectively.
⮞ Process: If accepted, you may receive revisions from the editor. Be prepared to provide a one-line bio about who you are and a nice headshot; some publications will want to include this in the op-ed.
Most newspapers, magazines and blogs allow their readers to comment on articles or editorials instantaneously online. However, the letter to the editor can still be an effective communications tool that allows you to put your messages in front of a wide audience. Letter pages remain one of the most-read sections in newspapers. Many politicians also use letter pages to informally sample public opinion.
Letters can be sent whenever you have an opinion to express but are most effective when they fit into your messaging strategy.
Placing a Letter to the Editor
Most newspapers and magazines have a dedicated email address for submitting letters, available on their websites.
Timeliness is important with letters. Be sure to respond to an article or editorial immediately to attract the most interest.
Tips for effective Letters to the Editor
⮞ Tone: Always use a straightforward, conversational Humour is often effective in letters to the editor.
⮞ Style: The best letters are short and simple—stick to a length of about 200 words and focus on one key point.
⮞ Process: Include contact information when you submit the letter.
Encouraging member participation at local election townhalls or rallies is an important part of the electoral process. Attending such events, asking questions, and even engaging with other advocacy groups is crucial to building momentum behind our election advocacy demands, and developing coalitions with other public sector workers and unions with shared interests.
Attending a rally:
✓ Bring your faculty association’s flag or sign.
✓ Consider creating your own signage that speaks to the need for funding the university sector and restoring good academic jobs on campus.
✓ Take pictures of your members at the rally for social media and your website or newsletter. If possible, it’s always great to get a photo of the whole group.
✓ When attending the rally, take the opportunity to introduce yourself to the coordinator and see how your association and their group can keep in touch to support future actions and events.
✓ Post your pictures on social media and tag @OCUFA, or email us your pictures to post on the OCUFA account if you prefer. Use the hashtags #ONPSE #OnPoli.
Attending an election townhall:
✓ Come prepared with questions on the candidates’ platform regarding university issues. Refer to OCUFA’s “Questions for MPP Candidates Resource“.
✓ Introduce yourself to the event organizer and exchange details so you can be in touch about future events and actions.
Newsletters can be an effective way to communicate with members around election priorities. They can be distributed to a wider audience than university faculty and academic librarians, and can help to mobilize allies on campus including students, other unions on campus, and non-faculty staff at universities.
Possible content may include:
⮞ Voting information: Key dates, riding boundaries, voting times, advance polls, candidate names, contact information for campaign offices, times, and places of all-candidates meetings.
⮞ Questionnaire results: Prior to the election, OCUFA will circulate draft candidate questionnaires to send to local candidates. The answers can be included as part of the newsletter. Care must be taken to treat all candidates fairly and objectively, while giving an accurate description of their positions.
⮞ Candidate profiles: One of the prime objectives of an association’s involvement in the election is to generate interest among members and provide information which will help place postsecondary issues before the candidates and the public.
Associations are encouraged to engage members around key election priorities for the university sector. This may include circulating materials detailing key election information, including platform commitments of all parties and information about local candidates. Examples may include tabling on campus with OCUFA materials, and postering in your community.
Social media engagement
Share OCUFA’s slate of social media shareables that speak to our election advocacy platform in the days to come. Please share and personalize the messages by tagging your local candidates and labour allies.
Posting photos of you and your members attending events is a great way to demonstrate to candidates and community members that university sector issues are top of mind for voters this election.
Be sure to tag @OCUFA and use the hashtags #ONpoli and #ONPSE.
Contract faculty social media day of action – Monday, February 24
OCUFA’s annual social media day of action in support of #fairness4cf will take place on Monday, February 24.
On February 24, please amplify OCUFA’s platform priority: Stop the gigification of teaching, and provide stable, permanent jobs.
You can download the graphics below, and click here for additional resources including ready-made posts, alt-text, and French versions of all materials.
[put the 3 ‘ask your candidates’ graphics I’ve attached to this email here]
Meeting with candidates and MPPs is an effective way to ensure concerns related to universities and university faculty are understood and potentially brought forward as a campaign priority. You can strengthen your relationship with the candidate by offering them information that is helpful for their endeavours, ensuring a mutually beneficial relationship.
Suggestions for meeting with local candidates:
1.Set up and plan a meeting with the candidate
✓ Phone or email the candidate’s campaign office and ask to speak with the scheduler. Finding candidate contact information is easy—just search for their name online to find their campaign website to find all the information you need.
✓ When speaking to the scheduler or campaign manager, it is important to tell them who you represent and what you would like to discuss.
✓ Be flexible when scheduling a date and confirm the meeting a day or two before. You can take advantage of the availability of Zoom and other platforms for a virtual meeting, which would allow more flexibility and would likely increase your chances of securing a meeting with the candidate.
✓ In your confirmation email, re-introduce yourself and repeat what you will be discussing with them and why it is an important issue in their riding. If you have material to share with them (eg: OCUFA election materials or issue briefs), you can email it to the candidate ahead of the meeting.
2. Preparing for the meeting
✓ Meetings are often more effective, and less intimidating, if you go in a small group of two or three. The composition of the group should directly reflect the interests of your faculty association.
✓ If you have another association in your immediate area, consider teaming up with them for the meeting.
✓ Identify a main spokesperson for the meeting who starts the meeting and sets the tone.
✓ It is important to plan the issues you want to address in advance. You may only have about 20-30 minutes for a meeting. Attempting to address more than three or four issues will be very difficult in this limited time. Be sure to highlight the need for increased university funding, faculty renewal, and fairness for contract faculty, which are OCUFA’s election priorities.
✓ Connect OCUFA’s election priorities to how these issues affect your university and provide examples and stories where possible.
- What difference would more public funding make at your university?
- What working conditions do contract faculty face at your institution?
- Has your department or institution had sufficient full-time faculty hiring in recent years?
- How have high tuition fees and levels of student debt impacted students on your campus?
✓ It is always a good idea to emphasize the beneficial impact your university has on the wider community.
✓ Consider how to present your issues to candidates from different parties. While you should never misrepresent or depart from your priorities, individuals from different ideological perspectives will respond better to certain types of messages. For example, for a candidate who is very interested in small business emphasize the economic benefits that flow from a well-funded and high-quality university.
3. The meeting
If you plan to publish or make public the candidate’s positions, you should disclose this prior to starting the meeting.
✓ The meeting will have two primary components:
-
- The presentation of your position (as a representative of both your association and OCUFA); and
- The gathering of information and commitments from the candidate.
✓ The key to a successful meeting is presenting your facts and ideas in a clear and concise manner. An effective lobby effort is essentially a good communications campaign.
✓ Start with the basics. Be mindful that you will likely know a good deal more about the issue than the candidate.
✓ Avoid long or overly detailed presentations to allow time for the candidate to ask questions and have a conversation with you.
✓ Avoid getting sidetracked by arguments or conversations about other topics that don’t serve your priorities. Do not be afraid to politely interject and steer the conversation back to your key messages.
✓ Firmly and politely state your case and the logic behind it—then move on.
✓ If you don’t know, don’t pretend to know. If you don’t know the answer to a question, or can’t answer an objection, do not feel that you have to come up with a response in the meeting. Tell the candidate you are not sure what the answer is, but that you can follow up with a response. Make a note of their question and pass the information along to OCUFA. We can help provide you with an answer.
✓ Once you have outlined your position and concerns, ask the candidate to state their position and the position of their government if elected.
✓ Feel free to make notes during the meeting and make sure to write down their responses and comments to direct questions.
✓ Keeping in touch: leave your business card or contact information behind.
4. Follow up
✓ Send a thank you email reinforcing the key points you made in the meeting.
✓ Provide useful information that is helpful for their endeavours (e.g. studies or information on a subject of mutual interest). This also creates an avenue for you to include your message within the information you are giving. Candidates will view you as a helpful ally.
✓ Consider suggesting a follow-up meeting, an invitation for them to address your members at a membership meeting or town hall, tour of a facility or demonstration of something of interest (e.g. new technology) within the riding.
Commit to talking to 3 people, either your friends, family, neighbours, or colleagues, about the importance of this election. Use OCUFA’s resources and materials to facilitate this discussion.
Electing candidates that support universities is crucial for the viability of our sector, and our local economies.
Encourage your members to make a plan to vote. Elections can be won or lost in close ridings on well-intentioned members of the public forgetting to vote or not having the time to vote on election day.
Consider informing your members when advanced polls are open and reminding them to vote on election day. If you have specific language in your collective agreement that guarantees time off on election day to vote, include that information in a reminder to members.
Election day is also a good time to re/share OCUFA’s report card on the provincial party commitments to our election advocacy priority areas.