Moving From Crisis to Crisis

• The 2010s were a time of significant change and upheaval. In the wake of the 2007/2008 financial crisis, governments struggled to deal with the resulting devastation, deficits, and rising unemployment.

   

• Austerity and Pullback

  In 2010, the Liberal government introduced a two-year wage freeze for about 350,000 non-unionized public sector workers. The move was in keeping with the austerity measures introduced by governments around the world.

   

  By 2011, though, the government had pledged to inject new funding into the higher-education sector. This was not enough, however, to “right the ship” in an increasingly underfunded sector. In 2014, although the Liberals pledged to increase the number of government-funded student places in colleges and universities by 60,000 over four years, per-student funding actually fell by 7% over the next three years and tuition fees began to steadily climb.

   

  By 2015, the funding crisis had become clear. In response, the government introduced the Funding Formula Review, which re-evaluated the formula by which Ontario’s universities were funded. It included measures to determine “outcomes” as a way to implement a new funding model. 

   

  In 2018, the Progressive Conservatives won a majority government, which quickly reversed course on a number of the Liberals’ initiatives. For example, 2019’s Bill 124, the Protecting a Sustainable Public Sector for Future Generations Act, imposed a 1% cap per year on wage increases for public-sector employees for three years. 

   

  The government also announced a plan to institute performance-based funding in the higher-education sector, which tied 60% of funding to outcomes or “performance” measures. It argued that this new “business model”–based approach would incentivize universities to be more productive, efficient, and “in tune” with the labour market’s needs.

   

  It also drastically modified the Ontario Student Assistance Program, making more students ineligible for loans and increasing expected parental and student contributions.

   

  

  OCUFA President, Executive Director, and staff in front of OCUFA’s office at 17 Isabella Street, Toronto, October 2014. Front row: Mark Rosenfeld (Executive Director), Andrea Calver; second row (left to right): Donna Gray, Karen Wheeler, Kimiko Inouye, Lisa Alexis; third row (left to right): Erica Rayment, Brynne Sinclair-Waters, Gail McCaughey; back row (left to right): Russell Janzen, Graeme Stewart, Kate Lawson (President). Missing: Karat TenBrinke.

• Changing Times, Evolving Priorities

  In response to the upheaval, OCUFA worked to educate and inform Ontarians about the quality and sustainability of the province’s universities. OCUFA’s “We Teach Ontario” campaign, for example, promoted the connection between teaching and research in universities through highlighting the research of featured professors.

   

  In 2012, OCUFA launched an anti-austerity education and mobilization campaign, highlighting the significant funding challenges facing the higher education sector and the government’s unwillingness to address what was quickly becoming a funding crisis. In 2015, the organization held its first annual Advocacy Day, at which representatives from its member organizations met with members of the Legislature at Queen’s Park.

   

  OCUFA’s 2015 Funding Formula Review Handbook, created after extensive engagement with the government on the issue, helped guide its member organizations through the review’s principles and laid out its own: “Funding should be: adequate, committed to core activities, student-centred, supportive of good jobs, stable and predictable, equitable, transparent, and respectful of universal autonomy and academic freedom.”

   

  Near the end of the decade, after Bill 124’s introduction, OCUFA began what would become a years-long fight to challenge the constitutionality of the Bill, mobilizing its members and working with other labour organizations.

  

  Mark Langer, President of OCUFA, 2009–11, supports striking faculty during the Northern Ontario School of Medicine Faculty and Staff Association (NOSMFSA) strike, Thunder Bay, 2010.

• The foundational, systemic problem we have in our sector is the lack of adequate funding and the quantity of funding. It’s pretty straightforward.

  OCUFA Executive Director

  Jenny Ahn

• The last 10 years have, in many ways, been devastating to universities. They've made it significantly more difficult for universities to accomplish [their] goals. We want to have a strong, solid core of vibrant research communities, which have been under threat because of the lack of funding for research itself.

  OCUFA President, 2023-2025

  Nigmendra Narain

• When I joined OCUFA it felt like we were in kind of a steady state. Like we knew the lay of the land, and we were fighting for more funding and we were concerned about the rise in contract faculty and those issues, but I think we had no idea just how bumpy that ride could get, and it’s just never levelled out since then.

  OCUFA President, 2017–2019

  Gyllian Phillips

• Within the last 10 years, we’ve been in a period of real dormant constraint in terms of funding for universities. So I feel like it sort of grew slowly, and I’m not sure we were necessarily fully appreciative of how bad it was going to get. I just remember this kind of consistent sense that at least this is the worst it’s going to get. And then it wasn’t. And I think we finally came to a point where we realized we had to structure ourselves and behave differently if we were going to survive this, because it wasn’t going to get any better.

  OCUFA President, 2021-2023

  Sue Wurtele

• For performance-based funding, it was the conception that if you tie funding to these goals, that universities will behave in a way that will meet those goals, without really accounting for what those goals are, how realistic was it to achieve them, and what were some of the worse outcomes of that. And if you tied funding and universities didn’t meet the benchmark, what happens then? Well, they were penalized. So essentially they were in a worse situation, and it made it much more difficult to reach those goals.

  OCUFA Executive Director, 2011-2020

  Mark Rosenfeld