The Canadian Press
TORONTO–The Ontario government is offering a full tuition refund to students who withdraw from this semester because of the province’s five-week-long college strike.
The Ministry of Advanced Education said students will have two weeks from the resumption of classes tomorrow to decide whether or not they want to continue with the condensed semester.
The government noted students also will be eligible to receive up to $500 for unexpected costs they incurred because of the labour dispute, such as child-care fees, rebooked train or bus tickets, or rent.
College faculty in Ontario headed back to their schools today after the strike was ended over the weekend with back-to-work legislation.
The 12,000 professors, instructors, counsellors and librarians, who had been on strike since Oct. 15, returned to work to prepare for students’ return tomorrow.
Colleges are extending their semesters so students don’t lose their terms, but trying to condense five missed weeks into roughly two extra ones will be very stressful, student advocates warn.
“It’s going to be a very busy rest of the semester for students,” said Joel Willett, president of the College Student Alliance.
“They have indicated to us that they are very frustrated.”
Around 500,000 students have been out of class since the strike began.
The colleges welcomed the back-to-work legislation, saying all efforts at the bargaining table had been exhausted.
“The strike has been incredibly disruptive to students and we needed to end it,” Sonia Del Missier, the head of the colleges’ bargaining team, said in a statement.
But the Ontario Public Service Employees Union said it is looking at the possibility of a constitutional challenge to the legislation.
“On the face of it, it’s a violation but there’s, of course, many wrinkles,” said president Warren (Smokey) Thomas.
“We will challenge it in one form or another,” he vowed.
Matthews lamented what she characterized as unnecessary procedural delays by the NDP in getting the back-to-work legislation passed.
The Liberal government first tried to introduce and pass its back-to-work bill in one fell swoop Thursday evening after restarted talks between the colleges and the faculty’s union reached an impasse.
But unanimous consent of all parties was needed and the NDP refused, leading the government to introduce the legislation on Friday and debate it through special weekend sittings.
If it had been passed Thursday, students would have returned to class today instead of tomorrow.
“For people who have classes on Monday, it’s another week that the strike has been delayed, so it is real,” Matthews stressed.
“It is a meaningful delay and completely unnecessary.”
But NDP leader Andrea Horwath said she disagreed with that assessment.
The NDP needed to do due diligence, she said, including actually reading the bill.
“There is no person, I think, in Ontario that would sign a contract without reading it, so there was no way that could have happened on Thursday,” she said.
“I was not about to pass legislation that I hadn’t seen.”
Horwath, meanwhile, slammed Matthews for letting the strike drag on for five weeks in the first place, but Matthews said the government let the two sides try to hammer out a deal for as long as they could.
“But when they came back and said, ‘There is not a glimmer of hope, we are in a deadlock,’ that was when we moved to save the semester for students,” she noted.
The legislation sends all outstanding issues to binding mediation-arbitration.
