Strike Votes and Strikes: What the Public Record Shows

How often Ontario’s education unions have voted to strike, how often they actually struck, and what it meant for students, from 1996 to 2026.

Summary

All five of Ontario’s major education unions are holding strike votes this month. Parents will hear a great deal about what a strike vote means. This article sets out, from public records, how often the unions have voted to authorize a strike and how often they have struck over the last thirty years. No complete count for teachers and support staff was found, and local records before 2014 are incomplete, so the counts here are a minimum. Four findings stand out.

1. Strike votes almost always pass, by wide margins. Of the fourteen central strike votes held by the education unions in the three bargaining rounds from 2014 to 2024, the thirteen with published results all passed, with between 92 and 98 per cent voting in favour.
2. A strike vote is not a strike. Six of those fourteen votes were followed by strikes. Four were followed only by work-to-rule or job action at a single school, and four by no job action at all.
3. Strikes come in waves. Teachers or support staff struck, or were locked out, at a series of boards from 1996 to 2003, and the province passed six back-to-school laws in those years. From 2003-04 to 2011-12 (with four-year provincial frameworks from 2005), strikes became rare but strike votes and job action did not stop: elementary teacher locals held strike votes and worked to rule in 2005, and two local strikes were found, in 2006 and 2007. Every provincial round from 2012 to 2022 included strike action by at least one union, most of it across the whole province; after the 2014-15 round, the remaining strikes were local (Rainy River in 2016 and Thunder Bay Catholic in 2017).
4. Many disputes have been ended by law or by an arbitrator. Since 1996 the province has passed nine laws that ended strikes or lockouts or imposed contracts, and the salaries in the most recent teacher contracts were set by an arbitrator.

1. Introduction

The collective agreements for Ontario’s teachers and education workers expired on 31 August 2026. The five major education unions are now voting on strike mandates: CUPE’s school board workers from 4 to 18 November, OSSTF from 6 to 16 November, ETFO from 9 to 18 November, OECTA on 12 and 13 November, and AEFO on 16 and 17 November (Zhu 2026; Jones 2026b). No results had been reported as of 7 November 2026.

For a parent, the useful question is not whether the votes will pass, but what usually happens next. This article does not take a side. It counts what the public record shows: strike votes and their results, job action short of a strike, strikes and lockouts, and the laws that ended them. A companion article to be published on 10 November, “How We Got Here: Eighty Years of Fights Between Ontario and Its Education Unions”, sets out what each dispute was about. This article also sets out the steps the law requires before a strike is legal, what research has found about strikes and learning, and what to watch for this fall.

2. What Counts as a Strike Vote and What Counts as a Strike

Under Ontario labour law a strike is more than stopping work. The Labour Relations Act, 1995 defines it to include “a slow-down or other concerted activity on the part of employees designed to restrict or limit output” (s. 1(1)). This is why work-to-rule, in which staff stop doing tasks outside their core duties, is legally a form of strike. This article uses four plain categories:

• Strike vote. A vote of members authorizing the union to take strike action if bargaining fails. It authorizes action; it is not itself an action.
• Work-to-rule or administrative job action. Staff stay at work but stop some duties, such as report card comments, meetings or extracurricular activities. Schools stay open.
• Strike. Staff stop work for one or more days, at one board (a local strike), in turn at several boards (rotating strikes) or across the province. Schools may close.
• Lockout. The employer keeps staff from working. Schools usually close.

Before 2014, teachers bargained board by board, and most strike votes were held locally. Some unions published province-wide results: in October 2012, OSSTF reported that 92 per cent of 60,000 members had voted in favour of strike action over Bill 115 (OSSTF 2012). Votes from 2012 are left out of Table 1 because they were not central votes under the 2014 Act. Since the School Boards Collective Bargaining Act, 2014, the major terms are bargained centrally, and each union holds a central strike vote, which makes votes from 2014 on comparable.

3. How a Strike Becomes Legal

A strike vote is only one step. Before teachers or education workers can legally strike, the law requires the steps set out in Figure 2. After a strike vote passes, a strike still cannot begin until the Minister of Labour has appointed a conciliation officer or mediator and 16 days have passed after the Minister is deemed to have released a notice that no conciliation board will be appointed (Labour Relations Act, 1995, s. 79(2)). Every employee in the bargaining unit may vote, whether or not they are a union member, and the vote is by secret ballot (s. 79(7), (8)). A dispute over which issues belong at the central table cannot itself be a reason for a strike (School Boards Collective Bargaining Act, 2014, s. 28(2)).

The clearest signal for families is the strike notice. A union must give at least five days’ written notice of a strike, with its start date: to the employer side and the province for central issues, or to the school board for local issues (School Boards Collective Bargaining Act, 2014, s. 34(3), (4)). The employer side must give the same five days’ written notice before a lockout: the employer bargaining agency, with the Crown’s agreement, for central issues, or the school board for local issues (s. 34(5), (6)).

4. Strike Votes Since 2014

Table 1 lists every central strike vote found from 2014 to 2024 and what followed it.

Round	Union	Strike vote	What followed
2014-15	OSSTF	Held in fall 2014; result not found	Strikes at the Durham, Rainbow and Peel boards from April and May 2015, ruled unlawful on 26 May
2014-15	ETFO	95 per cent (December 2014)	Work-to-rule from May to November 2015
2014-15	OECTA	94.2 per cent (April 2015)	Work-to-rule at one school (Moosonee) from 20 August 2015; tentative deal later that month
2014-15	CUPE	93 per cent (March 2015)	Work-to-rule from September to November 2015
2019-20	OSSTF	95.5 per cent of teachers and 92 per cent of education workers (November 2019)	Work-to-rule, then one-day and rotating strikes, December 2019 to March 2020
2019-20	ETFO	98 per cent (fall 2019)	Work-to-rule, then rotating and province-wide one-day strikes, January to February 2020
2019-20	OECTA	97.1 per cent (November 2019)	Province-wide and rotating one-day strikes, January to March 2020
2019-20	AEFO	97 per cent (December 2019)	Work-to-rule, then weekly province-wide strike days from February 2020
2019-20	CUPE	93 per cent (September 2019)	Work-to-rule; a strike set for 7 October 2019 was called off after a deal the night before
2019-20	OPSEU (support staff at eight boards)	96 per cent (November 2019)	No job action found
2022-24	CUPE	96.5 per cent (October 2022)	Two-day province-wide strike, 4 and 7 November 2022, after a law banning it was passed
2022-24	ETFO	95 per cent (October 2023)	No job action; tentative deal, with salary sent to arbitration
2022-24	OECTA	97 per cent (October 2023)	No job action; compensation sent to arbitration
2022-24	AEFO	93 per cent (January 2024)	No job action; salaries sent to arbitration

Every vote with a published result passed, and none with less than 92 per cent. In 2022, Global News reported that the Minister of Education found the result unsurprising, given the unions’ history of voting for strikes (Global News 2022).

What followed varied. Six of the fourteen votes led to strikes: OSSTF’s in 2014-15, all four teachers’ unions in 2019-20, and CUPE’s in 2022. Three led only to work-to-rule (ETFO and CUPE in 2015, CUPE in 2019), and one to job action at a single school (OECTA in 2015). Four led to no job action at all: OPSEU in 2019, and ETFO, OECTA and AEFO in 2023-24, whose remaining issues went to an arbitrator.

5. Strikes and Lockouts, 1996 to 2026

Table 2 sets out the strike action found in each period, and Figure 1 shows it by union.

Period	Strikes, lockouts and job action found	How it ended
1996-97	OSSTF secondary strike at the Lennox and Addington County Board of Education, from 9 December 1996	Ended by Bill 113, the Lennox and Addington County Board of Education and Teachers Dispute Settlement Act, 1997, 30 January 1997
1997	Province-wide political strike by all teachers’ federations against Bill 160, 27 October to 7 November, about 126,000 teachers (CBC Archives n.d.); schools closed for 10 school days (Baker 2011, 2, 6)	Teachers returned on 10 November; Bill 160 became law as the Education Quality Improvement Act, 1997
1998-99	Strikes and board lockouts at eight boards in September 1998, mostly at secondary schools; elementary strikes at four boards, 5 to 15 school days each	Back to School Act, 1998 for the eight boards
2000-01	Elementary strikes at four boards, 3 to 17 school days each, including a one-day strike and a 16-day board lockout at Hamilton-Wentworth (Brown 2008); support staff strikes at the Toronto District School Board and Windsor-Essex Catholic board in spring 2001	Back-to-school laws for Hamilton-Wentworth (2000) and Toronto and Windsor (2001)
2002-03	Secondary strike at Simcoe Muskoka Catholic; elementary strikes at Simcoe Muskoka Catholic and Windsor-Essex Catholic; board lockout at Toronto Catholic, 13 school days; work-to-rule by nearly a third of ETFO teacher bargaining units (Brown 2008)	Back-to-school laws for Simcoe Muskoka Catholic (2002) and Toronto Catholic (2003)
2003-04 to 2011-12	September 2004 to May 2005: work-to-rule by Toronto District School Board support staff; winter 2005: ETFO teacher locals held strike votes, followed by work-to-rule across the province; spring 2005: work-to-rule by Toronto secondary teachers; 2006: strike by ETFO occasional teachers at Near North; 2007: support staff strike at the Durham District School Board from 21 March	Four-year provincial frameworks for 2004 to 2008 (agreements reached in 2005) and 2008 to 2012; in 2008, ETFO was the only bargaining group left without one
2012-13	ETFO one-day strikes board by board, 10 to 20 December 2012; teachers withdrew from extracurricular activities	Contracts imposed under Bill 115 on 3 January 2013
2014-15	OSSTF strikes at Durham (from 20 April), Rainbow (27 April) and Peel (4 May 2015); ETFO and CUPE work-to-rule into November 2015	Strikes ruled unlawful on 26 May; Protecting the School Year Act, 2015; deals in fall 2015
2015-17 (local)	Local only: OSSTF partial withdrawal of services at Rainy River from December 2015, then one-day-a-week strikes from 27 April 2016; OECTA rotating strikes at Thunder Bay Catholic elementary (February 2017)	Local settlements of the 2014-17 round (Dunick 2017); central agreements later extended to 2019
2019-20	All four teachers’ unions: work-to-rule, rotating and province-wide one-day strikes, including a joint province-wide strike on 21 February 2020; CUPE work-to-rule	Negotiated deals, March and April 2020
2022	CUPE two-day province-wide strike, 4 and 7 November; many boards closed schools	Bill 28 repealed; negotiated deal, December 2022
2023-26	No job action	Teachers’ salaries set by arbitration awards (2024)

What the record shows

Three patterns stand out. First, the local era before 2003 produced many separate strikes at individual boards. Baker counts at least 101 teacher strikes in Ontario from 1975 to 2005, lasting almost 19 school days on average (Baker 2011, 3), and in 1992 a member told the Legislature that the Education Relations Commission had recorded “some 56 strikes” from 1975 to 1991 (Legislative Assembly of Ontario 1992). Each strike closed schools at one board, sometimes for weeks.

Second, strikes became rare for about nine years, but strike votes and job action did not stop. Baker notes that starting in the 2003-04 school year “there have been no strikes in the Ontario public school system” (Baker 2011, 6), but ETFO records one: a strike by occasional teachers at Near North in 2006 (Brown 2008). CUPE support staff at Durham struck in 2007 (CUPE 2007). Before ETFO signed the first four-year provincial framework in April 2005, its teacher locals held strike votes in the winter of 2005, followed by work-to-rule across the province (Brown 2008). In the Rainy River area, for example, teachers stopped administrative tasks and staff meetings after March break (Rainy River Record 2005). The Toronto District School Board’s support staff worked to rule from September 2004 to May 2005, and Toronto secondary teachers worked to rule that spring (Globe and Mail 2005). When the second framework was negotiated in 2008, ETFO was the only bargaining group in the school boards left without one (BayToday 2008). The province offered boards $750 million in 2005 “in the hopes of buying four years of peace” with secondary teachers (Globe and Mail 2005), and strikes were rare while the frameworks were in place.

Third, since central bargaining began in 2014, disputes have become province-wide. In each provincial round from 2012 to 2022, job action by at least one union reached boards across the province, though in 2015 most of it was work-to-rule, which is legally a strike. The strikes themselves have been shorter: one-day or rotating strikes rather than weeks-long closures at a single board. The exception was the 2015 OSSTF strikes at three boards, which kept more than 70,000 students out of class until the Labour Relations Board ruled them unlawful (Canadian Press 2015b).

6. How Disputes Have Ended

Progressive Conservative and Liberal governments alike have ended school disputes by law. Since 1996 the province has passed nine such laws: back-to-school laws in 1997, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2015, the 2012 law under which contracts were imposed in January 2013, and the 2022 law that imposed a contract on support staff and banned their strike before it began. The 2012 law was later found to have breached the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the 2022 law was repealed within days of passing (see the companion history).

Other rounds ended without strikes because the parties agreed to let someone else decide. In 2023 and 2024, ETFO, OECTA and AEFO reached central agreements that sent salaries and other unresolved items to arbitration, and OSSTF agreed to send all unresolved items to binding arbitration; OSSTF said there would be no strikes or lockouts during the round (Global News 2023b). The awards for ETFO and OSSTF in May 2024 set raises of 3, 3, 2.75 and 2.5 per cent over the four years; OECTA was still waiting for its award at that time (YGK News 2024).

7. What This Means for Families

For families, the record suggests a few practical points.

• A strike vote result says little on its own. Every vote with a published result since 2014 passed with at least 92 per cent. The signal that matters is a strike notice: a union must first be in a legal strike position and must give notice before job action begins; in 2022 CUPE had to give five days’ notice of any job action (Global News 2022).
• Most job action starts small. In 2015 and 2019 job action began with work-to-rule, which keeps schools open but can stop report card comments, field trips and extracurricular activities, before any strike days.
• Province-wide strikes have been short; local strikes were long. The province-wide strikes since 2012 lasted one or two days at a time. Local strikes before 2003 lasted 3 to 17 school days at the elementary boards Baker studied, and the Lennox and Addington secondary strike ran from 9 December 1996 to 30 January 1997, about seven calendar weeks including the winter break (Legislative Assembly of Ontario 1997).
• Lost days are rarely made up. Baker found that school days lost to strikes were typically not made up (Baker 2011, 11).

Students with special education needs who rely on educational assistants are directly affected when support staff stop work, and schools may close even when teachers are at work, as several boards did in November 2022 (Jackson 2022).

8. Do Strikes Hurt Learning?

Strike days are lost school days, and in Ontario they are typically not made up (Baker 2011, 11). The most detailed Ontario study of what that means for learning is Michael Baker’s 2011 working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research. He compared how school cohorts’ scores on the provincial EQAO tests grew between Grade 3 and Grade 6 when they had a teacher strike, from 1998 to 2005, with growth for cohorts that had no strike, including cohorts in comparable boards (Baker 2011, 3, 4).

He found that long strikes, of 10 school days or more, in Grade 6 reduced score growth in reading and especially in math. For math the reduction was 29 per cent of the standard deviation of school-level average scores (Baker 2011, 4). The gain in the share of students meeting the provincial standard in math between Grades 3 and 6 was just over 5 percentage points smaller than for students with no strike, almost 9 per cent of the average pass rate (Baker 2011, 24, 31). The Grade 6 result rests mainly on two long strikes, at the Simcoe Muskoka Catholic and Toronto Catholic boards in 2002-03 (Baker 2011, 23). Strikes in Grades 2 and 3 had a small negative effect that was not statistically significant, and when Baker re-ran his analysis by comparing students with and without a strike at a single point in time, the method most earlier studies used, the effect was small and not statistically significant (Baker 2011, 3, 4, 33).

The study looked at long local strikes. The province-wide strikes since 2012 have lasted one or two days at a time, and School Board Research found no public study of their effect on learning. Work-to-rule has costs that are harder to measure: Baker notes that the two long strikes behind his Grade 6 result were each preceded by a work-to-rule campaign, which does not change the days of instruction but does change “the general atmosphere at the school” (Baker 2011, 24).

9. What Happens Next: Fall 2026

As of 7 November 2026, this is where the round stands.

• 3 June 2026. The five major education unions served notice to bargain, naming student needs, violence in schools, special education, class sizes and staffing (Wilson 2026).
• 31 August 2026. The collective agreements expired. Bill 101, which received Royal Assent on 7 May 2026, had made the Council of Ontario Directors of Education the employer bargaining agency for English-language boards, in place of the trustee associations (Legislative Assembly of Ontario 2026).
• Central or local? Bargaining stalled over which issues are bargained centrally and which locally, and the question was referred to the Ontario Labour Relations Board (Jones 2026a). On 3 November, CUPE said it still expected the decision within two weeks (CUPE-OSBCU 2026); School Board Research had not found a published decision as of 7 November 2026.
• 4 to 18 November. All five unions are holding strike votes, the last ending on 18 November (Zhu 2026; Jones 2026b).
• 30 November and 15 and 16 December. Central bargaining dates set for CUPE’s education workers (CUPE-OSBCU 2026).

Before any legal strike, the steps in Figure 2 must be completed. News that a conciliation officer has been appointed, that a no-board notice has been issued and, finally, that a union has given five days’ notice of a strike are the signals that job action may be close. Each union posts bargaining updates on its website, and boards post labour updates for families.

10. Has Anyone Counted This Before?

No complete public count was found. The closest are the Education Relations Commission’s figures for 1975 to 1991, cited in the Legislature in 1992, and Michael Baker’s study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, which counted teacher strikes from 1975 to 2005 using the Commission’s records and the federal government’s work stoppage data, checked against Ministry of Education records (Baker 2011, 10 to 11). Neither counts support staff, and neither counts strike votes. News timelines cover single rounds (Rocca 2020). Statistics Canada publishes counts of work stoppages by province and industry, but not of strike votes or job action short of a stoppage (Statistics Canada 2026).

11. Conclusion: Ask What Comes After the Vote

Strike votes have passed in every recent round. What happens next is decided at the central tables, where the province sits with the unions and the employer bargaining agencies, and in each board’s local bargaining. The Minister of Education answers for the province’s position, and your MPP can ask on your behalf. Parents have standing to ask: there were 2,095,193 students in Ontario’s publicly funded schools in 2024-25 (Ontario Ministry of Education 2026). Private school and home-schooling families are not counted in that figure.

1. Find your MPP by street address and postal code at ola.org, and ask how the province plans to reach agreements without closing schools and what its offers would cost. Read both the province’s and the unions’ bargaining updates.
2. Write to your trustees, at any time and without the school’s permission, about how job action would affect your child, including support for students with special education needs.
3. Watch your board’s labour updates page for notice of job action, and plan for child care on any strike day.
4. Read the companion articles on the history of these disputes (10 November), the education unions (12 November) and educational assistants (13 November) as they are published.

A strike vote is a warning, not a strike. Over thirty years, what came after it has depended on what the province and the unions did at the table.

Annex: Data, Method and Limitations

Sources. Strike votes, job action and settlements were taken from union announcements, news reports, the Legislative Assembly’s bill pages and debates, and Ontario statutes. Each fact is cited in the text or tables. Where sources disagreed on a date, the date given by the Legislature or the statute was used.

What is counted. Table 1 counts central strike votes from 2014 to 2024, one per union per round; OSSTF’s 2019 vote is counted once although teachers and education workers voted separately. AEFO’s 2014-15 vote was not found and is not counted. Votes from 2012, including OSSTF’s province-wide 92 per cent vote, are not counted because they were not central votes under the 2014 Act, and CUPE’s 2012 result could not be confirmed from a primary source. Most local strike votes before 2014 are not counted because no complete record of them was found; the local votes and work-to-rule of 2005 are described from union and news reports rather than counted. Table 2 and Figure 1 count strike action by union and period; one mark can stand for strikes at several boards.

Limits. Local strikes and lockouts before 2014 are listed only where a statute, Baker’s table or a contemporary report records them, so the list is a minimum. Secondary and support staff disputes in 1996 to 2003 are less fully recorded than elementary ones. A CUPE notice of a custodial strike at the Durham Catholic board, which appears to date from 2002, could not be dated with certainty and is not counted. Baker’s count of 101 strikes and the Commission’s count of 56 are their own and were not rechecked. School days lost are given only where a source states them; no provincial total exists. The 2026 strike votes were still under way on 7 November 2026.

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• OPSEU. 2019. “OPSEU Members Join Other Education Workers in Giving Overwhelming Strike Mandate.” Newswire, 15 November 2019. https://newswire.ca/news-releases/opseu-members-join-other-education-workers-in-giving-overwhelming-strike-mandate-881070939.html
• OSSTF. 2012. “OSSTF/FEESO Members Show Solidarity with Strong Strike Vote Mandate across Province.” GlobeNewswire, 3 October 2012. https://globenewswire.com/press-release/osstf-feeso-members-show-solidarity-with-strong-strike-vote-mandate-across-province-1709004.htm
• OSSTF. 2016. “OSSTF/FEESO to Commence Full Withdrawal of Services at Rainy River District School Board.” GlobeNewswire, 25 April 2016. https://rss.globenewswire.com/news-release/2016/04/25/1040568/0/en/OSSTF-FEESO-to-Commence-Full-Withdrawal-of-Services-at-Rainy-River-District-School-Board.html
• Rainy River Record. 2005. “Local Elementary Teachers to Work to Rule.” 15 March 2005. https://rainyriverrecord.com/node/1765
• Rocca, Ryan. 2020. “Ontario Teachers’ Strike Timeline.” Global News, 21 January 2020, updated 24 April 2020. https://globalnews.ca/news/6433115/ontario-teachers-strike-timeline
• Sarnia News Today. 2019. “Education Minister Wants Mediation Talks with Teachers Unions.” 18 November 2019. https://sarnianewstoday.ca/chatham/news/2019/11/18/education-minister-wants-mediation-talks-teachers-unions
• Sarnia News Today. 2023. “Catholic Teachers Give Union a Strike Mandate.” 19 October 2023. https://sarnianewstoday.ca/chatham/news/2023/10/19/catholic-teachers-give-union-a-strike-mandate
• School Boards Collective Bargaining Act, 2014, S.O. 2014, c. 5. https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/14s05
• Statistics Canada. 2026. Table 14-10-0352-01, “Work Stoppages in Canada, by Jurisdiction and Industry Based on the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS).” https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1410035201
• Wilson, Jermaine. 2026. “Ontario Education Unions Serve Formal Notice to Bargain. Here Is What Parents Should Know.” CP24, 3 June 2026. https://www.cp24.com/local/toronto/2026/06/03/ontario-education-unions-serve-formal-notice-to-bargain-here-is-what-parents-should-know/
• YGK News. 2024. “Teachers Awarded Over 11% in Wage Increases.” 31 May 2024. https://ygknews.ca/2024/05/31/teachers-awarded-over-11-in-wage-increases/
• Zhu, Eva. 2026. “Ontario Education Unions to Hold Strike Votes in November 2026.” NOW Toronto, 27 September 2026. https://nowtoronto.com/news/ontario-education-unions-strike-votes-november-2026/

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School Board Research publishes independent analysis of Ontario school board data and policy. We are not lawyers, and nothing in this publication is legal advice. If you identify an error, please write to info@schoolboardresearch.ca. Corrections are noted on the page where they are made.