Quebec Teachers Are Winning This Strike

FAE teachers on strike in Montreal. PHOTO: Alexandre Claude.

If you’ve ordered a meal on Ubereats or sat in a Montreal café recently, there’s a chance you were served by a public school teacher.

With so many on strike and without pay, money is running out for tens of thousands of Quebec’s teachers. The Rover spoke to three teachers Friday working in the gig economy until the strike ends and each say they have a handful of colleagues doing the same. 

You’d think this level of desperation would put them at a disadvantage in contract negotiations with the government. After all, Christmas is just weeks away and many of them were living paycheque to paycheque before the labour unrest began. 

But instead of buckling under the pressure, teachers say they’re willing to push themselves into deep waters.

“They’re not going to win this time, we’re ready to fight until we break them,” said Claire (not her real name), a longtime teacher and mom who picked up a part-time job at a café after her strike pay ran out last week. “The way it is now, in our schools, thousands of us are quitting every year. Thousands of us are going on burnout leave every year. Because we love our jobs, we care about our kids but we don’t have the resources to actually teach them.

“If we don’t fight now, we’re telling these parents their kids’ future doesn’t matter. If we don’t fight now, why even bother going back to work when this is over?”

On Friday, the 66,000 teachers on strike with Fédération autonome des enseignants (FAE) were joined by over 420,000 public sector workers from Quebec’s four largest labour unions. The teachers have had an unlimited strike mandate since Nov. 23 and they’ll be on the streets until at least Dec. 14. 

All told, roughly 10 per cent of the province’s workforce has been on the picket line this past month as negotiations continue to stall. That makes this the biggest labour dispute in North America since the AT&T strike of 1983.

Caught off guard by the scale of opposition to his government, Premier François Legault told reporters last week that teachers are practicing “emotional blackmail” and harming Quebec’s children. A few days later, Legault’s approval rating sank to 31 per cent, the lowest of any Canadian Premier according to a poll by Angus Reid. Just one year ago, Legault was far and away the most popular premier in the country.

A dozen teachers interviewed by The Rover say this is a sign of a government that’s lost touch with reality. The latest polling appears to bear this out.

Some 47 per cent of Quebecers support the striking public sector workers whereas just 28 per cent back the government’s position, according to a survey conducted in early November. A Léger poll published last week saw support for the workers increase to 53 per cent.

A deeper dive into the numbers suggests that support actually solidifies when broken down into specifics. 

That same Léger poll shows a staggering 82 per cent of Quebecers supporting a raise for teachers so they can catch up to the Canadian average. The starting salary for a teacher in Quebec ($44,993) ranked second to last among Canadian provinces, according to a 2021 report by Stats Canada.

Meanwhile, the survey also found three in four Quebecers are behind the nurses and healthcare workers who joined teachers on the picket line Friday.

“This isn’t just a strike, it’s turning into a movement to save what’s left of our public institutions,” said Ismaël Seck, a high school teacher who’s been picketing. “People honk their horns in support of our picket line but they also stop and give us food. There’s a bakery that has breakfast ready for us every morning, there’s restaurants that invite us to eat for free after we’ve been picketing all day.”

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The government has offered teachers a 12.5 per cent pay raise over five years and a plan to hire 19,000 support staff to help manage overcrowded classrooms. But after you factor in inflation and consider how many classrooms there are in the province, union insiders tell The Rover the offer is smoke and mirrors.

“Who are these helpers going to be? It’s going to be daycare workers, lunchtime monitors — good people, no doubt — but not trained professionals,” said Marc, a special education teacher at a Montreal-area elementary school. “They want us to shut up and babysit these kids, not teach them. One of my classes, there are seven autistic kids among 22 students, about 40 per cent are failing, and there are even more kids waiting on a diagnosis (for a learning disability) so they can get help too.

“If it’s one or two you can manage. But when it’s 40 per cent of your class that have trouble, that need their own intervention plan, that need to be put in the front of class? Fuck, I have four rows of kids who should be in the front of the class. I can’t make up front rows for them. You’ve got a third of your students who need extra time on tests and another three who need you to read the questions in their exam for them. You have three who need the help of a computer, you have one who can only answer questions orally instead of writing them down.” 

Another problem with the government’s proposed hiring blitz: there were 8,558 vacant teaching positions when the school year began in late August. The government had such a hard time finding qualified teachers that Drainville was forced to dramatically lower the ministry’s standards to “one adult per classroom.” 

“We had a used car salesman teaching English last year at our school,” said one teacher from a high school in the Montérégie region. “He had no teaching certificate, just a high school diploma. I’m not denigrating the guy, he’s doing his best, but teaching isn’t something you pick up on the fly.

“If they can’t staff our classrooms as it is I don’t know where they’re going to find 19,000 people.”

In fairness to Legault, Quebec’s public schools have been circling the drain since the austerity budgets of the mid 2000s. Back then, the Liberal government closed special education programs across the province and pushed those students to integrate them into regular classrooms.

Premier Charest promised that schools would be equipped with more than enough special educators and occupational therapists to help special needs students adjust. That never happened.

“When I started out in special education, you’d have a classroom of seven kids accompanied by a teacher and a social worker,” said Marc. “So in a school with four of those classes, that’s eight people on payroll for 28 students. What the government did was essentially spread those 28 kids into a handful of “regular” classrooms so they could save a shitload on payroll. We never recovered from that.”

Though Marc is pessimistic about the strike, some of his colleagues say they’ll fight to the bitter end.

Karl is a teacher who’s been working musician gigs lately to make up for the 11 days of pay he’s missed while on strike. He says some of his colleagues are working as delivery drivers so they can afford Christmas presents for their kids.

“No one goes without pay just for fun. Our strike fund ran out last week, we’re on our own out here. But this is what needs to be done,” said Karl, who did not want his real name published for fear of reprisals. “The pay raise they offered doesn’t come close to keeping up with inflation. And when you consider that this government gave its elected members an immediate 30 per cent raise (this year) and offered members of police unions a 20 per cent raise — and that was rejected by the way — their offer is insulting. So we’ll continue fighting.”

In many ways, the battle over better working conditions is a fight for the future of Quebec’s public school system. Unlike other Canadian provinces, Quebec subsidizes up to 75 per cent of the cost of private schooling, creating an exodus of high performing students from the public sector.

Two years ago, some 44 per cent of high school students across the province abandoned the public system for a private school. It’s hard to blame them. One study shows that only about one in six kids who go through the public school system will make it to university. And while Ontario’s public school system has a graduation rate of about 87 per cent, Quebec’s is 20 points lower.

“You’d be hard pressed to find a politician who has firsthand experience with the public system since the vast majority send their kids to private school,” said one former MNA, who did not want their name published. “They don’t live in the same world as the average Quebecer and it shows.”

What’s left of the public system is being held together by teachers who work during their days off or tutor students for hours every week in between classes. 

“I’m pretty stern about not giving my time away for free but I do an extra six hours of work every week,” said Seck. “Over the course of a year, that’s 240 hours of free labour the government gets out of me. And so many teachers do even more than that. The government knows we do this and they use it against us.

“Because — just like in healthcare — this is seen as a vocation. Both my parents were teachers, my father-in-law was a teacher, it’s seen as something much more than a job. But it’s still a job that needs to be treated as a job by our employers. Yes, if one of my students needs an extra 30 or 40 minutes to understand something, I’m going to do my best to make sure I give it to them. But I’m running out of those 40-minute blocks because we keep seeing more and more kids with learning difficulties.”

Marc says there may have been a time where he would work unpaid hours to keep up but those days are over.

“When the premier says teachers are practicing ‘emotional blackmail,’ do you think he’d speak that way to doctors or other professionals?” Marc said. “So why is it that when he speaks to teachers — who are mostly women, let’s be honest here — he’s so condescending? Because he knows that on some level, we’re soft-hearted and we’ll do whatever it takes for our kids. Not anymore. The only thing this government respects is strength. So I’m not bending anymore.”