Under the Ontario Education Act, every student with special needs is entitled to an Individual Education Plan (IEP) and access to an Identification, Placement and Review Committee (IPRC)
Ontario education bargaining · 2026
The record
This is not a prediction. It is a programme that has been running for years, with published numbers.
Under the Ontario Autism Program, the province does not generally deliver therapy or contract for it at scale. It gives families money, and families buy services — in practice, mostly from private providers. The reasoning was that funding should follow the child rather than the institution, and that families know their own needs best. Both of those are reasonable propositions.
What did not happen alongside it was any comparable build-out of public clinical capacity. And the arithmetic of the programme has stayed stubbornly flat: as of May 13, 2026, 91,974 children were registered, and 20,711 — 22.5% — held an active funding agreement. The other 71,263 children, 77.5%, were waiting.
Registration has risen by 21,798 (31%) since the Financial Accountability Office’s baseline. The funded share has not moved with it. That is the shape of the thing: demand compounding, throughput roughly constant.
The limits
The strongest version of this argument is also the narrowest one. We would rather publish that than a bigger claim we cannot stand behind.
It would be convenient to say that the autism programme is the template and public education is next. We looked into a version of that claim and could not substantiate it, so we withdrew it in writing rather than leave it standing.
What we found: Ontario does not directly fund private schools, and that has not changed. No governing-party platform in 2018, 2022 or 2025 proposed it. No bill was introduced to create it. No lobbying registration was found for it. And in every province that does fund independent schools, general funding came first and special-education designations were added afterwards — the reverse of the sequence the wedge theory requires.
Nor are the two systems structurally alike. Education is delivered by statute through publicly funded boards with their own governance and their own collective agreements. Autism services were never delivered that way at scale. A mechanism that failed in one is not automatically the mechanism being attempted in the other.
Read the full investigation, including what we looked for and did not find →
What does transfer
One finding survives the objections above, and it is the one worth carrying into the bargaining conversation.
Funding a service and being able to deliver it are different problems. A family holding a funding agreement still needs a clinician with an opening. A student with an accommodation in an IEP still needs an educational assistant in the room. Where the people are not there, the entitlement is paper.
That is the link between these two files, and it is the honest one. The Auditor General found that educational assistant absences went unfilled across the boards sampled, and that boards spent more on special education than they received. The Financial Accountability Office found real per-student funding at $14,504 in 2024-25, $792 below its 2020-21 peak in constant dollars, and projects a further fall to $14,111 by 2027-28.
Those are staffing numbers wearing a budget costume. Which is why the staffing levels at the centre of this bargaining round are not a labour-relations detail for families of disabled students. They are the mechanism by which an accommodation either happens or does not.
No strike vote has been held and no strike has been scheduled. Unions have said they are preparing for possible strike votes, and CUPE-OSBCU locals have been asked to sign pledges to strike if necessary. A pledge is not a strike vote. Contracts expire August 31, 2026.
SOURCE
Financial Accountability Office of Ontario • 2025-10-23
Source for the full real per-student provincial operating funding series in 2024-25 constant dollars, 2015-16 through 2027-28, and for the finding that 2024-25 was the lowest level over the last 10 years. The FAO is an independent, non-partisan officer of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario.
SOURCE
Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives • 2023-04-18
Ricardo Tranjan. IMPORTANT: published April 2023, so its 2023-24 figures were a projection made at the time, not an outcome. Retained for the board-level TDSB estimate, which the FAO series does not provide. For province-wide actuals the FAO series supersedes it.
SOURCE
Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario • 2026-06-03
Joint release of the five central unions. Source for the June 3 notice date, the 255,000+ combined figure, the joint list of bargaining priorities, and the five presidents’ names.
SOURCE
Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation • 2026-06-03
OSSTF mirror of the joint June 3 release.
SOURCE
Ontario School Board Council of Unions • 2026-03-02
The March 2 joint call for early bargaining, which the unions say the government did not take up.
SOURCE
Ontario School Board Council of Unions • 2026-07-22
Source for days at the central table, the Ontario Labour Relations Board scope dispute over centralizing historically local items, and OSBCU’s own statement that the dispute could delay bargaining by several months.
SOURCE
The Globe and Mail • 2026-06-03
Source for the 15-day meet requirement, union leaders’ statements that they are preparing for strike votes, and the $6.4-billion union underfunding claim.
SOURCE
CBC News • 2026-06-03
Source for the bargaining countdown following notice to bargain.
SOURCE
CanLII • 2014
The statute governing two-tier central and local bargaining in Ontario school boards, including the Crown’s role and the conciliation route into a lawful strike position.
SOURCE
Ontario Human Rights Commission
The governing human-rights guidance for work stoppages involving educational assistants. Sets out the shared duty on government, school boards and unions to put contingency plans in place, and confirms that interference with a collective agreement does not constitute undue hardship.
SOURCE
Ontario School Board Council of Unions • 2026-08-06
Source for the August 6 filing of the formal OLRB scope application ("today we filed an application with the Ontario Labour Relations Board (OLRB) asking it to determine which issues belong within the scope of central bargaining"), for OSBCU’s statement that it cannot say how long the OLRB process will take, and for OSBCU’s account of the employer’s condition for returning to the table. Also the source for locals being asked to sign strike pledges — a pledge is not a strike vote, and no strike vote is reported.
SOURCE
Ontario School Board Council of Unions • 2026-08-06
OSBCU president Joe Tigani’s written request that bargaining proceed on items both sides already agree are central, while the OLRB decides the disputed items. Indexed on the OSBCU news listing.
SOURCE
Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation • 2026-03-02
OSSTF mirror of the March 2 joint call, and the source for the statement that the Minister of Education has authority to allow bargaining to begin up to 180 days before the agreements expire.
SOURCE
Government of Ontario
Section 1 (equal treatment in services, including education) and section 17 (duty to accommodate).
Written by Spencer Carroll
Founder & Autism Advocate
Evidence on this page
Key claims are paired with their source, evidence tier, and verification date so readers can inspect the public record directly.
Under the Ontario Education Act, every student with special needs is entitled to an Individual Education Plan (IEP) and access to an Identification, Placement and Review Committee (IPRC)
91,974
children are registered in the Ontario Autism Program
1 in 50
According to the 2019 Canadian Health Survey on Children and Youth, about 1 in 50 children and youth aged 1 to 17 in Canada had an autism diagnosis
22.5%
Only 20,711 children have active funding agreements (22.5%) — less than one in four
WHO recommends accessible, community-based early interventions for children with autism — timely evidence-based psychosocial interventions improve communication and social engagement