The Ontario Public Service Employees Union has asserted that the Ontario public college system will have faced as many as 10,000 job losses and more than 600 program cancellations and suspensions by the end of the year. In a speech, OPSEU President JP Hornick pointed to factors such as chronic provincial underfunding as contributing to this situation and emphasized the fact that the programs impacted include those with relevance to in-demand labour market areas like nursing, child and youth care, and engineering and manufacturing. The College Employer Council and ON Ministry of Colleges and Universities reportedly challenged OPSEU’s claims, with ON Ministry spokesperson Bianca Giacoboni calling OPSEU’s underfunding claims “baseless.”
