On February 12, the Ford government announced a major attack on the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP). Currently, students can receive up to 85 percent of their OSAP as grants, but starting in the fall, students will only receive up to 25 percent as grants, and the rest must be paid back as loans. These changes will affect the 40 percent of OSAP that’s funded by the provincial government. At the same time, the tuition freeze is set to come to an abrupt halt, clearing the way for dramatic hikes. In a province where recent graduates are already being priced out of the housing market and struggling to find employment, these changes are yet another hit to Ontario’s youth.
To fight the cuts, at least a thousand students, faculty, and allies rallied outside Queen’s Park on March 4, and students at the University of Ottawa, University of Waterloo, and a number of high schools staged walk-outs. The NDP organized a “Save OSAP” town hall, and on March 24, there will be another mass rally at Queen’s Park. It’s clear students are angry about the attacks on our future and want to organize against them, but the only question is: where do we go from here?
The Struggle for a Student Strike
The grassroots walkouts on March 4 showed that students are willing to take matters into their own hands and take spontaneous action. However, spontaneous energy can dissipate. The challenge ahead of us is maintaining this momentum and channeling it toward something that can truly reverse the OSAP cuts. It’s clear the Ford government isn’t listening to us. He seems to think he can ride out the protests and ignore petitions, using his majority in Queen’s Park to ram through his agenda.
The only way to truly fight the Ford government is by exercising our leverage as students with a coordinated student strike. The capitalist ruling class needs the education system running smoothly to prepare future workers for exploitation, but the education system can only run if students consent to it. The 2012 Quebec student strike showed that a mass, sustained withdrawal from classes can not just reverse tuition hikes, but bring down the whole government.
Of course, in order to achieve this, preparation is required. The first step should involve mobilizing for the mass protest at Queen’s Park to demonstrate the urgency of the issue. A set protest every month would help keep the momentum alive and fresh on students’ minds. Beyond this, students can organize local efforts at our campuses. We could hold assemblies at every school, or even cross-school regional assemblies.
We can draw inspiration from the Nova Scotian students who, when facing the boot of austerity, took bold action and just held a one-week strike. The strike took place at four campuses and shows what’s possible when students have the desire and organization to fight back.
We can also draw lessons from the September 2019 Assembly for a Student Strike at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), where about 200 students gathered to vote on a strike. This assembly was a good idea, but its impact was limited in that the discussion was centred around a single vote on whether to hold a student strike, rather than a broad discussion about strategy and how we’re going to get there.
Further, the group that led the organizing effort, the Revolutionary Communist Party, was more focused on recruiting students to their own organization than actually mobilizing for the student strike, leading the next assembly to be much more poorly attended. Students must focus on building popular momentum and comprehensively discussing strategy if we’re going to win the fight against the OSAP cuts.
The Student Union Leadership Must Be Pushed
One of the challenges in organizing a student strike is that for it to be effective, it must get the support of student unions across Ontario and ideally the Canadian Federation of Students–Ontario (CFS-O). In order to do that, rank-and-file student organizers should do everything we can to pressure our representatives into action.
We can organize grassroots assemblies to demonstrate that the student strike tactic is popular. We can also build caucuses inside of our student unions to give the militant tendency an organized expression. This doesn’t mean reforming student unions from the top, but building student power from below and making sure the leadership carries out the demands of the membership. Methods to do this can include social media campaigns, protests, sit-ins and more.
Again, we can draw lessons from the 2019 student strike movement at TMU. Student union leaders initially voted for a strike, but they didn’t follow through to make it happen. They set up one small organizing meeting, but seemed to think the initiative would die in committee. It fell on the shoulders of rank-and-file students to organize the strike, then the union leadership flip-flopped and voted against a motion to support the strike.
They later flip-flopped again and pledged their support for a “soft introduction” to the strike at the last second when the movement was already losing momentum. On the day of the “strike,” turnout was only mediocre, classes were not shut down, but the CFS-O joined the protest in an attempt to co-opt it. They played a counterproductive role throughout 2019, first trying to drown the student strike initiative in committee, then trying to stop grassroots organizers from carrying it through, and finally taking credit for a watered-down partial walkout.
We can’t allow that to happen this time. We can’t accept the leadership’s excuses, claiming to support a student strike in theory but saying it will take years to build toward. They said the same thing in 2019, but did nothing to build toward a strike today.
We need to build toward a strike now and strike while the iron’s hot, or else disillusionment will set in and the momentum against the OSAP cuts will dissipate again. The inconvenience a strike will cause students is also not an excuse. Strikes are supposed to be disruptive — a temporary disruption to make sure students can attend classes in the long term.
The need to gain support from faculty also isn’t an excuse, because education workers are under attack too, and a student strike initiative with institutional backing could encourage workers to join us in solidarity. The fact that organizing a student strike will be difficult and takes lots of preparation isn’t a reason not to do it. The buck needs to stop now, and the student union leadership is in a great position to lead.
No Faith in the Liberals or NDP
Liberal and NDP politicians were both present at the March 4 rally, attempting to use the rally to present themselves as leading forces against Ford’s attacks on education. However, in the 2025 election, the Ontario Liberals merely presented lukewarm reforms such as “Eliminate interest on OSAP loans and raise the income threshold for repayment to $50,000.”
This reform stops short of addressing the real shortcomings with OSAP, as even families making $50,000 might struggle to afford higher education. In Canada, the average student loan debt is $28,000 and takes 9.5 years to pay off. In a survey, 77 percent of Canadians under 40 said they regretted taking out student loans.
To have such a narrow vision as to try and slightly tweak a system that’s already making life so difficult for recent graduates shows where the priorities of the Liberal Party lie: with the status quo. Furthermore, the Ontario Liberals have already shown that they don’t care about education affordability. When they got in power in 2003, tuition was $26,000, and by the time they left power, tuition was $40,000, an obscene 40 percent increase.
As for the NDP, their slogan is to “Save OSAP”; that is, to limit themselves to saving a system that already wasn’t working for many low-income students. To their credit, their platform in the 2025 election did call for converting all loans into grants. This reform would benefit students immensely. Their plan to cancel all student loans would bring great relief to all students across the province.
However, the NDP lacks a vision for what we can do to fight the OSAP cuts in the here-and-now. They want us to vote them into power in 2030, but most students will have already graduated by then. And even if they do get in power, there’s no guarantee they’ll follow through on their promises.
For example, the BC NDP went back on many of their promises, such as implementing safe consumption sites and respecting the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. In Ontario, the NDP has policed their members when they believe they went too far, such as when they kicked Sarah Jama out of caucus for sticking up for Palestine.
At this very moment, instead of trying to help students organize towards a student strike, Marit Stiles and the Ontario NDP are trying to cynically promote themselves and funnel the momentum of the students into electoralism. We do not have the time to wait around until the next provincial election. What is needed is radical, mass action now. We must act and organize a student strike to truly bring the system to its knees and force change.
The Struggle for Education is a Struggle Against Oppression
Some speakers at the March 4 rally at Queen’s Park made the point that the struggle against the OSAP cuts must be a struggle against oppression everywhere. They rightly made the connection between the cuts to education and the bombings of Iranian, Palestinian, and Lebanese educational facilities, including a girls’ elementary school at the beginning of the current war with Iran. The money “saved” by cuts to education are going directly into the repressive apparatuses of the state, including the police.
Around the end of the rally, we witnessed the police brutalize a protester for allegedly vandalizing public property. Five cops tackled this person, and one of them crushed the accused person’s neck. Protesters fought back and were able to force the cops backward, although two protestors were arrested.
We chanted anti-police slogans like “TPS, KKK, IOF, they’re all the same!” and “Who do you serve!?” implying that the police protect rich people and politicians, not the public. The experience reminded us that the struggle for education is a struggle against state repression.
As the student struggle develops, it’ll inevitably butt up with the police as the Ford government uses more desperate, violent measures to try and stop us. The police have a terrible history of arresting striking workers, and they could use the same tactics to stop striking students, too. We must be ready for this and prepared to oppose the police in our masses. They can arrest a few dozen activists, but they can’t arrest 10,000 of us standing together in solidarity.
Additionally, we should address the struggle for education with an anti-racist, feminist lens, because we can only win the fight for education if we treat these as one common struggle. The Ford government is trying to pit us against each other, telling us not to pick “basket-weaving” courses, implying that this ancient Indigenous practice, traditionally led by women, isn’t worth defending. We should steadfastly oppose these dogwhistle politics and any other attempt to divide the movement on racial or gender lines.
Ultimately, our ire is aimed at the capitalist system which is the root cause of the cuts to education, and the reason why cops exist to protect private property and not people. A successful student strike would not just reverse the OSAP cuts, but would embolden students to fight for more, including free education for all. It would give us practice in self-organization, which will help us in labour and community organizing, too. Student struggles have historically been a catalyst for broader societal change, and we can start that process right now.