ETFO President Karen Brown's opening address to ETFO Annual Meeting 2023 Transcript: Transcript: Hello colleagues, and welcome to ETFO’s 2023 Annual Meeting! I have to begin by expressing my sincere gratitude to all of you for your dedication to public education. Our 83,000 members deserve thanks and recognition for the amazing work they have done to support students over some very difficult years. ETFO members’ skills and dedication -- invested year after year into their classrooms and schools -- have made Ontario’s public education system one of the best in the world. Local presidents and local leadership teams - thank you for all your work supporting members so that they can, in turn, focus their time and attention on their students. I also want to specifically welcome everyone who is joining us for the first time at an in-person Annual Meeting. Please stand up, if you’re able, so we can give you a round of applause. Welcome! We have a new observer program this year called First Steps which provides space for members from designated groups who have not been to Annual Meeting to observe our union’s highest decision-making body at work. Welcome, and I hope you learn a lot about your Federation this week. Finally, I want to recognize and thank our Annual Meeting Committee and all the staff who have done a wonderful job organizing our 2023 Annual Meeting. Thank you! I hope you take full advantage of your week here together. There are many significant issues for your consideration this year, and your role is vital because you will be setting the Federation’s course for the next year. I look forward to hearing from all of you from the floor, but also to all the informal conversations that will take place during the week. Let’s be kind and respectful to one another while we address some serious topics and critical issues facing our 83,000 members. We have a lot of work to do this week, and we all want to ensure our meeting is a positive experience for all present. This year, we are celebrating a very special milestone in ETFO’s history – it has been 25 years since ETFO was founded! I think that deserves a round of applause. Twenty-five years ago, back in 1998, it was a very challenging time for public education in Ontario. The previous school year had seen some of the largest-ever education protests in North America at the time. The Mike Harris Conservatives had forced Ontario’s 129 school boards to merge into 72 boards. Principals and vice-principals were removed from the federations. They changed the education funding model so boards could no longer raise money from their local tax base, resulting in structural underfunding of public education that exists to this day. The Harris Conservatives also introduced a flurry of changes -- new report cards, an entire new curriculum, and province-wide standardized testing -- without any support, time, or resources for implementation. The Harris government claimed it was making changes to improve the education system for students, but it was really just a pretext to remove over one billion dollars from public education. Doesn’t that sound familiar? Educators in 1998 understood what was happening then, and they stood up in solidarity to defend public education when the time came. We celebrate those colleagues for everything they did to ensure that students are valued, educators are respected and schools get the funding they need. As we celebrate our 25th anniversary, we remember that ETFO has been a strong and vibrant force in public education since its inception. It is our solidarity that is our strength, and that solidarity continues to keep us strong. That is why the theme for this Annual Meeting is “Solidarity Keeps Us Strong”. Just in this past year, we have faced down and challenged so many bad pieces of legislation I understand if people can’t keep them all straight! First in the fall was Bill 28, when Premier Ford and Education Minister Stephen Lecce tried to impose a contract on CUPE members and deny them their Charter-protected right to free collective bargaining. They included a notwithstanding clause in the bill to prevent any court challenges because they knew what they were doing to our CUPE colleagues was unconstitutional. In a show of overwhelming solidarity, the entire labour movement said “NO” – and the government was forced to back down. ETFO, along with our allies in the labour movement, also challenged and defeated Bill 124 in Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice in November. This was the wage restraint legislation that restricted our ability to negotiate meaningful salary increases in the last round of bargaining and that continues to have an impact on this round. Instead of accepting their loss in court and correcting their error, the government appealed that decision, and in June of this year ETFO and several other unions were at the Ontario Court of Appeal to counter the government’s arguments ...
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