Good morning. Teachers are taking more sick days, students keep skipping class, and now the clock has started for Ontario to cut a deal with its education unions – more on that below, along with World Cup super fans and Donald Trump’s reined-in war powers. But first:
Today’s headlines
- Trump looks to rebuild his tariff wall with new levies on dozens of countries, including Canada
- Russia and Ukraine exchange strikes loaded with symbolism
- Manitoba is calling for a national trucking registry after a fatal accident involving a decertified company
Sign up for Morning Update:
Reading this online? Start your morning with context and insight on the day's biggest stories, in your inbox every weekday.
Subscribe now
School is not quite out for summer yet.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Education
Marked absent
It’s shaping up to be a sticky summer for Ontario’s government and the 255,000 teachers who work in its schools. Yesterday, all the major education unions – representing Catholic, French and public elementary and secondary teachers, along with support staff – served the province a notice to bargain. That means both sides have 15 days to start negotiations on contracts that expire at the end of August.
Education Minister Paul Calandra said this week that he was “quite optimistic” about the coming talks. The unions don’t share his rosy view. “The situation in Ontario is not just challenging, it is dire,” David Mastin, president of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, said at a press conference yesterday morning. He told The Globe it was questionable whether they’d reach a deal before the start of the next school year.
There are several contentious issues that the unions want sorted, including classroom size (smaller), special education investment (bigger), teacher recruitment strategies (better) and mandatory e-learning (scrapped). They also want more child and youth workers, social workers, nurses and educational assistants – the support staff best equipped to handle students’ mental-health and behavioural struggles, which have only grown since the pandemic.
“All parties share the same goal of keeping students in the classroom,” Calandra’s spokesperson, Emily Testani, said in a statement yesterday. She may have been alluding to the possibility that teachers walk off the job in September – Mastin told The Globe his members were preparing for a strike vote – but she could’ve easily been referencing the rough state of school attendance.
Ontario students are considered chronically absent if they miss more than 10 per cent of their school days over a year. The numbers weren’t stellar before the pandemic: Only 60 per cent of high school students met that provincial standard. But the latest data show attendance has dropped 20 percentage points since then. Among Grade 9 students, just 45 per cent met the standard in the 2024-2025 school year, down from almost 70 per cent pre-2020. Grade 12s are the least likely to show up – 33 per cent managed to meet the standard last year, versus 49 per cent before the pandemic.
Education Minister Paul Calandra at a Toronto school this spring.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
The Ford government landed on a simple solution for student absenteeism: Make attendance a sizable chunk of their final mark. (It currently isn’t.) “There has to be consequences for bad behaviour,” Calandra said in April, after he introduced new legislation that would allocate up to 15 per cent of high-schoolers’ grades to class participation.
Everybody agrees that regular attendance matters for academic achievement. But experts told The Globe that most of the chronically absent students don’t have a problem with motivation – instead, they need policies that tackle the structural issues getting in the way of going to class. A good start would be more funding for mental-health supports, school safety measures, meal programs, transportation and extracurricular activities. Without those resources, the new law is just another barrier for kids to overcome.
Students aren’t the only ones desperate for those resources. Teacher absences are also on the rise in Ontario, as complaints mount about high levels of stress, unmanageable workloads and classroom safety. A 2024 survey of 12,000 Ontario education workers found that 75 per cent had experienced violent or disruptive incidents at school. A third of them experienced it every day. Teachers “are saying, ‘I can’t take this anymore,’” Mastin told The Globe. They’ve asked for greater support to address deteriorating classroom conditions; now they’re burning through sick days and taking short-term leaves.
Mastin suspects the government will have a simple solution for that too: “Absolutely, we think they’re going to go after sick leave” during bargaining. Teachers can take 11 sick days at full pay over the school year, plus 120 days of short-term leave at 90 per cent of their salary – and they simply won’t accept any cuts to that sum, he said. “The message that all of us will collectively send is, don’t bother.” Three months to go before school is meant to start up again.
The Shot
‘This is in my blood.’
Reem Mohammed and her kids, Dalia and Taim, will head from Montreal to Toronto for the World Cup.Adil Boukind/The Globe and Mail
Between the tickets, the travel, the accommodations and the astronomical price to park, going to a World Cup game costs a boatload – but for these fans, it’s worth every cent.
The Wrap
What else we’re following
At home: Ottawa ordered Canada’s telecom regulator to review a policy forcing foreign streamers to pay more to fund Canadian content, after the U.S. complained.
Abroad: The U.S. House of Representatives passed a measure forcing President Donald Trump to either withdraw U.S. troops from Iran or seek approval from Congress for his war.
Power: The race to build Canada’s first new nuclear reactor in more than three decades has officially begun on the north shore of Lake Ontario.
Oil: Staunch opposition by some First Nations is threatening Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s hopes for a pipeline to British Columbia’s northwest coast.
Keep calm: As the summer travel season kicks off, airlines are reassuring customers that jet fuel supply remains stable and flights aren’t likely to be cancelled.
Carry on: Louise Arbour met in London with King Charles III ahead of her installation as Canada’s new Governor-General.