Ontario’s community colleges have seen or are expecting 10,000 layoffs by the end of the year, “one of the largest mass layoffs in Ontario’s history,” the union representing college faculty and support staff said Wednesday.
A funding crunch in the sector has seen over 600 programs across the province suspended or permanently closed, according to the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU).
“This is bigger than the Hudson's Bay closure, which laid off 8,000 employees across Canada,” OPSEU president JP Hornick told a news conference.
“When, exactly, were the colleges and the Ford government planning to tell the public about all of this? The answer is that they never intended to.”
Hornick was speaking at the Story Arts Centre, a Centennial College campus on Carlaw Avenue in Toronto’s east end that is slated for closure. Programs offered there will be moved to a site in Scarborough next summer.
About 1,100 students are currently enrolled in programs at the end-end campus.
“We know more cuts are coming,” said James Braun, a part-time faculty member at Centennial College.
Some 40 per cent of the people in his department were laid off this past April, he said.
“It's the constant uncertainty that I find the hardest. I am constantly stretched between doing my job and looking for another job, because in this system it is impossible to exist without a Plan B and a Plan C.
“In the meantime, my job is to stand in front of my students every week and get them excited about their own futures, and help them prepare for their futures, when I can't even imagine my own,” Braun said.
A spokesperson for Nolan Quinn, Ontario’s minister of colleges and universities, called the union’s framing, which blames provincial underfunding of the sector, “baseless and categorically false.”
“In the last 14 months alone, we have provided unprecedented amounts of new funding to our publicly assisted postsecondary sector, with over $2 billion in new funding into our colleges and universities, on top of the $5 billion we put into the sector every year,” spokesperson Bianca Giacoboni said in a statement.
She pointed to the federal government’s sharp reduction in the number of international students allowed to come to Canada, which has created a financial crisis for Ontario’s colleges and universities.
“Due to the federal government's unilateral changes to the international student system, difficult decisions are being made across the country in the postsecondary sector.”
In 2024, international student permits were cut by 35 per cent, and they were cut again by 10 per cent in 2025.
“Any business owner would tell you that building an entire business model on a variable that could change at any moment, like international student enrolment, is risky business,” Hornick said.
“The colleges are using this as an excuse to downsize in programs that have nothing to do with international student enrollment. ”
Centennial College said it has cancelled 54 programs this year, but still has more than 100 on offer.
“Like all colleges in Ontario, Centennial is facing significant financial pressures due to external factors, including the federal policy shifts related to international students, which has reduced enrolment numbers, alongside a broken funding model,” the college said in a statement Wednesday.
Premier Doug Ford’s government has frozen domestic tuition at Ontario colleges and universities since 2019, a measure that the province’s own blue-ribbon panel on higher education warned is harming the sector because it is not being paired with ongoing base funding increases.
