The uOttawa Strike: Five Months of Bargaining, One Last Session, and Students Left Waiting
At midnight on November 7, after a 16-hour mediation session that ended with no deal, the Association of Teaching Professors of the University of Ottawa (ATPUO) went on strike. It is the first strike in the union’s history, which dates to 1986. Courses taught by its members are cancelled, grading and supervision have stopped, and the professors have lost access to their university email and Brightspace. The campuses are open, and the university says most co-op placements, internships and practicums continue. For students in the affected courses, there is no end date to plan around.
What the fight is about
The union represents more than 2,500 teaching professors, who it says teach over half of the courses at the university. It is asking for fairer pay and more job security, and also for changes it says protect teaching quality: smaller classes, and a seat for teaching professors on the Senate and the Board of Governors. Its spokespeople say members are asked to handle classes of 200 to 300 students, and that half of them cannot make ends meet. The union also points to a university budget surplus of more than $15 million as proof the money is there.
The university says it is bargaining in good faith and wants an agreement that “advances our educational mission.” It has not, in the public record so far, explained in detail why it cannot meet these demands, and that is part of the problem. Students are being asked to take sides in a dispute whose terms neither party has laid out plainly for them.
Students pay first
A strike is meant to pressure an employer. At a university, the pressure lands first on students, who have no seat at the table. A student in a first-year course may be sitting on a term’s worth of tuition with no instructor, no grading and no email reply. A fourth-year student may be watching a graduation date or a graduate school application slip. The union says students’ learning conditions are professors’ working conditions, and there is truth in that. But the same logic means students are also the ones who lose the most when talks fail.
Why this looks like a failure of process
This did not come out of nowhere. Talks ran for about five months. A conciliator reported an impasse in late October, which started the legal countdown to a strike. The parties moved to mediation on October 29 and 30. According to the union, the university then offered only one further session, on November 6, even though it knew the union would be in a legal strike position the next day. The university has not confirmed that account in anything I have seen, and the union is a party to the dispute. But if it is accurate, it means the last week before a strike deadline, the week when pressure on both sides is highest, was not used to bargain.
The union also says the university’s systems were cut off for members at 12:01 a.m., before the session had formally ended, and that a navigator showing which courses are affected had been prepared in advance. Planning for a strike is not bad faith. Any responsible administration should plan. But when preparation for a stoppage looks more advanced than preparation for a settlement, people notice.
Mandate votes, conciliation, mediation and early, transparent bargaining can all force movement without shutting anything down. Here every one of those steps was used, and they still ended at a picket line. The lesson is not that bargaining tools do not work. It is that they work only when both sides come to the table with room to move, and a deadline is the point where that room is most needed.
A wider pattern
uOttawa is part of a larger trend. Canada lost about 4.3 million person-days to work stoppages in 2025, up from about 2.4 million the year before, even though the number of strikes and lockouts fell. That is among the highest totals in decades, though not a record: 2023 was higher on the federal government’s count, and the all-time peak was 11.5 million in 1976. About a third of the days lost were in education, health and social services, the sector a university strike belongs to. Different sources count disputes differently, and some of them are business groups with a stake in the debate, so these numbers are a rough guide.
The other side
Supporters of the strike would say its critics are asking the wrong question. Economist Jim Stanford argues that it is very rare for strikes to have a noticeable, sustained effect on GDP, employment or incomes. Unions would add that disruption is the very purpose of a strike, and that without a credible threat of one, employers have little reason to move. The union has also put resources behind the walkout: the Canadian Association of University Teachers’ Defence Fund is backing its members, which suggests this was planned as a serious, sustained effort and not a gesture.
There is also a fairness point about the language. The university calls these workers “part-time professors,” while the union says most of its members work full time and has renamed itself accordingly. How a university describes the people teaching more than half its courses is not a small matter.
None of that cancels the cost to students. It does mean the real question is not whether strikes are good or bad, but why bargaining keeps failing before one starts, and what the university and the union will each do, starting this week, to end this one.
Sources: The Fulcrum (Nov. 7 and Oct. 28, 2026, union and university statements); CTV News Ottawa (Nov. 7, 2026); University of Ottawa strike information pages; Association of Professors of the University of Ottawa bulletin (Nov. 8, 2026); Statistics Canada and Employment and Social Development Canada work stoppages data (national totals; 2025 figures are preliminary); Al Jazeera, October 2026 (Jim Stanford). Claims about the Nov. 6 session and the timing of the system lockout come from the union and have not been independently confirmed. Check for new developments before publishing.
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