Students may face weekend classes

Part of plan to make up lost time: Union

Two sides in college strike still not talking

Ontario college students, now losing classes because of a teachers' strike, may be forced to go to school on Saturdays and Sundays to make up for lost time if the dispute drags on.

Insisting all will be done to ensure more than 150,000 students complete their semester before summer, Ontario Public Service Employees Union bargaining chair Ted Montgomery said the term may be extended by a week, the exam period shortened and both days of the weekend used for classes.

"I know that's not comfortable for students and neither is it for faculty," Montgomery told reporters at a news conference. "But I'm not suggesting, and I don't understand the colleges to be suggesting, that there are plans to extend into summer.

"There would be a short extension certainly and that has an impact that we would rather not see. But that's what we've been forced into."

About 9,100 teachers, counsellors and librarians walked off the job at Ontario's 24 colleges on Tuesday in a dispute over class sizes and workload. They've been without a contract since last August. No new talks are scheduled.

Montgomery announced yesterday that OPSEU is filing a bad-faith bargaining claim against the colleges, which are represented in talks by the College Compensation and Appointment Council. The union is accusing them of "provoking the strike" by reintroducing in their final offer last Monday workload provisions previously rejected by the union membership.

He also called on the provincial government "to become more involved" by urging the colleges to come up with a new offer that could kick-start talks.

Colleges and Universities Minister Chris Bentley said the province has no plans to intervene by legislating teachers back to work. He reiterated his call for the two sides to resume talks.

Bentley, who had to cancel a long-planned family holiday to Egypt because of the strike, said he wouldn't stand in the way of weekend classes after the strike so students can catch up.

Rick Miner of Seneca College, chair of the colleges' committee of presidents, called the union's bad-faith bargaining allegations "part of the game" in a contract dispute.

The colleges are drawing up contingency plans for making up classes after a lengthy strike, Miner said. They will make some public statements in the next week or so, he said.

There might be "some cases" of weekend classes if the strike drags on, Miner said. But with an estimated half of college students working part-time or full-time, often on weekends, it's "just not practical" to require all of them to come to class on Saturdays and Sundays, he added.

Tyler Charlebois of the College Student Alliance said weekend classes would be "a real problem" for many of those attending college.

"It's just another example of how students, who are missing their education through no fault of their own, are being used as pawns in this dispute," he said. "Instead of worrying about how classes will be made up, the two sides should be focusing on ending this strike."

With files from Robert Benzie