Ontario’s elementary teachers will be in a legal strike position starting Nov. 25 — but their union remains at the negotiating table and says no decision on job action has been made.

On Friday, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario announced it had received its requested no-board report, which means members can launch a work-to-rule or hit the picket lines 17 days later.

However, the union stressed that for now it hopes the move will simply put more pressure on the province and school board associations.

“ETFO is fighting for investment, not cuts in education, but Doug Ford’s Education Minister Stephen Lecce isn’t listening,” union president Sam Hammond said in a written statement.

“We will continue to focus on contract talks in an attempt to arrive at a deal that improves student learning conditions and educator working conditions.”

ETFO represents 83,000 teachers and education workers, who recently voted 98 per cent in favour of strike action.

Ontario’s public high school teachers and Catholic teachers have planned strike votes, with results expected next week. The province’s French-language teachers have not yet done so.

Public high school teachers and some support staff, represented by the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, are in a legal strike position as of Nov. 18 — making ETFO’s announcement yet another indication of how difficult ongoing negotiations with the province have become.

At a Friday event in Vaughan, Education Minister Stephen Lecce said the government was recently able to reach a three-year deal with support staff represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees on the eve of a strike threat.

Lecce said he wants “to make sure that we are able to achieve the same result with our teachers’ unions as we did with CUPE.”

However, he added, “I think it is regrettable that the unions have sought to escalate” the situation, calling such a move “totally unhelpful.”

He said “any form of labour action, and a strike specifically, really hurts our kids. I think a lot of families are speaking out about the consequences of that approach.”

Hammond has said the province is looking to cut $150 million in teacher supports and services for students, and has so far refused to commit to the current full-day kindergarten staffing model of one full-time teacher and one full-time early childhood educator.

Meanwhile, the province’s four teacher and education worker unions criticized the provincial government on Bill 124, which passed third reading Thursday and when enacted will impose a one per cent annual wage increase on public sector workers.

ETFO, the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, the Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association and the Association des enseignantes et enseignants franco-ontariens (AEFO), issued a joint statement saying the wage cap act “tramples on collective bargaining rights and targets public sector workers with unfair austerity measures for the next three years.”

But Treasury Board President Peter Bethlenfalvy called it “a balanced and collaborative approach to engaging with stakeholders and responding to their feedback” that “(reflects) the province’s fiscal reality.”

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New Democrat MPP Catherine Fife (Waterloo) said the “short-sighted” legislation will come back to bite taxpayers — given what happened in 2012 under the previous Liberal government’s Bill 115, which put curbs on teachers’ pay and prompted a court challenge won by unions that has so far cost more than $100 million.

“We’ve been down this road before where governments interfere in fair and legal collective bargaining,” she said.