The strike occurred in the context of Harris' Common Sense Revolution, a program of deficit reduction characterized by cuts to education and social services.

The party campaigned on the "Common Sense Revolution", a platform of policies aimed at reducing the provincial deficit by lowering taxes and cutting public services.

[1] The PCs had an acrimonious relationship with the province's labour sector, particularly teachers' unions; in 1995, controversy erupted after a video leaked of Minister of Education and Training John Snobelen stating that the party needed to "invent a crisis" to generate public support for its plans to overhaul the province's education system.

[2] From 1995 to 1998, "Days of Action" were held as a series of rolling, one-day general strikes organized by labour unions in opposition to the Harris government.

[10] The scandal lent credence to the OTF's claims that the primary goal of Bill 160 was to implement cuts, and forced the Harris government to acknowledge that it planned to reduce education spending.

[7] More than 2.1 million students were affected; nearly all of the province's 4,742 public schools were closed, with a few remaining open under the supervision of non-teaching staff.

[13][14] Five hours after the strike commenced, the government announced that it intended to file an injunction to order teachers back to work.

[4] In his ruling, MacPherson dismissed the government's claim that the strike was causing "irreparable harm", and noted that the provisions of Bill 160 were broad enough to potentially invite a challenge under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

[17] While OSSTF President Earl Manners described the strike as a "phenomenal success", the Toronto Star noted that "when all is said and done, the teachers have achieved few of their goals in opposing Bill 160".

"[11] Douglas Nesbitt of the University of Manitoba argues that the failure of the protests can be owed to an ideological split among leaders of the teachers' unions between those who opposed the Days of Action and wished to focus on electoral efforts to support the Ontario New Democratic Party (NDP), and those who supported the Days of Action and opposed the NDP following the party's shift to austerity policies under premier Bob Rae.

This factionalism among union leadership, Nesbitt argues, resulted in an unwillingness to escalate the scale of demonstrations; he notes that in the wake of the strike's failure, organized labour in Ontario retreated from extra-political action to pursue a strategy of electoralism.

[22] Alan Sears of Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University) similarly argues that the 1997 strike "represented the end point of a longer term mobilization dating back to the Social Contract" passed by the NDP,[23] and that the failure of the strike combined with the end of the Days of Action campaign "took much of the wind out of the sails of the opposition on the education front".