From The Province, Alex Tsakumis: B.C. Liberals are hoping to bankrupt the BCTF

Alex Tsakumis: B.C. Liberals are hoping to bankrupt the BCTF

http://blogs.theprovince.com/2014/08/25/alex-tsakumis-b-c-liberals-are-hoping-to-bankrupt-the-bctf/

In the waning days of summer, thoughts naturally wander to brisk walks on crisp but still warm September mornings, joyfully greeting smiling teachers and reminiscences with friends of long and languid summer days past. At least, that’s how any rational individual would expect the children of B.C.’s beleaguered public education system to begin their school year.

Thanks, though, to a wholly avaricious provincial government, absent of any real leadership or moral compass, your children, instead, might still remain at home for some time.

One expects that we’ll find out in short order.

You see, the B.C. Liberal plan, as manifest by their appalling track record on public education stewardship over the last dozen years, has been to starve the public school system of its only front-line advocates — the BCTF, the exhausted and long-suffering teachers of this province. Not that the union bosses, through an almost universal inability to appear practical in their demands, have made it easy on themselves, but the specific government blueprint has clearly been to enact legislation that will land the employer and the union in court in as protracted a litigation as possible. Essentially, the Liberals plan to bankrupt the teachers’ union.

The union has only its limited coffers from which to draw in defending against this government’s war on education, while the government has essentially an unlimited pool of money — yours.

A little over a decade ago, Premier Christy Clark launched the first salvo when she was education minister. She introduced two bills which, among related tyranny, ripped out collective bargaining rights for teachers, including over issues such as class size. It set the tone for a prolonged confrontation.

In the ensuing years, the B.C. Teachers’ Federation has won two judgments in B.C. Supreme Court — overturning Clark’s folly. Instead of accepting the noteworthy rebuke, the province — led forcefully behind the scenes by the premier, I’m told — insisted on appealing the dispute to the Supreme Court of Canada after introducing a new bill not unlike the first two.

The premier, you can be sure, is very proud. There’s nothing like having a B.C. Supreme Court justice deem your work as education minister 10 years earlier as acts of “bad faith.”

This from a politician who instead of standing in solidarity with the majority of B.C. parents, muscled her son into a $25,000-a-year private school. (Disclosure: her son is my son’s classmate and I graduated from the same school 30 years ago.)

Clark doesn’t understand, nor does she seem to care, that any society without a robust, well-funded, peaceful public school system is summarily impoverished.

In the interim, more union dues are being vaporized to pay for court costs at an unsustainable burn rate for the BCTF and more taxes are being liquidated to defend an ethically rudderless government in a court appeal with little chance of success.

If that isn’t evidence enough of the plan to sink the union by attrition, recall this government’s comportment since they launched the appeal. They sent out Education Minister Peter Fassbender, who began his political career ages ago as one of Langley’s most intractable, anti-union and socially conservative school board trustees, to reconstitute the government’s position, on the fly, with any available reporter.

Sadly, BCTF helmsman Jim Iker has been less than equal to the task, instead attempting to defend strategically poor union choices as negotiating savvy.

The rest of the way, it’s been the government using your money to spin their shameless position and run out the clock. It wasn’t until the Liberals stumbled badly earlier this summer that the mediation process currently underway was even a consideration.

After the backlash against Finance Minister Mike de Jong’s masterstroke of foolhardiness in offering daily $40 daycare vouchers to parents for possibly “school-less in September” children, the government was forced to consider the likelihood of losing the public-relations battle with taxpayers. The Clark government came perilously close to stalling, far too early, their relentless pounding of the BCTF’s pocketbook.

Believe me, if it were entirely up to Clark and her henchmen, your children will be putting up Christmas stockings before cracking a single textbook this fall.

Incidentally, this was pointed out to voters as a high probability outcome during the last provincial election by a chap you may remember: former NDP leader Adrian Dix. But nobody listened, with their eyes glazed over by the premier’s endless promises. Well, now it’s personal, is it not? The Liberals are using your children to break the teachers’ union. Do you see it now?